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Image Detecting Search Engines' Legal Fight Continues
Mr. steve points to this New York Times article about sites like ditto.com and the new google image-search engine, writing: "Search engines that corral images are raising Napsteresque copyright issues." Expect to see a lot more sites with prominent copying policies and "no-download" images, and trivial circumvention of both. If an image is part of your site's design, you wouldn't truly want to prevent downloads, would you? ;)
the question is: are images on sites intellectual property
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
SPAM CANNON!
Just an everyday guy....nothing special
What with all the policies and the gigantic ads taking up most of the room, pretty soon you won't be able to see anything on the site anyway.
Google clearly posts comments about the copyrights possibly associated with the images that it returns.
http://techienews.utropicmedia.com help us beta!!
Website Hosting
Here's the story without the signup restriction: http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/09/06/technology/c ircuits/06IMAG.html
If an image is part of your site's design, you wouldn't truly want to prevent downloads, would you? ;)
I wish I could say the same, but that would involve thinking about the client (the web-surfer), which is against corporate policy.
Let's do the same for text. God forbid we end up with the napsterisation of copyrighted text.
my site (Peterswift.org is cached on google and they have my images and pretty much everything i have on my site on their site. However, this doesn't bother me at all. They don't claim ownership to any of it, in fact, they blatantly say that they don't own any of it! I don't have a problem with them taking my page and putting it on their site. That just means more people access my page, and if my site ever happens to be down, then I don't have to worry as much. In fact..I hope google caches my site today, because I just uploaded about 40 or 50 images in the last week in my pictures folder, and if they cache it, then i don't have to worry about me screwing up html or anything...i can always pull my site from google. it is just another backup. :)
The anti-salmon
I think this is just a simple stumbling block. In the future just about anything and everything will be searchable. Our society demands it! (execpt what uncle Sam doesn't want you to see)
Just an everyday guy....nothing special
That's what steganographic image marking techniques are for. Just mark an image with an invisible mark that proves you own it, and boom, no longer copyright problems.
As soon as you can prove somebody downloaded the image from your site, and that it's the same image, you're safe.
Oh, and these newer schemes resist lossy image compression, to the point that you would have to lose enough image quality to lose the signature for it not to be worth it.
I blame the LinuxWorld Convention.
Now go buy a Marvin Gaye record, dork.
"Upgrade your grey matter, 'cause one day it may matter." --Deltron Zero
The main issue I see here is removing the web designers right to say "no".
I spend a lot of time editing my images in photoshop until they are perfect. I generally don't care if someone thinks they are cool and would like to use them. I do have an issue with people who take my images and claim them as their own work.
These search engines make it seem as though it is OK to take what ever you want and not credit the source.
That is not cool at all. If you want an image ask the developer if you can.. 9 times out of 10 they dont care as long as you give htem credit and a link.
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
Putting a picture on the web is like walking around in a public place.
If someone takes a picture of me out on the street, i have no right to keep them from publishing it. If i don't want people to take pictures of me doing something, i don't do it in a public place.
If you don't want Google picking up your pictures, and you don't want people saving your pictures to their hard drives, don't put the pictures on the web.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
If you took a great deal of your time to create yet ANOTHER Natalie Portman collage...would you really want that "sucked up" by someone's search engine or image archive? I mean, what's fair about that???
No credit for all that hard work...for shame, for shame... you might want to check out Digimarc, though
-PONA-
+that's funny...I don't FEEL tardy.+
Search Engines that display blurbs of matching hits are violating copyright.
Search Engines that keep the data of webpages stored in a database are violating copyright.
What next? Copyrighted URL's?
It's just a bunch of people wanting to raise a big hooplah and creating a big stink about the bandwidth consumption problem that this poses.
Wouldn't that make ie/netscape/mozilla/opera/ect the program you are downloading with?
I can just see it now:
Judge shuts down microsoft for distubting software that allows you to violate copyrights by downloading images. Microsoft was shut down Monday for it's popular browser Internet Exploder. A representive from the company said "We were shocked. I mean, we didn't really expect the software to work in the first place."
Of course we won't see such a headline, but still, turnabout is fair play.
=================
Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
I browse with most cookies filtered out by way of JunkBuster and have noticed that some sites will not let you view some of their images if you have cookies disabled. Enabling all cookies makes the problem go away. By requiring a cookie to be set, these sites are effectively disallowing web crawlers which ignore cookies from caching their images. Expect to see more of this, especially in sites full of copyrighted images or in sites which rely on advertising and where images are the main draw (ie. the porn industry).
ian
Child: Mommy, why was daddy taken?
Mother: Because he forgot to disable his browser cache honey.
You dont want to be indexed, set up your robots.txt file accordingly.
I just started using IE's image toolbar, nice thing, i was on a site that tried to protect the images with javascript, i just clicked on image and the toolbar popped up, clicked save picture...
Is m$ breaking the DMCA with thier circumvention?
The guy's site (http://www.goldrush1849.com/) still does not have a robots.txt file. Either Kelly is incompetent, or he does this deliberately to get other people to trick other people into "using" his content and sue them later.
I dont know how many hundreds of times, Google cache has helped display sites that get slashdotted. Pictures of a case mode comes to mind.
Come on now, this is getting ridiculous. If I can view something on a web page, why shouldn't I be able to save it to view later?
How is posting a picture on a web site any different than putting out a table on the side of the road, with a pile of photographs and a sign that says "Free"?
Now, I'm totally in favor of artists' rights and all... but let's ease off on the pervasiveness and invasiveness of copyrights.
"If at first you don't succeed, lower your standards."
There is a very simple answer for the artist in the ditto.com case. Watermark all your production images. You can create yourself a Photoshop action to automate this very easily, and a GIMP script version wouldn't be all that tough either. Make them unusable unless they obtain a (non-web based) copy from you. I couldn't even finish reading the horrible article because they compared the pitiful ditto.com vs nobody case to Napster vs. RIAA twice before the article was half-finished.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Those who set up free porn sites realize quickly that bandwidth/image protection is an essential part of site development. Fortunately, Apache and .htaccess allows you to prevent hotlinking, at least with browsers that pass along the HTTP referrer.
.*\.(jpg|gif|png)$ /404.html
Example:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule
Just deny the robot access in the robot.txt. I can't remember if it is possible to specify images against the entire site. But the solution exists, and always has. And this can be done without any more idiotic regulations.
Of course the idea that the search engines are stealing from him is questionable. Someone would download a jpeg instead of purchasing a book of pictures ? I don't think so.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
Can you have your image and download it too? The answer is YES! Actually, it'd be pretty easy to set your site up so that crawlers dont index your images .. can't you control referring access via .htaccess? I'm pretty sure you can, to make sure your www server make sure that your own site is the only valid referring party before returning the image. Sorry, but I'm too lazy to find the docs to proove it tho. :)
"Old man yells at systemd"
Could robots.txt be modified to include a line to instruct Google, et al., not to cache images?
I mean, don't we suffer from exactly the same problems with all text that's online? Google caches it all for Pete's sake! Isn't that making a copy? Isn't that making it easier to find? Aren't these exactly the same complaints people are making about the images?
Authors are losing control over their works which can be easily found and copied now they they're catelogued by search engines! Outrage!
But is it the Right Thing to ban or penalize this?
These are exactly the types of problems that we're coming up against now that copyright has been deemed a control mechanism. We've gone and screwed up the whole system to the point where it's going to be virtually unusable.
But personally, I just want to know who I can sue for "copying" text and images from my site when they visit it. I need the money.
However, while I would suspect that Google does the Right Thing with this, I know several newer search engines that completely ignore robots.txt and grab everything without even checking for this file. In addition, those new to the website game don't know about this mechanism, and thus don't know how to take steps to 'protect' their work.
IMO, the robots.txt thing ought to be a standard in place by both search engine software and publically offered site-mirroring software. Particularly in the latter case, most of these clients ignore robots.txt completely and grab all content including dynamic pages.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
except you can hace cookies enables, but have the cookies directiry set to read only. hehe. I love that.
Alls they have to do is make the site think your accepting its cookies.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If you don't want people to see your stuff, don't put it on the internet.
I got news for you, if I look at your site, I am saving it digitally, in my ram.(and of course cache).
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Thank you!
I don't really see the problem, if Google want to keep a cached copy of my site thats fine with me. Why should I care if someone keeps an off-site backup for me without charging me for the privilage?
Al.The Daily ACK - Eclectic posts by yet another hacker
I spend much time and effort on my graphics. For me it is a form of art. When I see one of my Backgrounds on a coworkers system, I am tickeled pink. I would like to make money at this someday. The more my work spreads, the easier it will be to sell my services. As for downloading and distributing my backgrounds as art theft, get real. The only valuable item is the 16 to 30 layer 1600X1200 gimp file and all the variouse auxillary files I used to generate the 1024X786 .png. It is just like photograph. It is'nt the print, but the negative that is important, despite what some anal Photo trade organizations are pushing for.
Dude, google doesn't cache images.
Strange, I thgought the reason they do cache a site was to avoid the slashdot effect. As long as they don't claim they own the content they cache, so what? Your brand new shiny page is seen by more people that way. If you really want to keep Images away from being copied you either encrypt them or password protect them from generic search engines. That's a reason for thumbnails as well.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Well, based on that evidence you are illiterate.
My site contains 100% GPL pictures that are free to copy as long as it keeps the same license.
:)
Why are people putting pictures on the internet and think they won't be copied? If I put anything on the internet, might as well make it free to use, like GPL.
But no one would care about my site any way
Can't someone easily prevent their site from being indexed by using a empty file named robots.txt ?
Many sites do this simply to get you to search from their site.
Altalavista and Google (as I now notice) both make you visit the site to get to the pictures. Chances are if you are complaining about someone stealing your pics - you are getting them with banner ad views.
I know i've put a pic here and there on the net, my own works (mostly) but I would notice someone trying to pass off my work as their own. If the concern is over pr0n whats the point; your pics are already on alt.binaries.great.ass.paulina or other such newsgroup. Pr0n pics are traded over IRC, Kazaa, Gnutella, what ever.
If someone has downloaded your company logo... whats the fuss? Either they are making a desktop background or something and if you still don't like that... sue them! Not the search engine!
I have a Athlon boot screen for winblows 98 and I bet I broke a copyright law while making it! But why would AMD even think of getting mad when I'm advertising for them??
If someone is editing your logo and putting sucks under it or some such thing... you probably do suck but have no time to sue anyone because you're doing The Next Horrible ThingTM.
Case closed. People wanted publicity... don't give it to them. They just use the word Napster to get attention from John and Sally Newbite.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Out of all the comments above, I only saw one person who understood the real issue. It's not that the user downloads the images, that happens all the time. The problem is that the user is not seeing any copyright information that may also be present on the web page *with* the image. They may then think that the image is public domain and re-use it in their own works. If I were to somehow create a really great image and integrate it into my website, I wouldn't want to have copyright information or visible watermarks messing it up, nor would I want someone taking that image and reusing it on their own site or publication or whatever. The image search engines don't have a method of verifying or displaying copyright information. Perhaps something needs to be added to robots.txt to address this. A specific list of images that are public-domain or vice-versa.
--
Marc
Omeganon
Heh, I always get a chuckle out of those pages that say "Images are copyright XXXX and may not be downloaded".
Oops, too late! I already downloaded it so I can look at it! It's in my cache! It's in my RAM! It's in my squid proxy! I guess I better go turn myself in to the Kopyright Kops, eh?
This is all just silly.
I reciently had engament pics done by a very nice lady who uses Frontpage to develop here site. She uses a pretty lame right click script as an attempt to stop people from stealing her images. I explained to her that it was useless and showed her how easy it was to get around and offered to watermark her images for her with her logo.
It is quite obvious that she did not want her images to be taken. How would she know that robots.txt would stop these searches let alone that the searchs exist?
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
Opera has a wonderful setting allowing sites to set all the cookies they like, and when you close the browser every single one goes into the trash. No problems viewing pages or placing orders and it makes tracking you a little bit harder.
http://www.showmethegold.com/showme.html
http://www.goldrush1849.com/
Not don't go any make any images there your desktop background or slashdot the site or anything.
They sell access to these databases to their clients to search for illegal copies of their works, or to see any mention of them in an unfavorable light. Is this an infringement?
Fight Spammers!
I know that there are arguments about how if you place information on the web then it's practically public domain, and there's some merit to that I guess. After all, how can you stop people from downloading it?
At the same time though, I think it's silly not to allow people to put their stories and their artwork and what is essentially their copyrighted material on the web where people can access it without the ability to tell people not to copy it.
The napster-like thing with many image search engines is a problem. Even when image search engines including google can give a good indication of where an image is coming from, they often show complete versions of them (even if reduced size) that people can download without seeing any copyright information, and save without going through the source. For text searches there's a fair use issue because most search engines only display a couple of lines, except I've heard some people complain about the google cache. Also it's possible to put meta information on pages saying you don't want them indexed. With image searches it's much more difficult.
When Babylon 5 was around, and probably still, there was a policy that fan websites could use as many promotional images as they wanted to as long as they explicitly stated that they were copyright to the studio, and required everyone grabbing it to say the same.
Image search engines can't do this because they can't read things like watermarks. What we could do though is have a standard allowing for publishers to associate copyright information with files so that search engines know when and how they should be able to index and display other people's copyrighted work.
It would be a voluntary thing and if search engines want to make legal judgements about whether copyright claims are going too far, it would be completely up to them. But it would allow for image search engines to operate cleanly and make sure they don't go futher than the copyright holder wants them to, at least with reason of a good legal argument.
Make it a text file in the same directory, or something. Requiring it to be at the top level directory of a domain would mean that some publishers without access to that dir won't easily be able to set meta information for their own stuff.
Squid, for example. If a company uses squid to cache http traffic, is it violating the copyright holders of the material cached?
I think the whole issue is going to boil down to "fair use". I can only hope that there will be a way that caching search engines, such as google, will be viewed as "fair use".
Allows really useful features like marking given directories, pages, or files off-limits to a specific robot or all robots in general. Boy... a technical solution to a technical problem? Who'd a thunk it?
Quickie examples (this is SO simple folks):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Boom! No more google telling that horrible world of pirates and thieves about your site. Not many visitors either though....
So maybe you want to exclude just googlebot from your images and image directory with the following:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow:
If you want to do this for multiple directories, you add on more Disallow lines:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow:
Now if you put
in your code to show up high on the search engines, you shouldn't be surprised or upset when you SHOW UP HIGH ON THE SEARCH ENGINES.
Not all robots follow the robots.txt standard, and there's no way of forcing them too. But google does, and that seems to be the big concern here.
A real life example, slashdot's robot.txt file (at slashdot.org/robots.txt):
In almost all cases, images on sites clearly will be under copyright (nothing published in the US has gone out of copyright since early last century). The real question is whether caching is a "fair use" of that copyrighted material. My opinion : it is fair use, just as the copy that gets made in your RAM and your local cache when you browse the site is fair use. The alternative is that all browsing of copyrighted material is infringing use - that surely doesn't make any kind of sense.
My next sig will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush
Karma be danged, here it is:
"Main browser turn on."
"What?!?!"
"How are you proxies?"
"All your images are belong to us."
"You have no chance to sue, fire your lawyer."
"Someone set up us the
Sorry. Couldn't resist
You can use a little thing called robots.txt - look it up here or here if you don't know what it is.
/image
Allows really useful features like marking given directories, pages, or files off-limits to a specific robot or all robots in general. Boy... a technical solution to a technical problem instead of a new round of lawsuits?
Quickie examples (this is SO simple folks):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Boom! No more google telling that horrible world of pirates and thieves about your site. Not many visitors either though....
So maybe you want to exclude just googlebot from your images and image directory with the following:
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow:
This will still allow your main pages to be indexed according to your meta keywords, but will disallow any 'napsterization'. Of course since it requires people running sites to do work and understand technology lots of people will probably decided lawsuits are easier.
Robots.txt DOES require you to run your own domain. If you don't, try using meta tags in the head of the html code for a similar effect, but it is harder to implement (must be on each page rather than site wide) and less supported. Info here.
If you spend that much time on the images... spend 5 minutes making a robots.txt file to indicate you don't want them taken by bots. But always consider anything you put on the net as published, if something's private don't put it on the net.
photodude
BTW
I'd like to critique this photo of his:
I think it sucks.
Exactly!
:)
Copyright is simply NOT an appropriate guide to IT policy. Society has spent trillions creating technology allowing information to be instantly copied.
Copyright law was created to regulate BOOKS, not ELECTRONS. And it wasn't aimed at individuals, but at publishing houses.
This is why we have absurd situations where publishers claim that the information in buffer memory represents a copy - that streamed audio is creating a copy in fixed tangible form. What copy? Where?
Craziness... And of course we certainly wouldn't want to consider creating a copy to allow indexing by search engines to be fair use would we? Why that would instantly destroy our whole society and open an interdimensional gateway for demons to pour forth and devour our children
Most Search engines adhere to this file
Netscape also has this feature.
Of course, it's undocumented and in fact is a hack. Here's how it works:
Same basic principle. The net effect is that when Netscape exits, it will lose any cookies that are set.
It is also possible to set permanent cookies: for example, your /. login cookie. Simply logon to /. with Netscape prompting for each cookie that is set: only accept the login cookie, and then quit. The cookies.txt/MagicCookie file will remember it forever more. My Netscape has, I believe, three permanent cookies. However, I've mostly transitioned to IE5: partly because of its cookie powers, which are much better.
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
Is that robots.txt has been around for longer than most of you young'uns have been on the net, not something that's being added now. If you don't know how to make a standard web site using standard technology.... too bad.
This seems so absurd to me.... I remember when the hottest programs were ones to get you higher-ranked on the search engines to drive traffic... has concern over ip really overwhelmed a desire for more visitors this much?
To the best of my knowledge at least, don't know about ditto - anyone have any info on them?
Google image search is simply listing information©
SmartTags changes information ¥in a sense© Lots of people aren't comfortable with their pages being changed©
I'm sure MS wouldn't have had any trouble pushing a feature that provided links to similar sites or such in a separate frame from the web page ¥as opposed to on the page, ala Smart Tags©©© oh wait, that's already been done with no problems©
Anyway, I believe that is the major difference© I could be wrong tho©©©
Bren©
The issue is the rebroadcasting of the image by someone who doesn't hold the copyright on it.
As a photographer, if I put my hard work on the internet and suddenly some business plasters it all over their site without my consent, I would be pissed off. A google image cache with a searchable image database would be similar, and objecting to it is reasonable.
The middle mind speaks!
To give an example of this. It is illegal for me to target a person on the street, run over to them and body check them into a wall with all of my 240lbs. If I did that I would correctly be charged with assault. However put some skates on me, put me on a ice rink and give me a hockey stick and (aside from some extreme examples) I can pummel my opponents into submission all I want, and they are welcome to return the favour. This is not only true in hockey, but all contact sports, Football, Boxing etc. It is reasonable to expect to be body checked in a full contact hockey game in which you are a participant with no legal liability on the body checker to the body checkie.
What we need a kind of reasonableness standard applied to copyright on the Internet.
Basically the Internet is one big computer network. Computers networks are designed for the sole purpose of sharing information easily between the hosts connected to it. Thus it is reasonable, I am sure, to everyone here to expect any information you put on a computer network like the Internet will get viewed, copied and archived, this is the nature of computer networks. . As an aside, this argument assumes no mechanism to keep the info private has been setup. ie password authentication of a web site. I believe in that case we would have an exception in that it is reasonable to expect that if I lock my web site you will not try to break into it. Again the most important thing to focus on is what is "reasonable".
Why then, if this is how the Internet works, do we allow companies to cry bloody murder when they put their content online and then get it copied?
What we should be telling them is that if you do not like the way the web game is played, do not play it. Put your content on a CD and sell that, or sell books with your pictures printed in them or any other mechanism for getting your precious images to your customers. However do not come crying to the courts every time someone makes a copy of your stuff if you put it on the public web. There are accepted rules to this web game, and one of them is that any content that you put online and do not protect with passwords etc...will get indexed, copied and archived.
In meat space what google and ditto.com do might seem unreasonable, but on the Internet it is part of the game. I think we can agree on that. My IANAL suggestion for the defense would be to call up a long line of distinguished people to back this type of reasonableness argument up in court.
IMHO What Google and Ditto are doing is reasonable behaviour on the Web.
Also the idea that ditto.com is like Napster is disengenous at best. The record labels did not choose to put their content online, their customers did, the plaintiff in this case decided to use the web. In doing so the plaintiff, whether or not they realized it, agreed to the rules of the web. Rules that are reasonable in the context of the web. IMHO it is too late for them to start crying now, they should have though of that before they went online.
However the appeals court will probably agree with the plaintiff and yet another straw will be put on the camels back of free information exchange on the Internet.
Could someone stop the world? I want to get off...
The REAL question is why not put up a robots.txt file telling the robots what files and directories you don't want them to index? ONLY if they ignore this do you need to deal with any of these other issues.
People can only view artwork, listen to music etc. only after downloading the data. IE they have to get a copy of it anyway.. is there any clearer way of rephrasing 'Information wants to be free'?
It's like the hypothetical person with perfect memory and sufficient abilities who can reproduce a piece of music having once heard it. Is he committing a crime by having a good memory? If not, shouldn't normal mortals be allowed 'memory augmenting devices' like hard disk recording?
Information has no volition to be free or anything else, but its only natural state is that of freedom. But then again, as Nietzsche (or someone else, can't remember) put it, you don't love information enough it you disclose it to others...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
User-agent: * /image
/image directory.
Disallow:
Put all image files in the
or I would recommend for him:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
- i don't think he has any 'right' to use the search sites to promote his site if he doesn't consent to them copying his data. Is html code protected by copyright? This would make all search sites illegal, and destroy the internet as a usable resource. So because the consequences would be untenable, we should answer no.
That's all. Meta tags, which you seem to be thinking of, are a pain in the ass, poorly supported, and only worth using if you don't control the domain and can't put up your own robots.txt file.
If I put 10 pizzas on a picnic table with a note saying 'please dont eat my pizza' and leave it there for 3 days - it will be eaten. If I do this ignoring the safe that's right there that I could use to lock them in, then i'm an idiot.
It is the web sites designer to includa a robots.txt or meta tag to keep the robots out.
.....
If the site owner wants to sue some one , try the web designer , not the search engines
unless this whole thing is just a scam lawsuit to extort $$$ from the search engines cause no one is buying his pictures
just smells that way
If i put something on the web , i expect people to download it , if i want to have it for sale , i wont put it out where people can get it for free
Y is it always some one elses problem for some one being stupid
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Why is robots.txt an opt-out system, and not an opt-in system? I guess opt-out is fine for spam too, then.
It's pathetic, but Corbis actually sells extremely low rez 640x480 images to "suckers."
I would argue that anything less than a print quality TGA image is a sample image, analogous to 128kbps MP3. i.e. it's free publicity in the eyes of real artists, and it's "copyright infringment" to greedy middlemen.
e.g. I happen to have a tangible print of this Pat Rawlings painting on my wall......and this is called free advertising.
Anway... Everyone benefits from abundance...except the selfish FEW that would like to profit from artificial scarcity.
Power to the Peaceful
Are our browser caches going to come under fire next? Where does it end?
Copyright is just getting totally nuts...
When is the next shuttle off this rock?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Files don't get on the internet by accident! It is inherent in the medium that when you put your files under the control of a web server and have it listen for connections on a network and respond that copies will be made. If that isn't good enough, password protect your website. Using a webserver without access control is an opt-in system that clearly authorizes some copying. The only question is how much copying is authorized.
I fail to see any meaningful difference between infinite copying for free from the original site and transitive copying from a search engine. Since "deep linking" has been held to not be infringement, the argument that you aren't forced to see the whole page is bogus, since an URL can target the individual image file.
You can explicitly unauthorize search engines by using robots.txt, right? . Any splitting of hairs about the scope of copying authorized by the act of putting your file in a web server can be fully accomodated by using robots.txt. Since this standard is publicly available and well known, doesn't placing your files on the web without restricting via this method constitute a grant of authority to everyone with access to your web server to copy? Now if these search engines ignore robots.txt, then that is another matter, but I doubt that is the case.
When you opt-in to copying by placing your files in a web server, but fail to subsequently explicitly opt-out after that, you have authorized copying, so tough.
The photographers say they might have to leave the net. Not so if they follow robots.txt . I don't generally think that forcing off people who won't learn how the net works is a bad thing. These groups are essentially trying to use the courts to create standards. The net already created its own standard for this in 1994. Perhaps we will have the first ruling that essentially says "RTFM".
I especially like those sites with Javascript pop-up message boxes that appear when you right-click so you can't select 'save as.' As if you couldn't just go into your browser's cache and copy it from there. Or, even easier, simply hold the right mouse button down while you hit the spacebar to clear the popup.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Yes, and that kind of functionality is very useful. Arguably, it falls under "fair use", whether or not Kelly likes it. But the web actually gives him a way of expressing his preferences in a machine-readable way that imposes no burden on him.
If natural-language statements like Kelly's are found to be sufficient to exclude indexing robots, the web would suffer greatly, and for no good reason whatsoever.
Is it Kelly, who will have to track all image cataloging spyders and manually disallow them while still allowing text indexing if he wants to promote his site?
Kelly has to do no such thing: the robots.txt mechanism is flexible enough that he can include and exclude parts of his site from indexing according to his preferences; he doesn't have to know what robot is used for what purpose.
Not that Kelly has any legal right to make such choices to begin with: text search engines are under no obligation to index part of his site (in fact, I think any self-respecting search engine should blacklist him). Giving him an all-or-nothing choice would be entirely sufficient. He should count himself lucky that the mechanism he actually has at his disposal is so flexible.
I think the real issue here is that the little uns will be able to make thier searches for porn more faster and yeild better quality images for archiving.
How is this any different from any other issue facing search engines? Whether it's an image or text being deep-linked is a purely client-side issue, if you screw with your browser long enough you can easily get it to display one as the other or vice versa (YMMV with regards to reading it :) ).
I could see a problem with sites such as Google that present a preview of the image found... Perhaps unfair-use claims could be avoided if the quality of the preview was lowered. A pixel-doubled image looks enough like the original that a human can make decisions based on it, but it's useless for anything a computer would want to do with it.
Because of what we think sensible defaults are. 99% of sites want to be spidered. 99% of people don't want spam. Also, because the web is seen as public and email is seen as private.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
What about a case where you take a (probably) copyrighted image, then sufficently modify it for another use entirely? Case in point my site carvingpumpkins.com , where I use images I've downloaded to create patterns to carve into pumpkins? How far should one have to go in order to claim art as their own, even if it starts as someone else's creation (Warhol's Campbell's soup can?)?
BTW, I see nothing wrong with the Google search, especially since they do provide the original page source in the window below each image you click.
i was on a site that tried to protect the images with javascript, i just clicked on image and the toolbar popped up, clicked save picture...
As other users pointed out, right-click traps do not protect images from fair users or pirates. In fact, they hinder usability and accessibility (read more).
Will I retire or break 10K?
From using assorted mirroring software in the past and from what I recall of the robots.txt documentation I've seen, it needs to be at the root of the domain, not in a subdirectory. So, does that mean that only people with a domain of their own get to protect photos or artwork that they've created?
fencepost
just a little off
Sigh...
Hey, here are some images you can have for free:
http://www.furinkan.net/art/
I'm the artist and owner, but maybe if my work gets around, people might be willing to pay me for large, high-resolution scans!
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
So how can sites say that an image may not be downloaded ? If that were the case then you wouldn't be able to see it.
Man I thought this was over with! Talk about deja vu. I used to work for Ditto.com. I was one of the engineers responsible for the development of their web crawler and image processing architecture. One thing that I want everyone to be clear on is that Ditto.com's crawler observes all robots.txt files. So if this guy really did not want Ditto's crawler to download and redistribute his work all he would have to do is setup a robots.txt file.
Also, if I remember correctly, he actually knows about robots.txt (go figure) so he is not entirely ignorant. Plus, since we crawled his site and all of this has blownup, his site is seeing traffic like it never has.
When the crawler downloads a file it creates thumbnails and discards the original image. Reason being is that the courts determined that Ditto could store images of a certain size and display those images without violating copyright. The full size image that pops up within the pop-up window is actually just a link to the original authors site.
If we had stored the image at its original size we would eat up terabytes of disk space, hence another reason to only store thumbnails.
The whole premise behind Ditto's search engine was not as an "image" search engine. Mike Lyon's the founder of Ditto is dyslexic. He thought it would be valuable to have a search engine that allowed people with similar disabilities to "search visually". If people are using the engine to just for search for images they are not using it as it was truly intended to be used.
just thought I would throw in my two cents...
-- uh...
I sure wish that all those lovely little bells and whistles sights with their flashy graphics and other crap would start using meta data to help searches... for that matter, I wish their was a nice standard or two... or more that would implement meta data inside outside and through other data so that indexing would not piss off these pissy people... oh wait, we DO have that. Too bad these assholes would rather bitch than provide a solution to a problem that obviously is desired by the very people they claim to be 'serving'
That's how.
Except the cookie won't actualy be set, so you won't be able to see the picture. The site dosn't 'know' anything between pages other then cookies, whats in the URL, and posted info (like from forms).
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
I must say it heartens me to see overwhelming favor for the Search Engines in this matter. As long as Search Engines:
a) honor robots.txt
b) provide the user with a mechanism to remove their images
c) Provides the searcher not only with the picture, but the page it was found on as well
Ditto.com's spyder does this (I know, I work there and wrote it) and GoogleBot does the same.
Someone else asked about why you have to opt out of robot spidering... you articulated this much better than I was able to.
Heh, pretty soon (if things dont change) it will be a federal offense to run/own/use firewall web cacheing software because it makes "unauthorized copies" of some esoteric copywrited document or picture or what ever.
Congratulations to the world of buisiness and the world of legislation, for putting aside thier various differances and lobbyed the internet back to the stone-ages where it belongs... >{
"Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds" - RWE
Like many here who post there art on line, I don't care if people view and save copies of my work. I'm happy if they think its worth viewing again later. On the other hand we do tend to get upset when our work is "USED" by others as if it was their own content. This isn't a RIAA type argument, we artists just want a little credit in most cases :) Art was meant to be viewed.
I took all the images from the net and created one big image, then shrunk it down to a 1x1 pixel thumbnail, which is contained in the period at the end of this sentence. Sorry.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
This is why I no longer use their spyware that tyey issue for their users. I have an Email address there that I use for spam mail, and have had it for over 10 years.(how many people do you know with 5 digit aol email addresses?)
Their software does the same thing to your harddrive if installed.
One of the first things I noticed was a huge file generated during install that had all of my files listed, by directory. It didn't used to be encrypted, but i bet it is now.
filemon, or similar program will show its generation during install, for those interested.
portmon will also show the accesses made to your machine during slow periods, while not downloading, etc.
I also noticed that if i created a 'bait' file, that it would be uploaded the next time i recieved an 'online upgrade'.
I only access their mail thru netscape now, and use a firewall religeously, but other places still hit my pc occasionly, looking for certain filenames.
remember, on a windows pc, any file whos name is known can be copied to a remote machine.
big bro' has been with us for a while.
To aol users: get some good monitoring programs, make some files that look suspicious, and see what happens.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Did your comment just fall prey to Microsoft smart quotes ®, or are you just trying to make it extra clear that you are indeed speaking about copyright issues?
Meta information isn't restrictive. It's descriptive.
If you chose to ignore an author's copyright notices then that's completely up to you, and this wouldn't stop you from copying it.
The main problem I have with the "information wants to be free" crowd is when someone takes my work and starts showing it off and taking credit for it as their own. Giving it away is one thing, but if it goes into the public domain I'd lose most of my incentive to create anything new.
I'm not in favour of totalitarian restrictive measures like CSS that work like a broadsword in blocking people's rights to fair use. But allowing authors to hold copyrights on their work is perfectly okay the way I see it.
Every web page is a mix of html and code. An original work of authorship.
Every web page should, therefore, be granted copyright protection.
The inevitable result of this is that portals stop indexing the web and the web ceases to be a useful tool.
The web is a DIFFERENT media than all others before it. It shouldn't be surprising that 18th century laws don't apply to it well.
When Kelly posts an image on his web site he is implicitly GRANTING consent for people to do any of the things they can do with http commands to access it: including viewing the image in a browser, saving it to their hard drive, saving the location, giving the location to their friends (which is why slashdot is allowed to crash other web sites willy nilly), etc. Including being spidered. The web would be nothing if not for the popularity of the portals early on for making the web usable. He wouldn't bother posting his images if the search engines weren't doing what they're doing. Nobody is SELLING his images in competition with him, so nobody is causing him financial loss. One of the reasons the movie companies lost Betamax was that the court held that someone MUST show actual financial loss to be able to request help from the copyright laws. Remember, copyright laws were aimed at publishing houses originally to keep them from stealing from each other. At best Kelly could maybe get a judgement that ditto.com or whoever couldn't show ads on pages with images from other sites, that those sites couldn't profit from other's copyrighted work. Although I would remind you again that all web sites could be considered copyrighted, and that this could be disastrous. Does slashdot profit from others' copyrighted work? Is this illegal theft or online journalism?
If Kelly wants to use the web to post images and grant selective access a variety of technical means exist to allow him to do this, from firewalls to passwords to the simplest robots.txt and meta tag exclusions. If the technical means exist to allow this, I would say that he is obliged to avail himself of those before he can seek remediation. The web was here before Kelly and will be afterwards. If he doesn't want to play by his rules he can take his toys and go home.