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
If a file sharer can lose their house for "making available" twenty songs, network chiefs can pay the same price for such a blatant rip off. No actual damage was done in one case, but the other leveraged public broadcasting to publically humiliate private individuals. A swank mansion would go a long way to make those people feel better, but the yacht and golf club membership will fix things right. It would be nice to see people punished for greed instead of ruined for sharing.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Warning! There is GOATSE at the end of the article!!
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!
thinks that a happy snap of their pet has any value other than sentimental. If you make pictures of your pet available, I should be free to use them as I see fit.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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?
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?
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.
I don't really have any sympathy for the party who was allegedly wronged.
If you publish something on the net but impose a constraint of "If you make money from this, I want a cut" then you're being driven by greed, nothing else. "All rights reserved" is even worse, it means "I have no clue how to profit from this, but if you find a way then I want a cut". In software there is no direct equivalent, but if there was it would fall somewhere between shareware and proprietary and submarine patent.
"It's only fair" is just a glossy veneer painted over greed too, because it assumes that there is a natural right to profit, and that you can balance two totally dissimilar things (creation and commercializing) so that there is a "fair" partitioning of the profit possible. Well sorry, but that's thinking clouded by greed again. Unless there were costs involved in creation, and these costs need to be recouped (and hence you are overtly operating a business), then creation has absolutely nothing to do with commercializing, and there is no objective "fair" profit partitioning. If you took a picture as part of a pleasurable hobby, and published it on your blog for the enjoyment of yourself and your friends, what makes you think that you have an inherent "right" to earn money from it as well, depending on the actions of a third party?
If you want money, operate a business. You might find that the pleasure you took in the hobby disappears when you do that.
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
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.
HI TWITTER!!
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!
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.
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/
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?
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.