Copyright Abuse Policy on DMOZ Listed Sites

1)
Does DMOZ/ODP have any policy about Intellectual Property Rights?
If for example a particular site carried a number of copyright images copied from other sites, would that affect whether the site was listed or delisted.
If there is no policy on IP rights, then why not?
As the guidelines atate
"ODP editors should enter sites that represent the following:
Original, unique and valuable informational content that contributes something unique"

As readers may guess, we are aware that a significant number of websites (over 400 and counting) use our copyright material. This is mainly in the form of photographs of coins and gold bars. Often text sections and entire pages get copied also.
2)
Is there any method of reporting such sites, or point in doing so?

I am aware that one response will be to get legal advice, which we already have, but this would not answer our questions.

Editors avoid duplicated content but are not expected to be the internet police.
In practice it's difficult for many editors to identify which site has copied which content from which other site, but sites which copy rarely provide "unique content" anyway...
The only thing I can really suggest is that you submit an update request on the offending site, mentioning it is plagiarizing your site, and also provide a replacement url.
However, all that can be guaranteed is that an editor will review the update request.


FYI Our guideline on the subject.

Thank you Elper for your answer.

I have read the guidelines numerous time over the years, and rechecked them before I posted yesterday.
I had already noted (I should have said):

a) Editors avoid duplicated content but are not expected to be the internet police.
B) In practice it's difficult for many editors to identify which site has copied which content from which other site, but sites which copy rarely provide "unique content" anyway...

The advice to:
"submit an update request on the offending site" is helpful.

We "name and shame" a number of sites copying our material, in one of 3 main places on our own sites.
One example, if it's OK to include it, is:

<url removed>

where we explain that 24 of 24 images on one page alone
<url removed>
of the site Briefmarkenhaus Heubach are our photos.
The screenshot of Briefmarkenhaus Heubach site on our site shows the Digimarc watermark symbol on most of the images (it is not totally robust, so sometimes gets lost when edited).
If the Briefmarkenhaus Heubach site is viewed with a Digimarc enabled browser, these can be seen, and guess you know that the IP rights owner can be looked up by clicking on the Digimarc logo.

This is not the site I was looking at yesterday which prompted me to post the questions, but happens to be the first site I found today when checking for others from our lists.

We are aware that plagiarism will not stop a site being listed in dmoz/odp, but we have noticed that where a site owner steals our images, they often source many of their other images from elsewhere, almost certainly without permission. Sometimes we remark on this when we have time, and recognise some of our competitors' photographs, but obviously we do not have time to be internet policemen either.

For our part, we try to ensure that our contributions to the internet are informative, original, entertaining, and of reasonable quality. We now have over 10,000 pages, and coincidentally over 10,000 photographic images, on 4 main websites.
Naturally, we get slightly frustrated when we see our original material plagiarised and rewarded by inclusion in directories, and by search engine rankings.
We believe and hope that dmoz/odp editors share our views about attaining, promoting and maintaining quality standards.

On another positive note, we are pleased to see that most of the sites which feature on our copyright abuse pages are not listed, at least yet, on dmoz/odp.

IMHO the best way to deal with these kind of matters is for yourselves to act on it in terms of DMCA legislation. A really good place to start is here where they explain what you can do if someone is infringing your copyright.

If you lodge a successful DMCA campaign against an offending site, the site will be taken down (in most cases) by the hosting provider. You copyright material is then not visible until the webmaster has sorted it out.

If this happens you can then input an entry in our Report Hijacks, Dead Links, Inappropriate ODP Content, and other issues here ONLY thread and get the site removed as it is no longer functioning.

For me this leaves no doubt that the site has infringed copyright. It is near impossible for an editor to make a decision on copyright as we do not get all the evidence, but if a site is no longer working (for whatever reason) it will be de-listed from the directory. The editor then does not have to worry about any legal wrangling. Doing it this way is obviously better for yourselves as the offender's site is removed from anybody seeing it and stops you having to chase around trying to get links to it removed.