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.'"
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.