Slashdot Mirror
Family's Christmas Photos Hawk Groceries In Prague
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that Jeff and Danielle Smith sent a photo of themselves with their two young children to family and friends as a Christmas card, and posted the image on her blog and a few social networking websites. Then, last month, a friend of the family was vacationing in the Czech Republic when he spotted a full size poster of the Missouri family's smiling faces in the window of a local supermarket in Prague, advertising a grocery delivery service. The friend snapped a few pictures and sent them to the Smiths, who were flabbergasted. Mario Bertuccio, who owns the Grazie store in Prague, admitted that he had found the photo online but thought it was computer-generated and promised to remove it, and 'We'll be happy to write an e-mail with our apology,' he says. Meanwhile Mrs. Smith has received 180,000 visitors and over 500 comments on her blog since she posted the story. She says she is glad the photo wasn't used in an unseemly manner. 'Interesting. Bizarre. Flattering, I suppose,' writes Mrs. Smith. 'But quite creepy.'"
Anything (well unless it's something I'm trying to find) you post on the internet can be found. It's common sense.
Do it right.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002168937_coffeemug03.html
Sue them.
It would be amazingly hard to sue them, so finding pics of someone in another country that will more than likely never see it, is a fairly safe way to go, and zero costs, with little risks.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
other (funnier) examples of global clashing with local:
http://boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese-restaurant-c.html
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/bert.asp
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Eh, I don't see the problem really. If our culture had instead developed along the lines of liberal copyrights, such as the creative commons licenses, rather than the restrictive copyrights that are common, I don't think anyone would care about this. It's a nice photo and wasn't being used in any malicious way. I don't see what is creepy about this.
"You can make that apology out to Jeff and Danielle Smith. Don't forget to sign it."
[is too busy pulling down his own photos to post] The bit where this becomes exceptionally mushy is at what point does any certain legal authority release or take up the power to determine the ramifications of things like this. Clearly, this was an instance where no harm was done, but what if it were to be something incriminating that was leaked, without your permission, and then illegally used in another country. Where do the boundaries start and end?
Excellent point! In that case a friendly "Can we use your photo, please?" Wouldn't be bad either.
(This post is licensed under a CC attribution non-commercial share alike license)
it will appear on 4chan and be used in an unseemly manner
News story. Week old. Slashdot. Catch up.
... when you use common file names that typical cameras use for their stored photos. Most people never change them. I took the part of the file name of that family's photo (removing the appended reduced size that was used) which was "img_1053". Google images found this. People should think about what they put online. Google is watching.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Now the Czech Republic only has 11 more years of the Simpsons to catch up on.
Italian guy in Czech Republic has used a photo of american family. It was pizzeria, was not it? If it was chineese restaurant....
Given this story was in the local throw-away newspaper (dead tree version, not online) last week, it looks like /. is waaay behind the times.
Goes to show however that any image, when it is on the internet, can be used for all sorts of things!
Sorry to be totally offtopic, but I'm very bothered by the junk showing up on slashdot articles, specifically, short horizontal and vertical gray bars and grey, green, and red dots/pills which do nothing but obscure content. Here's an example: http://i646.photobucket.com/albums/uu187/weirdslashjunk/dots.png
Is there a way to fix this?
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
From http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Stolen_picture_used_on_a_huge_billboard_in_another_country "Her blog post and most of the comments here are retarded. That image was not stolen. There's no way that large format print was produced from a 500 pixel wide Facebook rip. If you read her post she says a professional photographer "friend" took the image. The friend most likely sold it to a microstock agency which is where the design agency for the Czech supermarket chain bought it and is now denying it. With tens of thousands of decent quality high resolution images taken on pro/semi-pro equipment available for a few dollars each on microstock sites, there's no way any designer would troll blogs to find a usable random photo of a family among point&shoot and low rez photos."
The moral is: "DO NOT POST YOUR PERSONAL LIFE ON THE INTERNET!"
Really, besides your loved ones, nobody gives a fsck about your personal life unless they can make a bob or two out of it.
Also, be unmistakeably clear to provide licensing conditions to your content.
Last, don't whine if you're an idiot. Then again, you're probably still in the long lasting denial phase anyway.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Don't sue them. Give them permission.
How cool is it to have your family shown in Prague? As noted it's not for unseemly use, and it's some small grocer just trying to get by.
Don't make him go to the expense (and waste) of having to print a new poster.
Instead, do the adult thing - accept the apology and let him keep using the image officially until he moves on. Everyone wins.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The vast majority of people don't understand copyright. If I take a picture of you, I own the copyright on the image, not you. Even if you pay me. For some reason the "work for hire" system never got applied to photographers. This is probably because photographers are typically hired on contract, not on retainer. This is clearly as a case of a photographer selling his portfolio to a stock image reseller. It's not unusual and the people in the picture are not entitled to anything.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Everyone wins.
In this day and age of feel-good, everyone's a winner anti-competitiveness, it should be no surprise that someone would come along and claim that giving up is the same as winning.
Perhaps the supermarket has access to the same sort of computers as they use on CSI, NCIS etc. They probably have 3d models of the family, reconstructed based on DNA obtained by enhancing the Facespace photo and zooming in to the atomic level.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I've read about this over a week ago and it's very strange: There's no way anyone can take a 600px wide pic and blow it up to 1-2 m. 2m is about 80 inches; so that picture would have to be printed at 7.62 dpi (ppi would be more accurate). No way.
The only way that pic could have been used is if the ad people had access to the original file, which is assumed to be a hi-res picture from a dSLR. How could that happen? I see a few possibilities:
To keep things in perspective, copyright is mostly respected in all Central and East Europe - it's not like it's a jungle. Stock images from sites like iStock are very cheap and of good quality. A 12-15 Mp file costs $20 at iStock, that's nothing when you have a paying customer. There's no NEED for anyone to steal the pic.
Course of action: contact the grocery store, find out who made their ad. Contact the ad agency. If they got the file legitimately, they will have no issue cooperating. If the file was from a stock agency, contact them and they will resolve the issue. If the ad agency cannot provide and proof, get a lawyer, threaten to sue but look for a settlement; a trial would be long a costly.
Disclosure: I am an exclusive contributor to iStock myself and I live in another Central European country.
I wonder why people are surprised at this. This kind of stuff is somewhat part of the eastern european (I'm of that originality myself) and even russian culture.
A few years back, I did web design for a bunch of people from eastern europe. If we'd need an image for their site, I'd suggest a stock picture and they would just say "Why can't we use this one off of Google Images?". I literally had to convince a bunch of people not to steal some random pictures off of google images for use in ads.
It wouldn't surprise me if they hired some random teenager to Photoshop that ad and the guy was just going "davai! davai!" and instructing him to take any image.
And yes, the moral of the story is to not put random stuff on the Internet that might be stolen. Create some password-protected site if you want to share family pictures with your extended family. I'm sure that random people visiting your site do not care how your kids look like.
If you would have read the linked blog entry you would have seen this, written by the wife:
"I take FULL responsibillity for posting this picture with the incorrect resolution (read: too high)."
So we can take this "their friend sold their photo out" theory to rest.
Real life is overrated.
Without DMCA and similar restrictive "YOU TAKE IT DOWN NOW OR WE SUE YOU!!" notices the grocerier would probably have. If I would get an email about using someones stuff I would had also just said "sorry, we'll take it down" instead of actually asking for permission seeing the general approach of companies.
Not legally, but for all practical purposes it is. For instance, it is a popular practice in Slovenia for local businesess to use pop songs as background music in their advertising without ever paying for the copyright. Most recent case in point: a TV ad running on all Slovenian TV stations uses Orbison's song "You Got It" not only as background music, but it actually builds its message on it. The ad, advertising Merkure -- a major Slovenian superstore chain -- suggests that "anything you need, anything you want," you just come to their store and "You Got It"! I could bet they never even asked if they should pay the copyright holder anything before (ab)using the song. In ex-socialist states, this phenomenon is still endemic, it's like a sort of folklore.
Intellectual Property: an immaterial non-entity, most fiercely contended by those with no proper intellect to speak of.
In this day and age of feel-good, everyone's a winner anti-competitiveness, it should be no surprise that someone would come along and claim that giving up is the same as winning.
Incorrect. It's not giving up at all. In fact it's rather the opposite - it's obtaining the best possible result from the situation.
Sue the owner? We all know they would get nothing. A store owner would be out of business, and the family would be out legal expenses. A great ending if you're a law firm.
Tell him to take it down? Again, how have you really "won" anything. You have caused more waste through reprinting. You have done some harm to a small business, and done nothing at all to help your family. Your family looks like cads.
So you explain to me how saying "you know what, just keep using the photo and retire it when you are ready" is not the most sensible and best result possible. The family gets a kick out of knowing they will be seen in another country, again in a positive fashion. The grocer gets to keep using a nice photo, and again everyone wins - not because of anti weird anti-competitvness (which I abhor) but because in the best human fashion you have solved for the most optimal result.
There are plenty of other conditions in which I would say fighting would be the best option. You make the mistake of not realizing conditions can determine the best solution, and this is not one of the conditions in which a solution you seem to be advocating (fighting) is best.
Of course we all know at this point the true story is that it was obtained as a stock photo, which means he's not using the photo improperly at all and if anything the family needs to have a word with the friend who sold them to microstock without asking. Is she making money off them? Well then, that's a whole different story...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We all know they would get nothing. A store owner would be out of business, and the family would be out legal expenses. A great ending if you're a law firm.
Tell him to take it down? Again, how have you really "won" anything.
Maybe someone can correct me, but I was under the impression that usually when someone sues another person and wins, the judge may rule that the defendant has to pay the plaintiff's counsel costs. Or, the more likely case usually seems to be that often lawyers take on cases on a "no fee unless we win" deal - that is, if the plaintiff wins, the lawyer(s) take a cut of the settlement. On the flipside, I believe that if the defendant wins the case, they can usually counter-sue for damages including lawyer costs (or possibly, especially in a suit the judge finds to be frivolous, he may be able to directly order this). Again, I could be completely wrong, and if I am, I'd be glad to be corrected.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Excellent point! In that case a friendly "Can we use your photo, please?" Wouldn't be bad either. (This post is licensed under a CC attribution non-commercial share alike license) original post by by pinkushun on slashdot.org
This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.
Maybe someone can correct me, but I was under the impression that usually when someone sues another person and wins, the judge may rule that the defendant has to pay the plaintiff's counsel costs.
That depends on many variables, an I'd not even venture to guess what the answer would be to that question for for someone in the UK suing someone in Prague!
But the fact is they simply would not win - most especially when (as seems very likely) it turns out the grocer really got the photo from a microstock site. The grocer probably paid to use it properly...
Or, the more likely case usually seems to be that often lawyers take on cases on a "no fee unless we win" deal - that is, if the plaintiff wins, the lawyer(s) take a cut of the settlement.
Which makes it very unlikely you'd get any lawyers to bite on this mess. It's not like some large phone company used it, it's a small grocer - there's no money anywhere in this for anyone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This will become more and more common, and then eventually the whole concept of "here's a random image of an unrelated happy family! BUY OUR PRODUCT!" will fall out of favor.
When it's just a random image, sure, it's stupid but apparently gets the message across. /b/? I mean, for reasons other than lulz?
When it's just a truly random image from the internet... would you buy from
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Because there is no exception...
I have long thought that this cafe logo is a rip off of the debian logo. If you reverse the colors and rotate by 180 degrees they are almost the same.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Similar thing happened here a while back, the kids at one of the international schools had class photos taken. A few months later, one of the dads is browsing factory catalogs, and lo and behold it's a picture of his kid and a lot of her friends decorating the pages. Evidently, the Chinese administrators had given the pictures to the factory due to a guanxi relationship. None of them could understand why the parents were upset - they just used the pictures, no harm no foul. Why, did you want some money for it? Intellecutal property is a cultural concept, and people in China just don't understand why they shouldn't be able to copy something as long as nobody has been physically deprived.
I also "borrow" material from the internet for printing. Guess what, it's not front-page news. Everyone does it, and I'm sure I've published someone's vacation photo before. I try to use public domain images, but if they're not forthcoming then I've got a deadline to meet. Online repositories are a crapshoot, and my 300+ CDs of stock photos lack in entire categories - I've got three CDs of pictures of trucks and roads, and one photo of an airliner which I used a long time ago.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Gessh, her blog is getting insane traffic levels. Use the publicity to grow your reader base and stop whining about it. I'm not justifying the pic theft, but if she was smart she'd turn it into an opportunity. Loads of sites would kill for that kind of publicity and traffic boost.
I'll admit, there is an element of flattery (I think) to the whole thing. But still, there is something creepy about knowing our family picture was stolen from one of my sites. This picture has been on my blog, used as a Christmas card and put on a few Ning Networking sites. It is also on my Facebook page (which is one of the reasons Justin recognized us) but my FB page is open only to friends.
My guess is that the designer did a google image search for high res images of a happy family. That's what I would do...
My cousin just last week wrote to tell me she saw a photo she took of another cousin of ours being used in a Flash ad on a website. So it's not that uncommon.
'He said he thought the image was computer-generated'
Nintendo might have something to say about this:
http://karhuton.com/tmp/marco-pasta.jpg
The product was made somewhere in Eastern Europe and sold atleast in Finland.
I was looking thru my web server logs and noticed one of my photos was being referenced often from another site. I turns out some guy was using a photo of me on a motorcycle as his icon/avatar on some motorcycle forums. Since he was referencing my site directly I was tempted to change the image to something wacky for a laugh but since I couldn't be recognized behind the helmet I thought it was harmless and was kind of faltered so didn't change it.
Every stupid ass photo is copyrighted by "Professional Photographers."
There's a reason they can afford a D4 or your favorite DSLR.
They are out for money. Not the art. And not the history. What they say, and what they do legally are two different things entirely.
GO BUY A DSLR, don't hire them.
I happen to be in the first image that comes up in the Google image search for "keytar". Thus, I have received several snapshots from friends finding this image in random places around the world. If I was anything other than thrilled by this fact, do you think I would be in that picture in the first place?
Seriously, cameras don't steal your soul. Everyone has images of themselves posted to the internet these days, with or without their knowledge or consent. There's not a damn thing you can do about it. Get over it.
News flash - when you appear in public, people can see you!
Facebook is the new AOL
Anyone else love the counterpoint of "For chrissakes, you're American, right?" and "Instead, do the adult thing"?
Heh. Reminds me of when a picture of a dutch actress was used on a billboard ad for a florida strip-joint!
Can't remember her name though.
You do realize that European legal systems in no way compensate or award damages like American courts?
An example from my own country, Norway, if you harm yourself while walking by an icy storefront you are not entitled to any compensation for your pain and misery. You can claim actual economic loss such as the doctors bill and lost income (sick days).
If this "case" was brought to the courts it would result in a trivial amount in any currency.
I think it's funny when you see the SAME clip art being used on multiple products. You have probably seen the "chick with red vinyl pants turning her hair to the side" picture if you have seen a Coby portable DVD player. I saw the same image being used at a Sam Goody(on a wall poster) as well as a cardboard display for free AOL CDs. I have yet to find the original.
Heck, I've seen familiar clip art images on Tim & Eric Awesome show, from Hemera Photo Objects.
while I agree that the family photographer probably sold the image to a stock photo place, AC is correct that you do NOT need a "hi-rez" or 300dpi image for the final size of a large print that is viewed from far away.
Billboards print at around 70dpi (one example)
I like microcars
All I would ask is to have the grocer send me one of the posters. I would think it would make a great wall hanging for a rec room. A picture of your family advertising the weekly sale in a foreign language.... great conversational piece!
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
A few years ago I got a call from a friend who told me that I'm in the newspaper: a city newspaper used one of the pictures I made on a glacier to illustrate an article about global warming and the melting of the glaciers. Funny thing is that on the picture is more about the people than the glacier, and they downloaded and printed the 600x800 picture and it looked crappy in print, very pixeled compared to the other pictures on the page :)
Red Leader Standing By!
Nice, what should they do when their faces are used to sell stuff in my shop? Hey, they just allowed the other guy!
This has happened to me, too! Most often to my quartet. I was quite surprised to see this photo of the Beatles as a barbershop quartet. Someone hijacked this photo of my quartet, and changed the faces. Steven Colbert also used our photo on his show (with the original faces). Do I mind? HECK NO -- all PR is good PR! ;-)
Reminds me of an answer to an HL2 developer / PR guy. ;)
Back then, he meant that Far Cry looks like plastic. There also was a stupid looking photo of himself in the article.
To which a guy in the comments answered "Half-Life developer looks like plastic!"
(He meant, that all those PR guys look groomed and clean like a inhuman puppet, with a stupid PR smile.)
Does anyone know if the parents are working in PR too? ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
...considering that in 2009 if you're stupid enough to post a pic of your family online, that means you are entirely fair game for followup comments:
Is it just me or does she have an enormous head? Or her husband has a teeny head.
Either way, she and the kid she's holding look bizarrely large-headed, and I don't think it's just perspective.
-Styopa
Anything (well unless it's something I'm trying to find) you post on the internet can be found. It's common sense.
Anything posted on the Internet should also be totally free. It's common sense.
How do you stop other people from posting YOUR personal life on the internet?
I totally agree. Missed opportunity by the family.
Oh come on, are we supposed to be geeks here or what?
Why aren't we asking what camera was used?
I can tell by the pixels, and having shop at many supermarkets in my day.
There's a chilean cable provider which seems to have been inspired by the Slashdot logo.
Most graphic designers worth their salt know about copyrights--we're creatives and we need to know about copyright licensing due to the nature of the work we do and the art we create.
A lot of times it's the client that points to an image on the internet, 400x400 pixels at 72DPI and they want the designer to use that for their magazine/newspaper/billboard/logo/et cetera. I've heard plenty of horror stories about graphic designers trying to convince an ignorant client about copyright law.
I'm not saying that was the case here since we don't know either way, but don't be first to put the blame on the designer.
Of course, if it was the client's fault, the designer (or the studio) should have rejected the job.
The truth of the matter is that if you make something available on the Internet, it is there for the taking. If you make something in digital form and someone else makes it available on the Internet, again it is just there. Once it is out there, all control is lost.
There used to be these things like ethics, copyright and common decency. They are pretty much gone now. If I find your picture and I want to use it in some way, I can and there is very, very little you can do about it. You might try suing - but if an international border is crossed you will find it very, very expensive to do so. You will find many countries take the attitude that Americans have no business involving themselves in their country - go away and take your silly attitudes with you. Americans are there to be abused in any way possible.
So of you leave yourself open to being abused, you will not be disappointed.
Sometimes people just assume that if it is on the Internet, it is free to be used. They are pretty much right. It's like music - it used to have to be paid for. Today, it is just there.
Rule 1 is pretty clear. Don't put stuff on the Internet that you weren't intending others to have. And by "others" we really mean the entire planet.
Rule 2 is if you were thinking your digital information has value, you were wrong. At least after someone posted it on the Internet. And once it is there, it is there forever.
news on the BBC website last week.
Money magazine published ad for CitiBank with my name in it. Ad was just filled in mortgage application form with my name in it. My name is Leonid Volnitsky. There might exist other Leonid Volnitsy, probably somewhere in Russia or Ukraine. But I will not bet on it. But I can bet that nobody uses such particular full name spelling in latin alphabet.
I pretty much ignored it. One day friends and co-workers started to congratulate me that I am buying a house and I had to explain them that I am pure sob who don't have money to buy a house in Silicon Valley and that I never even applied. And that ad agency probably just saw my name somewhere and used it.
But I am still curious if my name use was legal.
I took one look at the picture and wondered what was up with the chiclets that appeared to have replaced that woman's teeth?
Two minutes of googling reveals this woman is a "Former TV Anchor" whose "shock" at public use of her family's image is obviously completely faked. She has now posted photos of herself with her family going through the whole 15 minutes of fame media circuit!
Her goal all along was to garner media attention for herself at the expense of her family. The "News Media" has played into her sick little hands. No wonder since she was one of them before making the career change to trophy wife so she is an easy interview. I will be demanding an apology from NPR for airing this bizarre feel good piece; cursory research should have revealed that tough questions of this little media whore were in order. (I expect this sort of thing of the "Morning Show" so they will be spared my pen. :)
The paparazzi are taking pictures of celebrities, and these photos are "news". You don't need a model release to publish the picture of a famous person in a newspaper. You need a model release to publish the picture of an otherwise not-famous person in an advertisement.
Jesus, nobody is going to sue anyone. You know what a pain in the ass it would be to sue a grocer in Prague for a win worth less than the legal fees?
I'll disagree with you on this. "most" is a very high ranking. There are an awful lot of "I'm a graphic designer" folks out there who aren't. I've found quite a few that I know more about their industry and do better work than them. I don't claim to be a graphic design professional, and I probably never will. Then again, there are people just started on their computer, and are fairly proficient at stealing stock photos and resizing them in PaintShop Pro who will advertise themselves as graphic designers. They're also the ones who will do your work for half the price, and end up stealing jobs from you, until the customers are completely frustrated with the shoddy work, and do finally look for a professional.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Virgin Mobile ad apparently stole a picture off Flickr.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
A link to the family's photo is now prominently displayed on slashdot's front page.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Fesh papers please.
What are you keeping your hand over your kettle of fresh black coffee, from me giving you some cainsugar lumps?
You got somthin' to hide, boa?
L.A.R.D.
This happened in National Lampoon's European Vacation, but the Griswold's weren't so lucky about their image not being used "in an unseemly manner".
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
When I worked at Intel I ran to jump into a company photo. A few years later, I was reading a tech web site and I found myself in an Intel ad!
The worst thing about the ad was that it's a horrible photo of me!
No, I will not work for your startup
And in related news, Richard Stallman is nothing more than a communist cannibalising the scene of Linux distributions with his doublspeak phylosophies. Realy, the image in that URL does justice to the art of programming.
Mario Bertuccio, who owns the Grazie store in Prague, admitted that he had found the photo online but thought it was computer-generated and promised to remove it
I have to admit, that's the most creative pile of bull excrement I've ever laid eyes on.