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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? ;)
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.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
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."
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
The search engines don't make anything seem like anything. It's the culture we live in. People don't care about intellectual "property". I'm not saying that's a good thing, but it's the way it is, and Pandora's box is well and truly open now.
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!
It's my art... I did it... Copyright Applys.
I don't mind if it's not used for a commercial purpose (Open Source Art?).. but if you slap it on a flyer for an event you make money on... or get ad revenue because someone is viewing my images on your website without my prior permission then you are a thief!
Artist still starve, even the ones who sold out to the IT industry and spend their time as a Client/Server Developer.
I don't know whether or not Kelly is incompetent, but I don't see how this can be interpreted as a trick. He has an explicit terms of use statement on every page that bans reproduction, modification or storage of his images (along with about ten other possible uses).
If Kelly were complaining about misuse of a paper copy of his images, it would be clear that the copier had deliberately violated his copyright. However ditto.com is collecting, processing and republishing images without a real person looking at the bottom of the page for this copyright statement.
The real question here is responsible for preventing violations of a clearly expressed copyright. 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? Or is it ditto.com, who would have to instruct their spyder to look for phrases like "Images copyright Bob Plaintiff 1999"?
Wait... you mean you still haven't joined the ACLU?
The answer is YES! Maybe.
Images on my site are my property. In every jpeg image (and powerpoint, word and text file) I create, I place my copyright statement. I also have a robots.txt file to prevent copying by search engines. To google's credit, they obey the robots.txt file, but others are not so considerate.
Recently, I had the occasion to place a number of images and other copyrighted works on a website hosted on one of my machines. The copyrighted works were available for a period of about 20 minutes, long enough for my friend (who paid me in beer, including many pints tonight just before I typed this, apologies for typos and bad grammar) and his brother to retrieve the works. My friend used AOL Instant Messenger to tell his brother which URL to find the images, including the obscure URL.
After I saw the two of them had retrieved the images, I left the site up for some stupid reasons (end of work day, beers calling, phone calls from idiots). Apache was running on an obscure port (28962) on an IP address with no DNS/reverse DNS entry. About 14 hours after my friend has sent the URL to his brother via AIM, I saw an AOL spider crawled my site for those works.
Its pretty fucking obvious that AOL is sucking up every copyrighted work they can, presumably to have copies of everything of value that passes by AIM. Their EULA allows them unlimited copyright to anything that passes by their systems, even if it is hosted on a third party system that doesn't agree to their EULA.
The machines involved slowly crawled the site, about one hit per minute from 4 different IP addresses. Machines like:
spider-loh-ta012.proxy.aol.com, spider-loh-ta016.proxy.aol.com, cache-loh-aa01.proxy.aol.com, and
cache-loh-ab02.proxy.aol.com carefully worked the site, following every link, and grabbing every (huge) jpeg and ppt file. Stupid of me to not filter AOL from my website, but I've learned. From now on, only password protected protocols that can't be easily picked up in plaintext streams.
Since that incident, I've been able to work this demonstration into my security reports. A client can set up a totally fake URL on a random port, send a message by AIM, and within 24 hours, the site is spidered by AOL, regardless of the robots.txt file. Sending an FTP username and password will result in the site being accessed within 24 hours. AOL hasn't responded to any of my queries, so that makes the whole thing even more interesting from a security aspect, and makes me even more money.
So don't place any intellectual property on any internet connected machine, if you want to retain control of your copyright. Large corporations will take your works, and if they happen to have great value later on, you won't see any recompense. I actually feel bad for the RIAA/MPAA giants, because they can't defend themselves, even with the DMCA and new European laws. You may own the IP for a work, but the internet doesn't care. "Get over it".
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on