Slashdot Mirror
Web Snapshots Are Nabbed for Commercial Uses
whoever57 writes "The Washington post has a story about Hollywood studios using photos grabbed off the web without permission. This particular story describes the case of a photo of a dog that was used by Fox. The photo had been uploaded to a personal blog and tagged 'all rights reserved.'"
Isn't this really the same thing people do with the studio's work? The studios get upset about that though so if they expect to do the same thing they better get the MPAA and friends to back off.
So, what's the problem? Hollywood, being Hollywood, has the RIGHT to use the material that we, mere mortals, put on the web. I mean, if mere peons had the same right as big corporations, what would the world come to????
These people are hypocrites if they wanted to violate copyright laws properly at least use The Pirate Bay.
How a large media organisation that happens to receive a large income based on the 'intellectual property' it owns, that shows warnings on its television broadcasts pertaining to copyright and presumably has a legal department and employs well educated staff can do something like this is unbelievable.
Clearly it is easy to make a mistake, even easier if there is some ambiguity in what you are doing, but in this case surely it would be relatively simple to ensure you know who owns what before using it. Whilst this violation is fairly innocuous and doesn't cause any harm (In a real sense as opposed to a legal one) it is the kind of thing that media companies would prosecute if it were carried out by a normal person (assuming they became aware of it) simply to ensure their 'property' isn't harmed in some way by unauthorised use.
It is interesting that recently (the last 2 years or so) the number of reported copyright violations carried out by businesses against individuals seems to have increased, especially given the amount of publicity given to 'piracy' of all types (well apart from the one that takes place on the high seas) has jumped significantly. I half expected there to be calls by businesses (apart from media organisations obviously) for reform of copyright law, primarily because looser copyright laws would potentially benefit normal businesses or in the least mitigate some of the potential legal damage caused by an accidental lapse.
Well I guess the moral of the story (assuming FOX are punished in some way, - I would be happy with an apology an that the image not be used if I were in the owners shoes) is simple, if you don't have express permission to use something, don't use it, seek consent, if you are planning to make use of material on the basis of fair use the make sure you check how to do that in an acceptable way. Personally I think society is losing out massively by having so much culturally valuable materiel locked away for so long for the benefit of the creators and their heirs, I think we are probably scaring people away from building on existing material and to a point scaring people from drawing influences from existing work, but then I haven't got the cash or influence to lobby government for a change in legislation.
http://www.4020.net/words/photorights.php
With photos it's easy....if it's online, then you most likely don't have the right to use it. If you want a photo, take one yourself or pay someone for theirs.
However, no one expects the powerful to actually heed the rules...
Between the falling angel and the rising ape
P.S. not off-topic since this is my commentary on the author's commentary, which is "very meta."
P.P.S quote used under fair use. HAHA!
You should be able to use the stuff I post online however you'd like, but if you claim that stuff you make available (by broadcasting it to the entire country on television frequencies, for instance) can't be used by me in any way I see fit, you shouldn't get to use the stuff I make either. quid pro quo
Apparently it does have value because Fox used it. You're well within your rights to use pictures you find on the internet for you desktop background or whatever, but if you want to use them for commercial purposes, or re-publish them, then you need to pay, or at least ask for, that privilege.
The Washington post has a story about Hollywood studios
Okay... so the story covers (alleged, sigh) violations by...
Fox Sports
Virgin Mobile Australia
"Thousands of boys"
Microsoft
Real Time w/Bill Maher (admittedly taped at CBS studios in LA)
Babble (an online magazine)
Is this really story about Hollywood studios?
I wondered what "extreme mooning" meant. Perfect place for it to show up, gotta say...
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
Why does the slashdot community have a problem with this, but not with sampling and remixing in the musical context? Is sampling more or less "ethical" if commecial recordings are used (without permission) as source? How about "found sound"? What if the the dog snapshot referred to in TFA was sufficiently manipulated? How different from the original would it have to be before recognized as art on its own merits?
If you make pictures of your pet available, I should be free to use them as I see fit.
uhhh, no. that's not how it works. if you attach a (c) or even if you DON'T its assumed you have rights to your image.
come on - this IS the studios DOING the stealing now even though they are first to yell when someone 'steals' from them.
if they want us to respect their (c) they must respect ours!
(yes, I shoot photos. often I will give them away but you must ask first!)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Joy! Beautiful spark of the gods!
wasn't the virgin story covered here some time ago?
Send them a notice saying that they have two choices: they can comply with the DMCA and take down all content that uses your photos, or they can pay you a nominal fee of $2,500-$5,000/photo to get a full business license to use it in any of their marketing materials online. If they refuse to pay, the DMCA is clear. Even big Hollywood has to take down the illegal content or face legal reprisal.
Read TFA, they have value to marketers because they are genuine.
It has nothing to do with the value of the picture. There was no real harm done, however, if the media companies are going to be dicks about copyright, and enforce it to within the last nanometer of the law, individuals can and should do the same back to them when the big guys violate copyright. Turnabout is fair play, after all.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Yeah, I kinda have to laugh at the ingenuity of making someone pay for violating your copyright by making them appear to link to goatse. That guy is all right in my book.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
I saw this on Digg or Reddit awhile back. Looked at the original photo and the alleged copy. While the photos are similar, they are also different enough that two owners of the same fugly mutt could have ended up taking pictures that end up looking somewhat the same.
Oh I completely agree. The problem is that people want to hold me to the same rules that they wish to apply to Fox or some other money grubbing bastard.
How we know is more important than what we know.
These violations are only harmless if your work is worth nothing. Apparently, it's worth using so you should be paid.
Some of the uses pointed out in the article were much less than harmless. One kid was described as someone to "dump" and another was a posterboy for peeling lead paint. The parents of the child, of course, were mortified.
The biggest losers in this round of big media hypocrisy and arrogance is big media. It shows better than anything else that copyright is a sham designed to enrich big media. Big media is acting like a perfect bully, while crying for appreciation and special protection. Lessig got it wrong. The victims are not crying out for copyright protection, they are furiously pointing out that copyright is bullshit and it's main proponents are assholes. What little sympathy the industry had left is going down the toilet. Soon they will no more withstand public outrage and technical obsolescence than the Chicago sock yard and Detroit auto makers did.
... is that there are massive collections of high-quality royalty free images like these that most of these companies probably already own for their own media productions. Apparently what it's come down to is that it's now far easier to find an image based on any random keyword using google images than it is for these companies to search their own content on their own servers.
So, how do we fix this without requiring several thousands of man-hours to assign dozens or even hundreds of single word descriptions to each and every image?
Perhaps one way to go is to create a wikipedia-type system entirely for image collections, then have the content owners submit their content to the system for review by thosands of users at random, each assigning a unique description to each image they encounter. Once a collection has been completely reviewed, the system would then generate a searchable RSS feed specific to that collection that the collection owner could use to let users seach their content locally.
The actual task of handling the workload wouldn't even have to be considered "work" if you presented it right to the end user. For example, you could set up a multi-player "game" where dozens of people compete within a set time limit to come up with the most unique descriptions, (relative to a dictionary of allowed terms) and then penalize them for repeated descriptions by more than one user. You could even give out weekly prizes to the top players.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Content you create is instantly copyrighted by you. Period. A person must actively release something into a free-use license. Therefore, regardless of what any person thinks of the content they have generated, YOU have no right to use it for any reason unless specifically stated by the creator of that content. Period. This is not a complex science or vague art.
I said reasonable. Since when is copyright reasonable?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Quite possibly the stupidest comment I have read in the entire discussion. Your content is your content. That's all there is to it. You have the right to dictate how someone can use your content, if at all, as well as being compensated for commercial use by a commercial application of your content. Just because I upload a photo for my profile on my website to represent myself doesn't mean that you deserve some self-assigned right to use it in an advertisement or sell it or redistribute it for your own purposes. It doesn't belong to you. The greedy people are the ones trying to take YOUR content and profit off it rather than creating their own content.
If you want content, create it yourself or specifically hunt out free content. Don't steal someone else's.
By your comments, I'm going to assume that you're probably a middle school student who has absolutely no concept of property or copyright or use licenses and thinks that you should get everything for free. Hell, by your reasoning someone should be able to just steal the linux source code and do whatever they want with it for profit, without adhering to any of the attached licenses (attribution, redistribution of source code, etc). After all, anyone who restricts you from doing whatever you want with THEIR content is just a greedy twat.
No one even begins to discuss the dog's right to be paid for the use of his image!
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
hahaha mods need to RTFA
Why would big name corporations even want our point-and-click photographs? [...] "Authenticity is the new consumer sensibility"
How ironic! While us mere mortals have been struggling for a while in order to emulate professionalism into our amateur work to make it look better, professionals strive to emulate our amateurism to make their work look more "real". Now maybe they'll start teaching photographers and such how to make things look "genuine" (i.e. amateurish) in school. The first lesson's punchline would probably be "Stop trying to control every aspect of your work, that's unamateurish".
You just got troll'd!
In a world without copyright there would be little market for linux products that don't include the source. Just as today there is no market for cars with their hoods welded shut. That is actually RMS's end goal - to get society to the point where the GPL is no longer necessary because its terms are the natural order.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
If they had copied the photo, hosted it on their own site, and used it without permission, then that would have been copyright infringement.
What they did, instead, was to link to the photo in its original location. While unethical (leeching), impolite, and potentially costing the photo owner money in the form of bandwidth fees, this is not copyright infringement.
Have a look at every comment on this story now.. anyone would think Slashdot is the home of the pro-copyright extremists. There's no talk of fair use. There's no talk of the creativity requirements of copyright. There's none of the usual bemoaning of the extremity of copyright law, as there is when "one of us" is being sued for copyright infringement. No, it's "hang 'em from the tallest tree!!" I honestly wouldn't be surprised if I noted down the nicks of everyone who has had some pro-copyright thing to say here and next week found them defending some soccer mom who is being sued for blatantly ignoring copyright law.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You should, but you aren't under current copyright laws. Help get them removed and the problem disappears. Furthermore, if someone finds an use to the pictures of my dog, then clearly said pictures have some kind of value to that person. Why else would they bother having anything to do with those pictures ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The point is that if you or I are using some random image we find on the net, even if it is for commercial use, the excuses start piling out. Copyright is unreasonable. The person who took the picture is just being greedy, etc. But when Fox does it, oh no, they're evil bastards who should pay for every picture they want or they are stealing.
Copyright is stupid and it is dangerous for precisely this reason - when people start seeing the dollar signs they become extremists. Then, of course, in an attempt not to be hypocritical they accept that it is ok for everyone to treat them the same way. To put it in a sound bite: power corrupts.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Look at the blog, it seems to be the same photo:
http://www.sweetney.com/001944.html
Or go straight to the photo on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetney/2131448895/
YOU have no right to use it for any reason unless specifically stated by the creator of that content. Period. This is not a complex science or vague art.
Yes I have. I can't believe you use Slashdot and haven't heard of the concept of "fair use"
But did he ask the Goatse guy's permission to use that image?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
It's the class warfare man.
People feel like they've been shit on 'from above' for so long that when one of those 'above' slips in their own pile of turd we really really hope that they land in it face first.
You are correct though, it is hypocritical. *shrugs* Personally, I hope they (infringers who are known to sue other infringers) choke on the IP laws that they have shoved down our throats. I don't REALLY believe in copyright laws as they exist (maybe if they were far far shorter in duration, 3-7 years would be fair and profitable IMHO) but if they get hit by the same rocks they're throwing at others, I'll chuckle along.
Well, there's several reasons for that:
1) Nobody likes a hypocrit.
2) These cases are all obviously not fair use.
3) Fox, Virgin Mobile, and Microsoft are not computer illiterate single Moms being bullied by corporations into paying $5,000 to avoid a lengthy trial based on false pretences.
4) Schaudenfreude
Everyone loves the irony of bad people getting served what they've dished out. Most of these companies go out of their way to be the biggest dicks they can be over their copyrights. Why shouldn't we judge them to the standard they want to hold everyone else to?
Furthermore, most of the cases outlined in the article are cases where copyright is a good thing. The works are being used for commercial purposes, therefore has value, and the original photographer was not credited or paid for it's use. Most of the people who don't particularly like copyright in it's current form still see some value in having limited copyright, and this is most certainly one of the ways in which works should be protected under that limited copyright.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Is goatse in the common domain? If not, the guy just made himself a giant hypocrite.
You can't complain that Microsoft is infringing on your copyright then copy and pass along someone else's copyright image.
I once "nabbed" a half-dozen AP photos & put them on my website for quasi-personal use (grouped the key Elian Gonzales photos into a .gif animation to enhance effect, posted for a few friends to see). Within a few hours, the image was linked to by Drudge Report. Wasn't long before AP lawyers were leaving phone messages for me to cease-and-desist immediately.
You'd think groups so (justifiably) paranoid about copyright issues would be keenly aware about the legalities of using other peoples' IP.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I don't think that's been tested. The web is a publishing medium. So if you publish a photo on the web, I request that photo from your web server and your server sends it to me, how is that different than if I received any other published work from you? If you send me a free magazine there's no problem if I cut out a picture and tack it to my wall.
There IS a problem if I photocopy that picture and redistribute it. If I were to download your picture, turn it into a desktop background and then repost it on my website for other people to download, that would clearly be copyright infringement.
For the desktop background example, many OSes have some method of displaying HTML data as a desktop background. I could just display your web page with the photo, properly cropped (ie window resized so only the picture shows) on my desktop.
Of course, if you live in the US all bets are off. I hear you guys have some pretty crazy copyright laws. Pinups and newspaper clippings probably are illegal there, eh?
This is probably my favorite quote out of the entire article, which made me question whether or not the writer actually knows what they are talking about:
"What's noteworthy in each of these cases, Lessig says, "is that bloggers, a community typically associated with piracy, are rallying in support of copyright."" (page 3, emphasis mine)
I didn't know that all bloggers were pirates, did you?
The web is a publishing medium only in the sense that television and radio are publishing mediums. While format & time shifting radio and tv are considered fair use, photo copying a pinup & putting the copy on the wall isn't. You can put your pinup or clippings on the wall or in a scrapbook because you haven't duplicated the work - you've simply manipulated an existing copy - hence no copyright violation. Format & time shifting are exceptions to copyright. New desktop backgrounds don't currently have that protection.
Sigh. Remember this argument: just because someone is willing to download something for free, doesn't mean they would be willing to pay for it.
How we know is more important than what we know.