I've searched the Google Developer site and general help. I can find information on reporting violations of my copyright. I can't find information on reporting a site that explicitly fosters copyright violations using Google's services. Specifically the site uses Google image search (I believe but am not certain using Google API) to return images based on user keyword search. The images are presented hot-linked to their original source. So far - no problem. There is also a link to the original source - no problem. BUT the site offers the user the "service" of making modifications to the image - primarily upsizing and removing backgrounds - then the resulting modified image is stored on that site and the user invited to download the result.
They now filter out some sites - those most likely to want to enforce their copyrights - but continue to display copyright images, and creative commons images in ways that violate the license terms. So I can't easily report infringement of my own work - undoubtedly I can find it but the core problem is the service, not just my work.
Google Ads are inserted throughout the search results.
It seems offering to modify images without the permission of the rights holder would violate Google terms of service? But how do I report it? I looked at many report forms - nothing seems to fit.
Laws vary by country. You need to contact a lawyer.
Did you register your copyright with the Copyright Office and did you receive a copyright? If yes, then you have a registration number.
Was the image attached to a tangible object such as a magazine advertisement, poster, book, box, dish plate, etc? If not, then you probably do not have a copyright that will stand in court.
It is not as simple as reporting an unfair use. You must demonstrate your legal standing on the issue and not your opinion and that usually requires going to court. If you provide your copyright registration, most vendors will review the issue. Send a certified letter to their registered business or legal address.
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I've found today in my inbox an email from google where they announce that CWS payments API is deprecated
I'm working to create a Chrome extension that I want to release with the in-app payments support to let the user purchase a license to unlock full features. I was oriented to the CWS native payments API, but Google's decision to deprecate the API is a very bad news.
At the moment I've found a nice Wordpress plugin that will manage licensing, I'm thinking of using it to create a licenses backend but I'm not sure about it because it's mainly focused to be used for wordpress themes or plugins, so to implement it on client side for an extension would require some workarounds.
How do you will manage your in app purchases and licensing for Chrome extensions or Electron apps?
Alright, so as I am in the same situation as you are, I did a little bit of research. Here is a summary of my findings and comments on the matter.
There are three things to think about before you get started with the implementation:
The type of payment processing service you want to use;
The way you want to limit features for the free version (and for multiple tiers of plans);
The security of your users information through your extension.
Let's go through each of these one at a time.
1. Type of payment processing
There are two main types of service providers that will allow you to collect payments in you extension. Payment processing platforms are the first type: they allow you to process payments and will generate receipts, but they won't manage the different taxes and regulations of different countries. If you operate solely in one country, or in a few countries where taxes and regulations are the same, this won't affect you.
However, if you have users around the world, especially in Europe, implementing the rules to handle all of the different taxes and regulations can get really complicated and messy. But you have to do it, otherwise you put yourself in a situation where you are at risk of getting fined. That is where the second type comes in: the merchants of record. These are companies that will charge the users on your behalf, removing all of the complexities of taxes and regulations from your plate. They're essentially acting as a reseller of your products. Of course, they take a small cut from your revenue to pay for the weight that they're taking off your shoulders and putting onto their own.
Payment processing platforms will be cheaper (ex.: 2.9% + 0.30$ per transaction for Stripe), while merchant of records take a bigger cut (ex.: 5% + 0.50$ for Paddle). However, if you deal internationally, the 2.1% higher price is likely more advantageous for you, just because it saves you a lot of time and development work.
It's important to note however that merchant of records are unlikely to take on a brand new project, especially for Chrome extensions. That's because the amount of revenue those extensions generate on average is pretty low, and often not really worth it for them. Still, I suggest you hit up a few of them before deciding do go the classic payment processing way, just in case you can get in touch with a salesperson who sees potential in your project and is willing to take you on.
Here are a few merchant of records:
Cleverbridge
2Checkout (offers both MoR and basic payment processing services)
Paddle (does not support new Chrome extensions at the moment)
FastSpring (does not support Chrome extensions anymore, as of 2021)
Here are a few payment processing platforms:
Stripe
Paypal (from my experience, Paypal is a lot less developer friendly than Stripe)
2. Limiting features for free or tiered plans
The way features are limited for non-paying users will differ from one extension to the other.
If the features you want to limit in your extension already rely on a backend, to fetch or process data for example, it would make sense to implement the limitations on the server side. You would simply pass the user's ID, which could be stored in chrome.storage, to each request made to the backend. In addition to that, you could also disable the related elements on the client side, such as hiding or greying out buttons, tabs or fields, to make it clear to the user that those features are locked. You'll want to make sure the limitations are in place on the backend as well however, because otherwise a user could just inspect your extension and enable premium features without paying.
If your extension mostly or only operates on the client-side, then you will have to render the interface conditionally, based on the user's plan. The scripts or interfaces that will be added will most likely have to be returned by a backend, as pretty much anything that is done only on the client-side could potentially be inspected and exploited. In that case, any backend technologies or platforms you are most familiar with can probably be used to set things up.
Keep in mind that most of the payment processing and MoR listed above have APIs and guides on how to implement them securely in apps and websites. However, if you know Wordpress well and can set up a secure communication between your Wordpress and your extension, go ahead. If you want to use an online service like Zapier to link existing authentication and licensing services together, go ahead and do that!
There could be a lot more details in this section - there is a ton of material to cover, so I suggest you look for articles and tutorials online to help guide you in this process if you don't have much experience in the matter.
3. Security
This section won't be long, but it is very important one. No matter which payment processing platform you decide on or how you limit access to features in your extension, it is crucial that you make sure that your users information can never fall into the hands of another user. That includes reverse engineering and exploits of your system.
The more things you decide to handle yourself, the more risk there is, especially if you are not experienced. Keep that in mind when making your decision(s).
That's all for me. I hope that helps a bit!
I know it's probably a lot of information without any detailed "how-to", but without having in-depth knowledge of your product and situation, it is impossible to say what you should do exactly.
P.S.
If that can offer any guidance, here's what I will be doing for my own extension. Seeing as it's already very reliant on a PHP backend, I will add a few features to the backend in order to communicate with the Paddle API. So all of the limitations will be implemented on the backend, and I will add messages and visual indicators on the frontend to inform the free users of what they can and cannot do.
[Edit]
I just received a message from Paddle indicating that they do not support new Chrome extensions at the moment. Sorry for the misleading there.
[Edit: June 2021]
After an update earlier this year, FastSpring has updated their security standards, which makes it unusable within Chrome extensions. After I enquired, their support agents informed me that they do not support Chrome extensions anymore (and that it was only "accidentally" supported before).
I'm using a Google Chrome Portable browser for my offline app. But I'm not sure if I can use it for commercial purposes. Please can anybody give advise if there's such a browser, that is completely free. Or is there really simple way how to create my own.. What I want is to show a html file in that browser. It doesn't need to have any address bar, etc. I've already searched how to create a browser, but I am not really good in programming languages, I only manage web pages, so I don't know which would be the best way.
Thank you for your answer.
You can use it for commercial purpose as per their EULA. See point 21.
Additional Terms for Enterprise Use
If you are a business entity, then the individual accepting on behalf of the entity (for the avoidance of doubt, for business entities, in these Terms, "you" means the entity) represents and warrants that he or she has the authority to act on your behalf, that you represent that you are duly authorized to do business in the country or countries where you operate, and that your employees, officers, representatives, and other agents accessing the Service are duly authorized to access Google Chrome and to legally bind you to these Terms.
Subject to the Terms, and in addition to the license grant in Section 9, Google grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable license to reproduce, distribute, install, and use Google Chrome solely on machines intended for use by your employees, officers, representatives, and agents in connection with your business entity, and provided that their use of Google Chrome will be subject to the Terms.
August 12, 2010
You are not the only one searching for an answer https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/xuyg5tSad08
This is the first answer I got when I searched a bit
"Google Chrome is totally free for commercial and personal use." I found this on http://www.technibble.com/google-chrome-portable-internet-browser/
I'm doing a project for my job and am trying to get attorneys contact information off of the GA bar website. I've searched for programs to do it, but am not finding anything for exactly what I need.
I need to get all of the attorneys information into excel and I figured there was some batch text program to do the job. There are over 50,000 contacts listed and I really dont think I need to click on every link to view the information to be able to access it.
I have opened up the code on the page with "inspect element" on chrome and saw that each attorney has a unique ID on the site. I feel like their info can easily be copied from the site, but I have very limited programming knowledge.
Any suggestions?
The first step is to check the terms of service / copyright of the GA bar website and make sure you are allowed to do that.
Before you start coding, you may consider requesting the contact info in database format. The information may be available for free, or for a fee that is less than the cost of you programming a solution.
If you must program, a very capable library for scraping the contents of a website is HTML Agility Pack. I suggest you become familiar with it, and post more detailed questions here as you get into specifics.
HTML Agility Pack does require programming. If you're looking for a non-programming solution, Stack Overflow is not the right place to ask.
I'm trying to figure out the different skills and technologies necessary to develop webpage personalization apps that allow users to input and edit text/images/links on a webpage. About.me and Flavors.me would be the most advanced examples of what I'm talking about. Thanks in advance for any guidance.
#tim, they're database driven apps. The user enters information into a database (or Facebook profile, etc) and it's then pulled back out via a scripting language and presented on the page. The page layout is also stored in a DB and brought together with the user's profile information for what becomes the page layout you see. About.me seems to take it a step further by creating an email account that's tied to the user account.
Technology-wise, just about any back-end language could be used. Facebook is written in PHP, though they have a language-agnostic API that could be talked to from .net, java, php, etc. You'll need a database, and that probably would either be MySQL, Sql Server or Postgres, though there are certainly others. Finally you'd probably want to make use of the API's I spoke about including Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc. to aggregate information the user already has entered in different locations.
Examples of this type of site are varied and all over. Mint.com does it for financials. Grooveshark will tie into facebook and others to communicate and share your music collection. Linked in will tie into others as well. Integration is actually a very lucrative segment of the programming business right now. An app that talks to others has good marketable value.
After delving into the world of opensource I have found implementation is emphasised over design. Version control allows for a project to branch off in many directions, which projects may do; this suggests lack of consensus or direction amongst the participants.
What software or websites are useful for collaborative design?
There are literally hundreds more collaboration apps out there and more keep appearing by the day, but these should get you started:
Source Control (Online):
Assembla - Public source is
free, private repositories are paid
Source Forge - Open source only
Google Code - Open source only
Git Hub - Public source is free,
private repositories are paid
Bug Tracking/Project Management
LightHouse - Unlimited open source, paid private projects
FogBugz - Full version is free for up to two developers
BaseCamp - Paid only
Trac - Not hosted (although Assembla hosts it), open source - Python
Bugzilla - Not hosted, open source - Python
Mantis - Not hosted, open source - PHP
Mind Mapping
MindMeister - Free for small
plans, with options to upgrade
Documents
Google Docs - Free
Buzzword - By Adobe - free
Scribd - Free
Graphics
Aviary - I'm not quite sure how
collaborative they are, but I think
you can use their tools that way
Photoshop Express - Another
Adobe product
Picnik - Free
Whiteboards
Scriblink - Free with paid
options
skrbl - Free for public, paid
for private
Dabbleboard - Free and paid
plans
Hosted Wikis
pbwiki - Paid plans
Wikidot - Free with paid plans
Miscellaneous
Acrobat - Part of Adobe's
online suite
Zoho - Fits into a lot of
categories
I've been studying collaborative design early in my Ph.D. (contact me if you want a literature survey draft that I wrote about it a back in 2003).
Anyway, collaborative design applications (as in UML modelers) fall into three categories in terms of timing:
Synchronous - Two people or more editing at same time
Asynchronous - Check-in check-out model, a mess if multiple people edit at the same time.
Hybrid (can share certain things in real time).
In addition, they fall into three categories in terms of metaphores:
- Desktop based - Essentially something like rationale rose with multiple user support
- Whiteboard based - Free canvas, not necessarily structured, sometimes has support for UML recognition. Usually a mess to manage multiple models.
- Hybrids
So this gives you a 3x3 "design space" of tools, and there are research tools inside every one of them.
The problem is that in switching to collaborative work there are many usability issues that are difficult to address. For example, access control, synchronization, awareness, shared viewports, etc. There are some academic advances on these, but they're not necessarily in tools yet.
If this is the topic you're interested in, comment, and I'll post some of the tools I'm familiar with.
I would suggest using a Wiki to document/explore the design.
A mailing list. And opensource projects argue on enough of them. I doubt lack of collaborative tools is where the lack of design emphasis comes from.
In no particular order:
A good email client (I use gmail)
Good wiki software (I use media wiki)
Github or an evolved source repository that allows for easy branching and comments on check ins
A chat room, plain old irc or that built in messenger one
A news group or mailing list (I use the free google one)
Skype
I am somewhat skeptical about collaborative design. From Scobleizer: Why Facebook has never listened and why it definitely won’t start now:
My former boss, Jim Fawcette, used to
say that if you asked a group of
Porsche owners what they wanted they’d
tell you things like “smoother ride,
more trunk space, more leg room, etc.”
He’d then say “well, they just
designed a Volvo.”
also from the comment:
Apple never listens to its customers.
In fact, it prides itself on not
listening. If you listen to your
customers, you will never innovate and
you will never be ahead of the curve.
You will always tweak and fix minor
things on what is top of customer mind
that day, week or month.
I agree with the wiki answer. I'd suggest looking at MindTouch. Our company uses them for our Intranet and for other internal and external project collaboration/management.
A wiki (such as ScrewTurn, or MediaWiki) is a good tool to document a project.
BaseCamp by 37 Signals
Microsoft Office Live Meeting
For us, all we use is Adobe Version Cue, Google Docs, Google Calendar and Gmail.
Design wise, Version Cue does the trick in terms of file management really well.
As for Google, well, it helps organizing all of my activities more than very well. I find most collaboration tools, like Basecamp, a tad too restrictive or just not exactly right. Google lets me organize my stuff just the way I want it to be.
For collaborative design ... without a doubt, it's
http://conceptshare.com