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9th Circuit: Thumbnails Are Big Enough For Fair Use
An anonymous reader submits: "According to an article from law.com, yesterday's decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (U.S.) will have far-reaching effects on web publishing. From the article: '... The court found that reproducing photographs to create thumbnail images is a fair use of the material, but displaying full-sized images violates the copyright owner's exclusive right to publicly display his works....But the court found that displaying the full-sized images through linking and framing was not transformative and harmed the market for the original photographs.' One lawyer is quoted as saying, 'It's basically going to do away with linking or framing without permission.'"
What penalties can be enforced for a violation?
"ph34r my 1337 n3kk1d ski11z!" - largo of megatokyo
All is for naught unless adequate enforcement is supplied. So far, all we have is the option to sue over copyright infringement.
I have an image on my site, and someone does a direct link to it, to display it on their site...
and therefore drains my bandwidth....
and deprives me of any ad revenue or anything else as a result....
I have to provide permission first.
Hmmm... is there a problem here?
Note, this doesnt' stop someone from creating a thumbnail and using it to link to my site... where someone can see the whole image.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Based on what they stated, any adjustment to the actual image can be considered enough of a change. One could scale to 99% the width and 99% the height and use that image to link to. Or perhaps just use the img width and height tags to display the linked image in a smaller size; you may be linking to the image but it's displayed in an altered form.
I wonder if that's sufficient to get around the ruling.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
This is a great thing for the most infernal practice on the web - people loading other people's work into their frameset, with their titles and their content on either side of it.
If this isn't allowed, finally we'll be able to have some place where the author of the work has either the rest of his website recognized or has it branched away from the "link-pirate".
It is reassuring to see that the courts haven't thrown out fair use altogether, but (IMHO) the ruling that you can't link to offsite pictures has bad implications. If I put a link on my site, all it is is me telling you where to find such-and-such. Now I am not allowed to tell you that information? Can I give you a URL that you see as text? What if you end up viewing my text in an e-mail program that automatically makes my URL a link?
If you don't want an image linked to, then just check the referer and refuse to serve it.
Simple. Use technology, not the law.
---
Oregon
By displaying thumbnails as link to the actual pages, they are not in contravention. But what about cached copies of the full images?
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Unless I'm misreading, this means that
$WEB_MONKEY[0] at $SITE[0] can't put a
link like this: <img src="http://$SITE[1]/image.jpeg">
without being smacked down by
the admins at $SITE[1]. In the early
days of the Web people who resented such
linking would hack Apache to demand the
right referrer before serving an image.
It's still the better solution in my view,
but the courts are right to intervene.
... but is a serious question.
What effect does this decision have on everyone in the world who isn't in the USA?
Would enforcement rely on a Skylarov effect, or an 'effective place of publication' ruling, or both?
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
heh, the ninth court of appeals is reversed constantly. don't be too optimistic about this ruling standing up in higher courts, since the ninth court has a particularly bad record with reversals.
some references:
"Let's say this is a court on the cutting edge of jurisprudence," Richards said of the 9th Circuit court. "It may be the most reversed court."
"Of course, this is the Ninth Circuit, the most reversed court in the country, so the road is likely to be bumpy."
"Our final area of concern is that we are talking about the Ninth Circuit. That Circuit is much too large, which has made it difficult to develop any collegiality. As a result, judges have not developed common legal approaches to their decisions, and they are often even unaware of each other's decisions. The case law that has developed from this situation is often conflicting within the Circuit. Further, as judges have learned to act as laws unto themselves, they have frequently made unconstitutional decisions. It is by far the most reversed court in the country."
jon
-- http://www.cerastes.org
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer www\.yourdomain\.com good_referer
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from env=good_referer
ErrorDocument 403 http://goatse.cx/hello.jpg
</FilesMatch>
STOP ME BEFORE I POST AGAIN!
disclaimer: i'm not saying i agree with the reversals or the ninth's decisions. but, it is recognized as a *very* activist court, meaning that if it overreaches in the opinion of any higher court, it can find itself reversed quite easily.
:)
there, hopefully that will help.
jon
-- http://www.cerastes.org
/. Ticketmaster stories
Why is that bad? Why is that "against a free and open Internet"? That protects copyright. That's ALL. A photograph is copyright by the original author. So is a written work. So is source code. In fact, copyright and license is all that's stopping a popular enemy of many of the readers of this site from running off with a lot of source code and using it in proprietary products. This law protects the originators of work. It gives the author the ability to control and decide how that work will be used.
Anyone can still create excerpts of works for research, indexing and review purposes such as short links to stories, quotes of larger works, and now, thumbnails. This law extends the long-respected and venerated copyright law into the realm of digital images, and in what I personally feel is a responsible and very fair way.
For once, the law appears to be creating and extending a statute by case law in a fair way, in line with the intention of the original law, and it's getting slagged by some of the people it protects. How disappointing.
Try to weigh the rights of an author to own their labour vs. a free for all. This law protects and extends the right of each of us to create something, and either give it away, or sell it, or distribute it in some other novel way. Without that, anyone can take anything any of us does and use it in any way they wish, without our permission, and without compensation, and most importantly, without any concerns as to the intent for the use of the work originally.
Thus endeth the rant. Just think.
You know, I'm all for intellectual property rights, but the world would be a nicer place to live if everyone would just give a little bit. All these big companies are fighting for every square inch of what they think they're entitled to when they'd actually be doing themselves a favor if they lightened up on the iron grip. Fan sites build up interest and bring revenue to music groups and TV shows and such. Now I absolutlely believe that companies have a right to be selfish and keep a tight grip on their intellectual property, but they'd do themselves a favor if they stopped acting like toddlers with a toy they don't want anyone else to play with...
This is absurd.
Imagine some site has a web page that displays a picture surrounded by adds. Lets keep things simple, and say there is one image for the picture and one image for the ad. A normal web page directs your browser to request the image for the picture, tells you where to display it, tells it to request the ad image, and then where to display it. (actually, the ad probably comes first!).
In this case, you could view the html source yourself, type in the URL for the image you want, and voila, just the image would pop up. No copyright infringement, because they have built their site to provide the image to any anonymous client on demand.
But now if I write a page that instructs your browser to go to the other site and request the original image, then surround it with flowers instead of ads, this is copy right infringement. But they gave it to you on your request.
Its like if I tell you, go to Addison-Welsey, and ask them to give you a free copy of the latest Britney Spears Bio, and they'll give it to you, and they do, and then charge me with copyright infringement.
If they don't want people to access the data anonymously, all they have to do in not give it away anonymously
In our simple exam, the site could post a single gif image that has the adds and the original image combined.
My handle breaks slashcode, what does your handle do?
I might be wrong, but I believe there is in fact only one higher court, the United States Supreme Court.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Then tell me what this thread is doing discussing bascially the same thing but is dated back to Dec 1999.
And these other articles as well dating back to Nov 1999.
Note 276 In Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., a California federal district court ruled that the defendant's use of "thumbnail" images in its search engine was fair use and did not infringe on the rights of plaintiff photographer.
* Thumbnail photo not infringing *
Ditto.com uses an automated program to crawl through the web collecting and building a database of images. When a user puts a specific term into Ditto.com's search engine, thumbnail reproductions of those images pop up. A California photographer who specializes in images filed a copyright infringement suit. A Southern California federal judge handed a preliminary ruling in favor of Ditto.com
--Metrollica
Thanks Slashdot. When I get back from work today I can shout to her "Hey! Size does matter after all."
No wait.....
Note: Reality filter in effect, suggested changes added in parentheses.
On another note, this decision really has nothing to do with hyperlinking, only with embdding other content into a page without attributing it, i.e. either using frames or the SRC of an IMG. The only way it even vaguely relates to hyperlinks is that it's not really clear under this decision whether creating a hyperlink to an image directly instead of linking to the page that contains the image is forbidden. I don't see any language to that effect, but it could be considered unattributed display nonetheless.
What happens if someone has really big thumbs?
I think this might be able to apply to mp3's as well. For instance, if I have an .m3u mp3 playlist on my web site that links over http to mp3's on another person's website, that is similar to representing the mp3's as my own.
The future isn't what it used to be.
Just include some text imbedded on the images on your site with your URL. That way, if another site links to your image, at least you get some advertising out of it.
Now here's a related question... if I take someone else's picture and convert it to colored HTML text, like the random babe @sciifyer, is that considered fair use?
So what you're saying is that if I want my copyrighted book protected, then I shouldn't place copies in libraries? Is that right? I mean, libraries are public places. Or, if I publish a magazine full of copyrighted pictures, then someone has the right to scan them into their computer and post them on the Net? Or if you post some interesting content on your Web site, I can come in and take that content, transfer it to my site, represent it as being mine, and make money off it? Just wait until someone does one of these things to you, then you can decide who the dumbass really is.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
IANAL, but as I see it, by posting somthing on the web via a publicly-accessable URL you are giving implicit permission to everyone on the planet to view, and link to, your content. I would imagine that failing to have any kind of access control mechanism on your site would provide the would-be linker with an automatic defense. You can't put up a billboard in a public place and then complain that the wrong kind of people are looking at it, or that someone took a picture of it.
If you want to control the way people use the content you put on the web, you need to rely on technical means, and not the law, as your primary means of defense. If you want to control deep linking, set up your site so that it requires a password, or cookies, or requires a referrer field from an internal URL. Without some attempt to control access, I'd imagine you'd have a very hard time convincing a judge and jury that you were not giving the world an implicit license
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
They didn't specify the size of the thumbnail, did they ? What if I happen to choose 1600x1200 as the most suitable resolution for my thumbnails ?
"But the court found that displaying the full-sized images through linking and framing was not transformative and harmed the market for the original photographs."
This is sheer thuggery, as is much of current so-called "copyright" law. Simply pointing to an image which was voluntarily, knowingly posted by the owner (or authorized party) on a publicly supported Internet[work] specifically for anonymous viewing, is gloatingly labelled "theft" by word-twisting professional liars.
Bullpucky.
The better anology is a man who is accused of theft because he pointed to a window, whereupon curious onlookers went over to look at the window and what was behind it, namely publicly mounted curiosities which the arrogant owner had expected only to be viewed by a very few people who even knew of the location of the shop, let alone that odd curiosities were there to be seen with which to begin.
If the arrogant owner hadn't wanted people on the public sidewalk to see his curiosities for free through his window, then why did he put them in the damn window with which to begin? He could have charged admission for people to enter a private room, or he could have put a curtain over the inside of the window, to be whipped aside only for paying customers. He is NOT ENTITLED, however, to essentially steal the public sidewalk from the public who paid for that sidewalk!
The courts are populated by bubbling morons who've taken it into their pinheads that their smarmy success at political cronyism means they are real judges. A plague on the lot of them.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
Let's see an Australian wondering, why this sort of things are not government regulated and require all this pricey legal procedings instead...
After all, it is so much easier to pay taxes to support the additional government machinery and then you just file a few forms and have your problem resolved by a government employee! And you can even appeal a decision you don't like -- to the employes's boss...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
When /. mentioned "frameing" in the synopsis, I thought (honest, why would I make this up) those cheesy simulated picture-frame borders that some people insist on putting around their digital images. I'd like to see that made against the law, even if you own the image.
On the other hand, maybe this law will help end one of the many html frame abuses. Maybe we'll see more laws in the future which make bad web design illegal. Imagine if popping up windows you didn't ask for was declared vandalism, whether done by javascript or some installed program's registration reminder or advert. That would, perhaps, be the greatest day in gui history.
-Paul Komarek
So, according to this case, if I provide a link from my website to a relevant image from your website, but without the content around it (i.e., a link to just a certain image from your stie), that's a violation?
p onses: "XYZ". Where # indicates the articles # in the typical order in the site; type is the type of article, such as Your Rights Online; #character, the number of characters in the portion of the thing displayed on the main page; size-of-all-responses indicates the net amount of words of all the responses added together; and #responses indicates the # of responses to the article.
If my users need a specific image from your site, why should they have to download the image, which they need, and all that surrounds it, which they don't? The net shouldn't be slowed down by such nonsense. Also, your server bandwidth is wasted because your server has to upload the image which they want, along w/ alotta stuff they don't.
What about Google.com's image searcher, which allows images from sites displayed in-frame? What if I want to include an image from your website in my site, but just that image, and in a specific place? Why should the efficiency of the net be hindered by having the same information stored in different places, when need not be? (Of course, some would argue this is a virtue, as redundancy reduces vulnerability to data-loss).
The simple fact is, the internet should not be allowed to be harmed by IP laws. Such rulings diminish and reduce the usefulness of the internet, its functionality, even its it ideology.
This brings me to a suggestion I was thinking of for quite some time regarding the net. Why should web-publishers dictate to users HOW they view information? Why should they have to bother? What I propose is a system whereby information is transmitted in groups, packeted, its layout not completely controlled. For example, take slashot. Under my system, the web-publisher would write something like (in pseudocode)
TITLE: "XYZ".
SUBJECT #,type,date,#character,size-of-all-responses,#res
Etc.
You guys get the point. Instead of dictating to users the exact layout of sites, sites would give them information about the sections of the sites, and individual's browsers would CHOOSE how to display them, based on the user's preferences. I haven't attempted to explain this idea to its limits, but the possibilities are endless. Its representative of the true nature of the internet: minimal control.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Yes, not without permission. But it has always been ethically questionable to do... now it's just backed up by the courts.
If you've ever "accidentally" been directed to a "leisure" site then, like me, you were probably convinced that only thumbnail images exist.
This case is a landmark for me because it provides evidence that non-thumbnail pr0n is actually out there somewhere.
:)
What implications might this have on Google's image searching feature? They give a thumbnail, but they also let you see the whole picture as an remote paste into their page. This is a case where they *are* pasting the remote image into their own HTML page without the surrounding context, so in that sense it seems like it would violate the ruling made. But on the other hand they do it in a way that makes it obvious that this *is* an image from a remote site and they aren't trying to pass it off as their own work.
How would the ruling affect this case?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
What if the original image is already small enough to be a thumbnail? For example, what if you paste a copyrighted icon of a stop sign, or a left-arrow, from someone else's site? Would that be a legal inclusion, or would you have to shrink it down even further into an incomprehensable dot to make it legal?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
What is thumbnail? Will 788 x 598 thumbnail of a 800 x 600 go? How would they decide?
<^>_<(ô ô)>_<^>
Umm, if there were no copyright law, there wouldn't be any proprietary products in the first place.
Yes there would; they'd just be protected under trade secret + contract law rather than copyright law. Copyright infringement cases are generally civil cases, and damages usually don't top five figures per work infringed. Trade secret cases, on the other hand, carry even bigger damages, plus jail time for all involved.
Being against this ruling and against copyright law is not hypocritical. Being for the ruling and against copyright law is.
I agree with many of the general principles of copyright, and I agree with this ruling, but I don't agree with the specifics of the implementation of copyright in the United States. For instance, I don't agree with the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA as interpreted in recent cases (the courts have flatly ignored many of the exceptions), and I don't agree with life+70 copyright terms. I also don't like companies whose products teach a message of sharing but who do not themselves share (i.e. license to individual webmasters under reasonable terms) their own IP. Does that make me a hypocrite?
Will I retire or break 10K?
A few years ago I did this little animated GIF of a snowball coming at the viewer. Last year I got a few deep links, but this year it really took off. At first, I reacted by renaming the file and switching it so that they saw another GIF that said "you need to give me credit and copy the image to your own server". Yes, that's right, the GIF is FREE TO USE as long as you give me credit and host it on your own server, but people were too lazy to fulfill even that simple request.
I contemplated several solutions, none of which were satisfactory. Eventually I decided to insert a (C) 2001 VRML3D.COM frame into the GIF so that any site using it would have my copyright notice in it. This doesn't solve the bandwidth problem, but at least I get credit.
I had been thinking that if I decided to do more GIFs, it would be a PiTA because I would have to find a way to protect my bandwidth. I mean, who wants to hit their hard transfer limit just because some yuk-a-puk wants to put a GIF on some message forum? Message forums that allow IMG tags are the *biggest* offenders.
Now if I ever decide to do more GIFs like this again, it's nice to know the law is on my side. The only question I have is the question a lot of others have too: What's a thumbnail? In the case of the animated GIFs, they are already thumbnail sized, but if a whole bunch of people start posting them on those stupid web forums it could suck quite a bit of bandwidth.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Ted Nelson's original Xanadu concept anticipated this controversy. He advocated what he called "transclusion", which is similar to this concept of taking someone else's published data and embedding it into your own document. Nelson proposed that transclusion should be a built-in feature of the system and that contractual relationships should govern its use. People would get royalties when their published data was transcluded within someone else's site. Of course his whole system was built around a pay per view model, so the main issue was how to distribute the payments from viewers.
Xanadu had many problems of course, which is why it never went anywhere, but it seems that on this issue it was way ahead of the Web. A universal system for negotiable royalty payments would be more flexible and adaptable than the kinds of legal prohibitions which are evolving today.
Just for 1 second...
I've got a personal website, www.dionic.net (Come /. my ISDN ;-)
Just a handful of holiday snaps - not professional grade at all - but OK. I put them there because some people may find them interesting.
Trouble is - if you link directly to the larger scale images, as someone else said, you eat my feeble bandwidth and no-one knows about my site (unless they can be bothered to examine and dissect the URL a bit).
What I would consider more reasonable would be:
On point 4 if your site get's major hits I may need to chat about my link getting slaughtered and may suggest moving to scheme 3. But upto that point, at least your site is visibly linking to mine in some form so it's good for me :-)
Sure - I could do also sorts of things to the server like traffic throttling, HTTP referer checking etc. But for this thread I'm just considering the ethics from my POV.
My idea of what's fair won't be someone else's. So if you want to use other people's stuff to enhance your site - just ask. You may be pleasantly surprised - especially if you try to do something for them by way of advertsing their site in return.
Why can't we all just try the cooperative route before banging on about rights?
Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn
You make it publicly available, you have to live with the public seeing it. There are server directives for when you don't want it to be publicly available.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
.. and you would most certainly loose.
There probably isn't a specified limit on what is considered thumbnails or not. This is (as it should be) decided on an individual basis by humans in the court system.
Ah, hmmm. Right, there was no art, books or music created before there was copyright.
BTW, did you know that the US did not abide by international copyrights until late in the 19th century. Just like China is doing today.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
A court will be able to take personal jurisdiction (power over a defendant) and be able to render judgment against them if the defendant's actions cause reasonably forseeable harm in the forum (place where the court is).
In other words, if you are in Germany, and you link to and display copyrighted pictures in your frames, and the copyrighted pictures are the work of someone in... say, Maryland in the US, the plaintiff can proceed against you in the Maryland court because the injury, loss of sales/advertising/etc. was caused to the plaintiff in Maryland. OK, you say, but what if I never go to Maryland? What if I don't show up, and never enter the US? How can the plaintiff enforce the judgment against me? Well, most nations have signed treaties that basically say "If your courts have rendered a valid judgment against a defendant, our courts will enforce it." The US Constitution has the Full Faith and Credit Clause which pretty much does the same thing between US states, so that California would have to enforce that Maryland judgment. What that means is that, sure, you can ignore the US proceeding against you, but if Germany, or whatever country you're from, has signed such a treaty with the US, all the plaintiff has to do is take his judgment to your local German court to have it enforced. They slap a lien on your car, and the local law enforcement officers come out and auction it off to pay the judgment. The reciprical of this is what got Yahoo in trouble with France. Sure, Yahoo is an American company, and they could have told the French court to go to hell, but if they did, and then the French court rendered a judgment against them, the French judgment would probably be enforced by an American court.
The long and the short of this is, don't assume that just because you are outside of a nation's borders, you can violate their laws to your heart's content. If you injure someone in that country, it's pretty likely that they will be able to drag your ass into court.
I honestly didn't know, but google to the rescue: From the site, Federal Judicial Center History of the Federal Courts, we have
So the federal district system dates back as far as the Constitution itself. Early in the Republic, the Supreme Court justices also rode the circuit, so perhaps that's what the poster was remembering.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
I think the discussion may have missed both a novel aspect of the case (PDF) and a significant factor in the court's analysis:
First, the infringement didn't occur because ditto.com copied the work, but because they violated Kelly's right to publicly display his work. A run-of-the-mill infringement claim is going to involve copying or creating a derivative work, which makes the analysis in this case relatively interesting.
Second, the question of whether ditto.com infringed on Kelly's right to display his work still came down to a question of fair use:
In this case, the infringement of the right to display came, essentially, because Kelly was trying to sell copies of his photographs and ditto.com displayed the images in a way that made it less likely that people would ever visit his site (why bother? they could right-click the images displayed on ditto.com's site) and buy copies of his works.
In other words, the analysis could be different if the copyright holder isn't trying to sell copies of their work. It could also be different, I think, if one of the other factors tilted more strongly in favor of the defendant: for example, a not-for-profit use of a work in a context of political or artistic discussion.
Mike "Still Bitter About Submitting This Story Yesterday Morning and Having it Rejected" Skoglund
These judges just completely botch the inline linking part of their decision. Arriba simply isn't displaying anything.
It shouldn't be a "fair use" case at all, but rather a question of whether permission is given for the use. Arriba use of an inline link is nothing more that a REQUEST to use the images. The result is that a http GET command is sent to kelly's website. Kelly is the one who chose to put his files in the web server. Kelly controls the programmatic response of that web server. When Kelly's web server responds by sending the image, it is Kelly that is authorizing display on the end user's machine.
The fact that such an image can be framed is a flexibility directly supported by the browser paradigm and HTML standard. When Kelly puts his images in a web server, he is de facto authorizing their use in the HTTP/HTML/browser context. The court doesn't even ponder this.
It is completely absurd to say that Arriba is "displaying" their images unless Arriba puts full sized copies on their own web server. Instead it is more appropriate to say that Arriba is providing the end user with a request form (HTML) to display. That isn't "use" at all.
I've been working at the company in question, ditto.com (formerly known as Arriba Soft) for several years, designing and building the technology that lead to this. The judge ruled against Ditto on one point, that being the display of the full-sized image. I'd like to clarify what exactly that means, though.
All thumbnails displayed are served from our own servers, not using the bandwidth of the sites being displayed in our search results. The issue that came into play was what happened when a user clicked on a thumbnail. When that happened, we would pop up two windows (as ugly as that is). One would contain just the full-sized image hosted on that site's server. The second window would be the actual page that the image was found on. Because of the judge's ruling, we no longer pop up the full-sized image, just the page that the image was found on.
I don't think this ruling will have much impact on us and others like Google who are providing the same type of service. The judge ruled upheld the previous ruling about fair use of thumbnails, which is the primary concern of this business.
If you create an image and you don't want other people linking to it without context, then you need to learn about HTTP. If you are too stupid, then you should pay someone to do it for you. The simple solution is a script or web server hack that checks the HTTP headers for a referrer and denies all requests for images without a referrer pointing somewhere on your site.
h tml
Here, from the HTTP 1.1 RFC, the section on referrers. Any browser worth it's spit should provide the correct Referrer header.
14.36 Referer
The Referer[sic] request-header field allows the client to specify,
for the server's benefit, the address (URI) of the resource from
which the Request-URI was obtained (the "referrer", although the
header field is misspelled.) The Referer request-header allows a
server to generate lists of back-links to resources for interest,
logging, optimized caching, etc. It also allows obsolete or mistyped
links to be traced for maintenance. The Referer field MUST NOT be
sent if the Request-URI was obtained from a source that does not have
its own URI, such as input from the user keyboard.
Referer = "Referer" ":" ( absoluteURI | relativeURI )
Example:
Referer: http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/Overview.
If the field value is a relative URI, it SHOULD be interpreted
relative to the Request-URI. The URI MUST NOT include a fragment. See
section 15.1.3 for security considerations.
RFCs are good for this because they allow he person sending to take action. And in this case, it should have been RFC'd. However, no RFC will ever help with spam.
SIG: HUP
The ninth circuit has improved in recent years. Also, as one judge on the Ninth Circuit said: "they [the Supreme Court] can't reverse them all!"
Try to weigh the rights of an author to own their labour vs. a free for all. This law protects and extends the right of each of us to create something, and either give it away, or sell it, or distribute it in some other novel way. Without that, anyone can take anything any of us does and use it in any way they wish, without our permission, and without compensation, and most importantly, without any concerns as to the intent for the use of the work originally.
The purpose of copyright is to expand the public domain, NOT to control how infomation and public works are used. Copyright laws in the US were designed to offer a temporary franchise on publication of works at a time when publication itself was costly and required encouragement. The current expansion of copyright into a 75 year, effecutally permenant, franchise is an abomination especially in light of electronic publication costs. The author's intent has nothing to do with how I should think or express myself or use his material to do so. I will freely quote people I disagree with to show them up. It was never about the ability to force your will on others or to be able to make money forever off someone's "work" (both are equivalent, how is left as an exercise).
The callenge for lawmakers is to forge laws that continue to encourage publication without inflicting undue restrictions on use. The GPL exits because of undue restrictions that have been placed into current copyright law and it's strength is how abusive copyright laws are. If those abuses did not exist, the GPL would have no more force than any other more restrictive copyright. Your confusion is the reason copyright is so screwed up and is the greatest obstical lawmakers have.
Don't be misled. You will not be protected when _largeCorp rips you off (as you consider it). _largeCorp would more likely copy your image or what not to their own machine and dispense with the reference alltogether. _largeCorp will be able to hit you with a very large stick if you EVER try to use their content. A great example of that is the whole "for Dummies" fiasco where the publisher of the popular dead tree serries used copyright law to commondere a common english phrase. We can be sure of prior use and publication of the phrase, but the publisher sent out thousands of threatening emails to sites that used it. A lighter aproach to the situation is found in the excellent dispair.com trade mark parody of :-(
To summarize, copyright is a created right to encourage contributions to the public domain and should never be used to defeate the real right of free speech.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Dude, if someone is dumb enough to go to the trouble of photocopying an entire John Grisham novel, they've already got trouble. Double that for anything by Tom Clancy. Do these guys get paid by the pound, or what?
That is all.
Now, from user's point of view (which approximates judge's POV most likely), if you do see the whole image on a page, it IS ON THAT PAGE. Technical implementation is that due to linkage browser automatically fetches the image, and comes from another server. That is inconsequential for the user. Who cares? Programmers do, obviously, but for the user that image IS part of the page.
Thus, having a thumb-nailed image that links to the original page with the embedded image seems more fair use than 'embedding' the image.
And yes, I fully understand that from underlying tech's (and infrastructure's) perspective, difference isn't all that clear, far from it. But what matters is the context in which the image is used.
However, what I would consider more interesting is actually the _intention_ for linking to full-sized images. Thing is; if a casual user (or another artist etc) did the linking to mislead people, it would be easy to condemn the practice. But when a general purpose search engine does it, it's easier to defend the practice; especially since it's easier for anyone to understand that the search engine "didn't produce" the image, but found it from another site.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Can I take someone else's picture, enlarge it -- extrapolating pixels via these new fractal toolkits -- and post that? At this point, information is being added. Hmm... a better derative work?
What if I find a business that makes and sells professional thumbnails. Can I zoom it as well? Or do I not have to, because the it's already fair use by virture of being thumbnail size?
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I lay claims to blank.gif which holds one transparent pixel. Anyone who wants to make a smaller thumbnail of that, feel free.
But this law only applied in the US. It was not applied to works created outside the U.S.
In fact read about Stravinsky and Disney - Disney used Starvinsky's music without his permission. They said that since he was Russian the US copyrights did not apply.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
in the hotly contested race between (now former) Senator Slade Gorton and (now Sen.) Maria Cantwell.
Gorton had a fairly goofy picture of himself buried in his campaign website. Cantwell's web site deep linked to it from their front page as part of a humourous attack on his environmental record.
Gorton's campaign manager didn't really understand the issue and first accused Cantwell's campaign of copyright infringement and, later, "hacking" Gorton's website. Fortunately for Gorton, his tech people understood what was going on much better and swapped out the goofy pic with a different pic...
then when people went to Cantwell's website, they were greeted with a big "Vote for Slade Gorton"-style picture. Cantwell's people quickly stopped deep linking.
Whole thing played itself out in a day and no lawsuits were filed.
What you are saying is that there are "special" URLs, ie ones that point to images, which are inherently pointing to things which are not published to the public and "normal" URLs, pointing to HTML, which constitute the intended published context of an item. This is arbitrary and false (at the same time!).
Since it is possible, as even the trolls have pointed out, to prevent deep linking to images quite easily, thereby actually making this distinction non-arbitrary, it should be assumed that an image not so protected is available for linking.
The existance of unused locks and keep-out signs in an otherwise public context denies any claim of trespass.
Apart from anything else, how many images are there on the web which were taken with a specific HTML page in mind? Very few when talking about photographs. So, what makes a photograph less of a "content item" than the piece of text it may at a later date find itself dropped into? Nothing, and if you can link to one then you can link to both.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Hmmh. I must honestly admit I don't quite understand what you are saying here..
What you are saying is that there are "special" URLs, ie ones that point to images, which are inherently pointing to things which are not published to the public and "normal" URLs, pointing to HTML, which constitute the intended published context of an item. This is arbitrary and false (at the same time!).
No. I'm not saying anything like that. I'm saying I (assuming I was a judge) don't care even about the fact that we are talking about URL-linked items. I'd be more interested in what is the end result; what browser display and how that looks like; what is the impression and intention of the page in question.
You are still thinking in technical terms, how things are done instead of what is done. I certainly understand how similar (identical) different methods are from HTML viewpoint; hyper-linking as usual. About the only difference is that it might be logical to consider html-pages to be 'first class' web content, and anything else secondary linked-to material; whether that makes sense or not can be argued to no end.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
What is being done is that the image is published by giving it a URL. You are saying that the use of that URL is only allowed in some circumstances, ie in the context of another URL which points to a page of HTML or whatever.
I am also saying that not understanding what a URL is (the method of publishing material on the Internet) is no position to argue the in's and out's of copyright law. At a technical level (the "how") copyright does not apply here as nothing is copied by the defendant, but also the litigant has actually, definitely, and in clear language, made the image available for linking by giving it a publicly accessable URL which is an entirely optional step which they chose (perhaps unwittingly) to take.
If I own a field surrounded by common land and put no markers up to tell people that this normal looking patch of grass (the image URL) is different from all the other grass (other URL's) I don't see how any court could justify a case of trespass against someone that "uses" my land by walking over it.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"