This is the kind of crap I have to deal with from time to time:

John Holbrook wrote:
I’m writing regarding the Rolex Cosmograph Daytona photo you are using at the
following link: http://www.thewatchblog.com/index.php/category/rolex/

The photo is a copyrighted photo from my site, www……..com. You
are using the photo without my permission. Please remove it immediately.

My response
get a clue, it’s not my website.

His reply

And I quote:

Credits and Copyright
Proudly powered by WordPress. All content © 2004-2005 Author
Theme by Theron Parlin

You are the only name listed on the site, and photo has changed - thankfully. Looks like I do have a clue.

John B. Holbrook, II

jholbrook@woh.rr.com

My Response
If you want to know whose website it is, try doing a whois lookup on the domain. Don’t email people out of the blue demanding that they remove your copy written material when you have no idea what you’re talking about, it makes you look like a magnificent ass. Again, it’s not my website, I have nothing to do with that website. Try googling my name and you’ll see hundreds of thousands of websites with my name on them because that’s how many people use my wordpress themes. Okay smart guy?

His response:
Re-read my original E-Mail – I realize words like “please??? are quite foreign to someone as rude as yourself, but my polite and professional E-Mail to you hardly constituted a “demand.???

The poorly designed website in question obviously takes liberties with the work of others, and as near as I could tell, yours was the only direct contact information I could find.

I didn’t respond to this one because I figured I would just respond here…

You could have avoided this entire mess by doing 60 seconds of research before firing off your first email to me. Now you’re insulting my work, but that’s okay, Bionic Jive was one of my first themes and I’m not a fan of it either. It even uses a table-based layout (yuck) but I leave it up for download because so many people seem to like it. As far as my contact info being the only you could find, so what? It clearly says content is copyright © Author and on a completely separate line it says “theme by Theron Parlin.” I understand that for some people 2 + 2 = 5, and for this I have empathy for you–I understand our educational system needs work. But let me get this straight. You find the contact info for the designer of the theme of some website that’s using your copy written material and decide because that’s “all you could find,” I deserve an email from you? Do they teach logic on your planet?

———-

This kind of thing happens maybe 4 or 5 times a year, but this is certainly the most clueless (and arrogant) someone has ever been. Usually when I tell them that it’s not my website, they do the research to figure out that they were wrong and send me an apology. Not this genius. He replies with the revelation that because his image is gone, that I must have removed it.

Update: Comments closed because posts about idiots tend to attract more idiots.

Update 2: from James Elwood
I was going to tell Raoul to look up Jerry Taylor and point out that his purse snatcher analogy is flawed in that this situation is more like the person loosing their purse would blame the architect that designed the buildings around where it happened. I get the feeling Raoul is a bit limited in his experience never having worked a help desk or supported any type of application. I deal with non-thinking people on a daily basis in my job and outside of it I am expected to deal with people who cannot do basic research let alone RTFM? It is called support fatigue and sometimes you loose patience with people looking for you to perform the most basic of tasks.