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.'"

Comments

Re:Not that hard

[daeg]

GIS, in this case, = Google Image Search. Sorry.

Re:Use the DMCA

[radarjd]

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.

You're getting two legally different concepts confused, I think. First, by "comply with the DMCA", I'm guessing you're referring to the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA which require a service provider to take down a copyrighted work if someone claims ownership of that work. Service provider is defined fairly broadly, but would likely not apply to Fox. It would apply if, for example, someone served a take down notice to Fox's ISP.

From the summary (naturally, I didn't read the article, I'm merely responding to your comments) what seems to have happened is straight forward infringement. The owner of the photo can sue for infringement -- no DMCA required.

Re:What's really stupid about this...

[corsec67]

Most of the microstock companies that sell Royalty-free images already do that, in the form of tagging and descriptions provided by the photographer.

For example, my picture of a burning tire has a bunch of tags and a full description so that anyone searching for tires, fire, burning, smoke, etc. can find that picture.

Now, when the media people buy the images, they just need to keep track of those descriptions and tags, but that is a much smaller problem.

Google already made that "photo tagging" game, Google Image Labeler

Re:Sign of the times: money, "rights", greed

[Seumas]

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.

Re:So? What's the problem?

[xeoron]

Hollywood was created by thief's, so what do you expect? They want to have their cake and eat it too.From The Pirates Dilemma

"Some of America's greatest innovators were thought of as pirates. When Thomas Edison invented the phonographic record player, musicians branded him a pirate out to steal their work and destroy the live music business, until a system was established so everyone could be paid royalties, which we today call the record industry. Edison, in turn, went on to invent filmmaking, and demanded a licensing fee from those making movies with his technology. This caused a band of filmmaking pirates, including a man named William, to flee New York for the then still wild West, where they thrived, unlicensed, until Edison's patents expired. These pirates continue to operate there, albeit legally now, in the town they founded: Hollywood. William's last name? Fox."

Re:No reasonable person

[tinkerghost]

You're well within your rights to use pictures you find on the internet for you desktop background or whatever,

Um, no. You can view them and your system can cache them so you can save time viewing them later, but copying an image as a desktop isn't part of fair use. Not that anyone is going to sue you over it in the normal course of business, but it's still not fair use. Technically, you can't actively save them or print them without violating copyright law.