Slashdot Mirror
Corbis, DMCA, And John Kerry Photos
Phronesis writes "Photo District News is running a story reporting that three historic photos of John Kerry from the early 1970s, including the one used for the Jane Fonda forgery, were pirated from Corbis. The photographers who own the copyright on the photos are asking Corbis to use its fancy watermarking technology to find the culprit. Corbis hopes either to track the responsible people down using watermarks, or to invoke DMCA if the watermarks were removed."
Yeah so this is the problem with folks who don't ask questions. A quick examination of the forged image reveals differing light angles. However, other than that, the forgery (based upon an interpretation of the low resolution image from the link) is pretty decent. The cut lines are well concealed, and the brightness has been rather nicely matched. Of course the highlights in her hair have been darkened to match the background of trees and such, but here is(are) my question(s)..... 1) Who would be stupid enough to obtain a copyrighted image in a forgery attempt? 2) Unless this is an attempt by a right wing organization to discredit Kerry, why waste your time? Especially when you are lying?
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
from the forgery-and-lebel-were-already-criminal dept.
I believe it's "libel"
And as for contrasting "rich people" with Mr. Kerry, that's a very interesting spin you have chosen.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The other part of the DMCA says stripping copyright information or other identifying marks from a copyrighted work in an attempt to avoid proper attribution is also a violation.
It's in that part none of us got really upset about because most of us (even those who "pirate" regularly) still think the creator should get credit (just not control).
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Wouldnt they be protected under parody laws?
Standard IANAL bit.
It would protect him or her from libel, but not copyright or DMCA violations.
No, the person who takes the picture gets the copyright (unless a work for hire).
However, some states do have laws that regulate the use of a person's image, especially with regards to endorsing some product. So you can't take that picture and put it on Kerry-brand penis pumps in California, for example.
Sec. 1202. Integrity of copyright management information
. . . (b) REMOVAL OR ALTERATION OF COPYRIGHT MANAGEMENT INFORMATION- No person shall, without the authority of the copyright owner or the law--
(1) intentionally remove or alter any copyright management information,
(2) distribute or import for distribution copyright management information knowing that the copyright management information has been removed or altered without authority of the copyright owner or the law, or
(3) distribute, import for distribution, or publicly perform works, copies of works, or phonorecords, knowing that copyright management information has been removed or altered without authority of the copyright owner or the law,
knowing, or, with respect to civil remedies under section 1203, having reasonable grounds to know, that it will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement of any right under this title.
In other words "Thou shalt not do anything we don't like."
That would seem ironic, considering it's apparent origins:
From the Guardian
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You don't think Kerry is ``rich people''? You don't think he would say something like `I would therefore urge you to move forward with the passage of "The Digital Millenium Copyright Act"' ? Oh well, someone beat me to this, but at least I've got a link here.
Kerry probably qualifies as one of the "rich people" who are in power
In fact, if Kerry is elected, he will the the 3rd richest US president ever (behind George Washington and JFK).
Oh, wait, only one of the pictures of them together was forged, while the other has been verified.
I think it's interesting that the media is following the forged photo and completely ignoring the fact that the man claiming now to be pro-military and bragging about his service record has been proven to be one of Hanoi Jane's fellow protesters. Granted, she was not yet personally, directly responsible for killing American servicemen, but I somehow doubt her claims that she suddenly had a radical change of heart between the time they were hanging out together and when she starting partying in North Vietnam.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I saw it when it first came out. It was a joke. It was an answer to a request by someone to find a picture of Fonda and Kerry. It was basically a Fark.
These goomers need to relax and find another vendetta. Otherwise, Fark is going out of business.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
You mean libel. Slander is spoken, libel is in print. Libel will be hard to prove. You can easily prove the picture is false, which is one criteria for libel. However, showing that the author actually meant harm, and that harm actually occured will be difficult. Much easier to get the author on copyright infringement.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
And if you RTFA (I know, this is Slashdot) it's Corbis going after them for copyright violations, not Kerry.
This level of watermarking needs to be done every time an image is downloaded. The whole point is that they want to embed the IP address the image was sent to along with the timestamp so that there's enough to take a subpeona to the ISP to find out under what ISP account it was downloaded.
That might not get us down to what person did it, but it very certainly would narrow the number of suspects into a very tight group...
Have you read this?
The unofficial
Kerry isn't liberal.
From the overview page at Corbis.
;)
Founded by Bill Gates in 1989, Corbis is headquartered in Seattle, with offices in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, Paris, Dusseldorf, Vienna, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, and Tokyo.
Just throwing out that tidbit of info for the tin foil hat crowd.
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
Just off the top of my head, another thing: Doctoring photos as such is more than mere libel during a political campaign. The US actually does (again IIRC) have laws on the books for such smear tactics.
Someone help me out here, but there was a politician whose campaign in the 1940s (or 1950s) tried to frame his opponent with a photo of Joseph Stalin. A photo of Stalin was placed alongside that of the opponent, and the border between the 2 was blurred, and alongside one of the other guy. The border was blurred, and presto.. a photo of a conference between Stalin and a sitting American politician, just in time for the average voter.
The fallout from this particular incident, I believe, caused considerable flak back then.
Of course, nowadays we're much more sophisticated.
We just take a picture of Osama Bin Laden and (now ex-)Senator Max Cleland, stick them on the telly, without any editing whatsoever, and add a sinister voice-over to scare the sheep...
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
Forbes. Kerry was not poor before he married the Heinz heir.
"Does anyone know if an open-source (cheap) watermark solution exists?"
Look at ImageMagick (or Image::Magick for Perl people) -- it lets you add text to an image from the command line, among many other things.
For websites, ImLib lets you modify images from within PHP, but it's probably easier to batch-process them if you care about your webserver's CPU usage.
You are not required to vote in the Senate, but I checked and Kerry did vote yea .
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
San Fran Shark Link...
http://www.snopes.com/photos/shark.asp
No. And clearly, neither do you. Her current last name, which she got from her first husband, is Heinz.
I have no idea what her maiden name was.
Mr. Kerry was in the Senate when DMCA passed unanymously, thus he voted for it.
Sorry your premise doesn't lead to that conclusion... A bill can pass unanimously by a score of 97 to 0 in the Senate. It's still unanimous because nobody voted "no", but that doesn't lead to the conclusion that all of the senators in office were present or that everybody that was present agreed, the losing 3-person side may have just chose to abstain.
What happened in the Senate is that the Senate voted by "Unanimous Consent", which is to say not one senator spoke up to object to the bill being passed and/or request that an on-the-record vote be taken. This is often done for sure-to-be-disliked legislation because nobody has to vote "yes" either.
Now, the thing is, to call for debate and a recorded vote on an issue that you're opposed to, but you're sure the other side has the votes it takes to pass is a waste of the Senate's time, and sure to make you some enemies who might start to do their best to muck up an unrelated issue that you're in favor of. Therefore, there's a downside to objecting, the only real thing you have to gain is to get your objection onto the record.
Kerry, being a Senator, is going to be confronted with a lot of questions about the activities of the Senate and when he took action and didn't take action on them throughout the campaign. Candidates who run for a higher office after ahving any legislative position always have these questions... that's why it's more common for a former govenor to run for the office, they have far fewer on-the-record actions they have to justify, and total control of their own agenda rather than having to fight other legislators for control of a schedule.
FYI, Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wisc.) voted against the USA PATRIOT Act.
The GIMP's plugin is called Digital Signature. Looks pretty neat.
Wild Eeep!
He does come from a wealth family, too
Correct. However, since the fact that he voted for it is a matter of public record, there is no need for conclusions to be drawn.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Of course, you might ask, "who owns Corbis?"
Taken rather out of context to make it sound worse.
"As you move to conference on "The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998," I write to express concern regarding unrelated provision[s] added by the House in its companion bill. These provisions deal with the protection of "collections of information," or databases.
I am specifically concerned about language contained in Title V of the House-passed bill. This language is similar to that contained in S. 2291, "The Collections and Information Antipiracy Act, " a bill introduced in the Senate that would amend current law by creating a new form of intellectual property protection for informational databases. In recent days, I have been approached by various Massachusetts- based groups and institutions with concerns regarding the potential implications of the language included in Title V.
While I am not opposed to the eventual consideration of the database legislation, I believe that the Senate Judiciary Committee has not had ample time to examine closely the specific provisions contained in Title V and their potential implications. I would therefore urge you to move forward with the passage of "The Digital Millenium Copyright Act," but to delay consideration of any database legislation until next year. This will provide the committee with the opportunity to hold hearings on the matter and to craft database legislation that enjoys broad-based support in both the public and private sectors."
Actually, the DMCA doesn't apply because you CAN'T remove a watermark, unless you have the original image! If you had the original image, why would you send out the one that has a watermark in it??? You would get caught...that would be stupid.
Watermarking an image is pretty basic signal processing (go talk to your EE friends about it). You add a small amount "noise" to the signal (in this case, an image). This "noisy" image is then sent to people. To prove where a watermarked image came from, you subtract the original image from the watermarked/noisy image and you get the noise that you added. You compare this to your records and see who you you gave that noise pattern to.
The problem with removing the watermark is that you don't know what noise was added, and there isn't a way to find out, unless you have access to the original. Another way of putting it is that A+B=C. If you only know C (the watermarked image), you can't find out what A and B are! (unless you know A (original image) or B (noise you added).
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't." --Douglas Adams
Wow, he must be only twenty or thirty feet away, in a crowd, no less.
If anyone reads anything into that pic, they're really reaching.
Of course the guy's at a peace rally. Unlike the majority of the people there, Kerry had an actual understanding of war, and actual combat expiriences that led him to protest the war after his return.
The realness of the other photo in no way discredits Kerry as a candidate, or as veteran. He was one of many Viet Nam veterans who had the balls to speak out against the war when he returned.
A lot of crap is comming out from the right-wing chickenhawks who are beginning to realize that this is a candidate who served in some of the worst combat zones any vet has seen, and earned a Bronze Star, a Silver Star, and Presidential Unit Citation while doing so. The guy has a dislike for the intelligence community and has gone after them before.
Real or not, I'm pretty sure those pictures are not going to make a whole hell of a lot of difference.
Read, L
There is a real photo of Fonda and Kerry at a 1970 anti-war rally in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania (which they both spoke at).
Can you even prove he was in the room at the time it was brought up?
Hmm...let's see. Let's look at your parent, shall we?
since the fact that he voted for it is a matter of public record
And here's the record.
Unless there's something seriously wrong the Congressional Record, it looks like people did vote for this one.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Funny, because Kerry's wealth is really his wife's fortune. And where did she get that fortune? She inherited it from her former husband, who died in an air crash. And what was he when he died? A Republican U.S. Senator!
What? You speak as if the CIA is a company and the Bush family has stock in it. It's a government agency, you knob. It was formed in 1947 by Harry Truman. GW Bush was the head of the CIA for a while, but he was rich before that.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
GW Bush was the head of the CIA for a while, but he was rich before that.
Ahem, thats GHW Bush. Don't get your Bush's confused (always good advice).
W is the richest Bush, pretty much solely from the 15 million he made selling the Texas Rangers. Daddy Bush is in the single-digit millions somewhere. Prescott, W's grandfather, was an investment banker/millionare, but not all that impressive as far as war profiteers go. He supposedly was the one who stole Geronimo's skull for Skull & Bones. (without a skull, it's a kinda shitty secret club) The great-grandpappy Samuel was in charge of buying guns for the army during WWI and maybe-kinda Remmington used him to overcharge the army like drunken sailors.
None of them founded the CIA, George H.W. just got appointed head of the CIA for awhile.
Don't forget the "stupid" argument. As was so well documented in a book called "Slander" it would appear Bush is not the dummy that the Democrats would have us believe! In fact, he blew away Al Gore's school record. A synopsis: Bush= A's, B's and the Occasional C Gore= A few C's many D's and a none to rare F. Oops, it looks like another cherished stereotype has been thrown to the wind!
OK. Bush lied about WMDs, and while I'm at it he lied about Iraq's ties to Al Quaeda before the war!!
If he didn't lie then he is dumb as a post and that should disqualify him to be President too.
In his state of the union when he told America Iraq was pursuing Yellow Cake he didn't technicly lie because he said "British Intelligence says" but he did decieve. The fact is all of the documents that were the basis of this claim were badly and obviously forged and everyone who'd seen them knew this. Rice and the NSA had been told on numerous occasions these claims were bogus but this deception occured anyway.
The state department's intelligence agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and elements within the CIA repeatedly insisted there was no creditable evidence to establish with any certainty that Iraq still had WMD's.
Its a well known fact the Wolfowitz and Rumsfled established a special projects office, a new intelligence agency under Wolfowitz's direct supervision whose goal was to mine all the intelligence that made a case for war and for WMD's in Iraq and to downplay all the intelligence that suggested there was not. Presumably this office was formed because the Defense Intelligence Agency whose role it usurped wasn't giving them the answers they wanted. Much of the best intelligence this office used was single source coming from defectors associated with Chalabi who had a vested interest in getting the U.S. to attack Iraq. In other words the defectors lied about the WMD's and Wolfowitz and company were so eager to believe that they made no attempt to corroborate. Wolfowitz has since publicly admitted WMD"s were just the excuse everyone could agree on when in reality the goal was entirely about a regime change and finding justififaction for it everyone would buy. WMD's were ideal since they evoked the greatest fear and its impossible for a country to prove they don't have them.
If you recall Bush and Cheney repeatedly used rhetoric that suggested that Iraq might have nuclear weapons soon and that we would find out about when there was a mushroom cloud over our cities. Iraq's nuclear program was simply nonexistent since at least 1995. The country that was doing the most to put nukes in the hands of rogue nations and terrorists was our close allie Pakistan. North Korea, Iran and Libya were all farther along than Iraq but we haven't invaded them yet.
You will be hard pressed to find any creditable expert who will agree that the famous aluminum tubes Iraq had were for gas centrifuges. They simply weren't built for it so they probably were rocket tubes. If you want to see some fine centrifuge parts check out the ones the Pakistani's were manufacturing in Malaysia and selling to the highest bidder.
Cheney as recently as a few weeks ago was still contending the mobile vans that were discovered might be used for biological weapons. There is simply no evidence that is the case. They were for manufacturing Hydrogen. There was no traces to indicate they had been used for biological weapons and they weren't particularly suited for it any more than any other big tank you could point to.
The administration repeatedly said "WE KNOW" where the WMD's are. In fact the U.N. inspection team was desperate for the CIA to tell them where the WMD's were. The little intelligence the CIA gave to the U.N. inspection teams was worthless garbage. The Democratic chairmen of the intelligence committee this week is suggesting that Tenet was in fact lying about the intelligence they had on WMD's when the U.N. inspectors were in Iraq and what he gave the U.N. inspectors. The CIA had no creditable evidence on the location of WMD's in Iraq and they also declined every invitation to go in and show the world where they were though they were repeatedly saying "WE KNOW" they have them. The CIA declined because A) they didn't know where they were and B) if they did there has zero interest in actually finding or destroying them until after the invasion. The U.S. wanted to i
@de_machina
The AC is refering to the 2000 South Carolina GOP primary were polls were conducted asking SC voters how they would have felt if McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. There's more at this blog posting.
Support the Chagossians
Do Americans really still buy that log cabin myth? The Lincoln family owned two farms, livestock, and more land in Elizabethtown, Ky while Lincoln was growing up.
Speaking of photographs linking political figures, I have yet to see the obligatory link to these pictures of Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein