Slashdot Mirror
Why You Should Never Lose Your Digital Media
kkrista writes "What would you do if you found someone's digital media card from their camera in your taxi? One such individual has decided to provide the world with 227 days of entertainment. I Found Some Of Your Life will post a photo a day and accompanying fictional narrative for the next 227 days using the photos found on a digital media card left in a cab. Is it pure genius or pure evil? Who cares? Just be thankful they're not your photos."
Those ARE my pictures! Please Slashdot them so no one can see them! Thanks.
Actually, I wish my life were interesting enough right now that somebody would want to build a website based on my photos.
Day 1: This is wrinkledshirt on Slashdot.
Day 2: This is wrinkledshirt on Slashdot.
Day 3: This is wrinkledshirt cursing spymac mail.
Day 4: This is wrinkledshirt cursing Slashdot for not posting his spymac submission.
Day 5: This is wrinkledshirt on Slashdot.
And so on...
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Found photo sites are the best.
http://www.spillway.com/ is still the king of "found photos on the Internet."
Keep in mind that there have been hoax blogs before. Did they really find the camera card? Do you believe every blog is true?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
We have irrefutable proof those are not your photos:
There are girls in the pictures.
The taking of the card itself is theft. If you find something on the sidewalk, in a cab, etc that does not belong to you, you do not have the right to take and keep it. It is still property of the orignal owner. To keep it is theft, pure and simple.
However this is also a case of copyright infringement. Works are automatically copyright to you upon creation, no registration is required. So these photos are the copyright of whomever shot them. To post them on the Internet without their permission is infringement.
If I was the person who this happened to, I'd go after the blogger with a vengence. Instead of being a good citizen and either handing it over to the police or trying to track me down and instead of just being neutral, and leaving it, they decided to be malicious.
Personally, I hope they go to jail.
I'll leave the legal issues for the lawyers to handle - but more importantly, is it ethical?
If you found someone's driver's wallet with their driver's license and credit cards, would you go ahead and impersonate them or steal their identity? It would be an identity theft - in some ways, I think that is exactly what this guy is doing.
I shudder to think what will happen if the real guy finds out. I for one know that if my pics were put up on the net - I would certainly get very mad, very pissed and would sue this guy to kingdom come.
Leave the fun and coolness part of it - it's just not quite right, it's unethical and wrong. I do not know about anybody else, but in my book what this guy is doing is simply wrong.
If you read this comment, you'll see that someone already found one of the people in the photo a while ago. The conclusion of the discussion at the time was that the participants should be allowed to 'discover for themselves.'
Hopefully the meta-drama will half as fun as the blog so far :)
(Yeah, it's pretty wrong. But hilarious.)
I can understand being mad, wanting an apology, and wanting the blog aken down, and maybe criminal proceedings if any laws were broken. But why do people think they deserve money for something like this? What have they lost? Mental suffering? Bullshit. People are just greedy bastards.
/Rant
There were about thirty-some shots that were all stereotypical 'poor southern family'. Very odd, and a little sad, until you realized that they were genuinely smiling in every picture.
Interesting stories played out in my head about this family until I got my boring pics back.
I was in Baton Rouge, LA. My car was having some problems with the AC and I stopped in at a Ford Dealer (Autobahn Ford) to get my R-12 recharged. Someone there took my Canon Powershot S30 with my IBM CompactFlash 384MB drive. Fucking redneck assholes. I should have beat the shit out of the inbred fucks working there, but that's a different story for a different day.
Regardless of how pissed I am at losing a $400 camera to a couple of asshats, I had some photos of my then girlfriend in various comprimising positions. To keep this brief, if I saw photos of her on the internet, bad things would happen to all involved. I wouldn't be surprised that if some of the images on that card are more personal, and if the owners get a glance, someone is gonna get hurt bad.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
It's funny because you don't know the person.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
One of the comments posted on the blog identified this sorority as the source from another picture of one of the girls that was posted on their site.
In preparation for opening a website lampooning politicians (DailyHaiku.com, I asked a friend who is an intellectual property lawyer for some advice on what would constitute fair use for the photos we were planning on appropriating from the AP and other such sources.
His advice was pretty telling. While we had a good fair use argument, he indicated we would most likely run into legal problems anyway with model releases for people who weren't public figures, and even some politicians (like Arnold Schwarzenegger hotly contest their public figure status regarding copyright.
As it is we had to go strictly with photographs in the public domain (and thankfully almost everything the federal government produces counts) or expressly granted for general use.
Posting entire found pictures (actually an entire collection), especially if used with a profit motive, with no permission from the photographer and the subjects is just asking for an incredibly brutal pounding in court.
-dameron
Still waiting for my C&D from Dick Cheney...
Unfortunately in todays society people really don't understand the consequences of their actions unless its associated with a dollar value. Money is an excellent deterent.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
First off I found the site very funny. Now reading the posts here, I'm very disappointed that I live in a country where everyone's first reaction to this seems to be "I'd sue the bastard" or "put him in jail".
Yes the guy who found the card should attempt to find the real owner, what better way? If he posted a few pics on the net, it would never get enough notoriaty to be found. Its a memory card, its not like there is an address and phone number on it. The cabby wouldn't be able to find the person, the person I'm sure doesn't know where exactly they lost it, and wouldn't be able to remember the cab companies name either. The cops would just junk it. This is the only way the real owner can get his pictures back.
Yes, in a way this is copyright infringment, but geeze, for a place that is sooo against musicians being able to keep people from copying things they actually make money off of, this guys pics seem like a bizarre hypocrisy to try to protect. It's not like he's a pro, or that he was gonna sell these pictures for money.
People here posting that this guy should be put in jail, or fined, or sued... well just chill out. He's having fun, I had a good laugh, and its actually possible that the real owner will get his pictures back, whereas if the poster didn't post them in this manner there is basically 0% chance that would happen.
What have they lost?
Well, a memory card for one.
Hello and welcome to Blackmail! The way this works is we post once picture a day, but at any time you can email our hot..er.line and pay the amount of money listed at the bottom of the page to have the pictures removed.
Each day the price doubles...
With kudos to Python
Actually...
Having government registration allows you to have a more solid footing.
What is important in Copyright infringement cases is to prove intent. In this case, the poster KNEW the content was not their's to use and fully intended to post the content up.
The poster also decided to create fake events around the pictures. This can lead to slander/libel cases if the posted content results in mental anguish, loss of job, or other personal losses.
The quality of the pictures is not the point, the theft and misuse of the pictures is.
It would be very funny if the pictures actually belonged to a law student. *grins*
Winged Power Photography
I can understand being mad, wanting an apology, and wanting the blog aken down, and maybe criminal proceedings if any laws were broken. But why do people think they deserve money for something like this?
They deserve to ask for punitive damages to punish and deter people from commiting these kinds of acts. And an extreme amount of public exposure can bring all sorts of problems like stalkers and death threats. There are a lot of loons out there that will target someone simply for being well-known publicly. Someone in that kind of a position will need security. Who is going to pay for it? If a person receiving a great deal of public exposure isn't someone like an actor who actually recieves an income relative to that exposure, then what financial recourse do they have to protect themself from the reprocussions?
What have they lost?
They have lost their privacy. Having pictures posted on the internet against one's will is an invasion of privacy, especially if it gets Slashdotted. Remember the Star Wars Kid? He and his family weren't too happy about all that and took the parents of the kids that put his video on the net to court. They didn't want any part of the internt cult status the practical joke had given him and would have preferred not to have him humiliated with that kind of exposure.
Even if these photos are taken down by the poster, they could already have been copied and circulated around the net, just like the Star Wars Kid. And just because you're not doing anything wrong in a photo doesn't mean your privacy should be left to others to toy with and take away. Isn't privacy a fundamental right?
Mental suffering?
Something like this can indeed cause mental suffering. Have you ever heard of social phobia? It is a very real anxiety disorder, and someone with such a condition could be severely traumatised if they had their privacy invaded with all the internet as an audience, even if the photos were innocuous.
What if a photo of yourself in an embarassing situation had been circulated on the net without your consent? A practical joke between friends is one thing, but letting a worldwide audience through the internet see it is another and can cause extreme humiliation and mental suffering.
You should'a warned us you're linking to a porn site.
Regardless, it's not the same thing at all. An unprotected gallery on photobucket is much more fair game than stealing someone's memory card and platering it all over the web.
my password is private, but unchanged.
Surely, even if a 'finders-keepers' rule applies, it doesn't cover the photos, which are covered by copyright. If this is not the case, then any photograph, radio signal, dvd, etc that you found in such a juristiction would ultimately end up in the PD.
He might gain ownership of the storage device, but I doubt the content on it
This is why I make the first image on my media cards be one that displays my contact information and then I lock it so it won't be erased accidentally.