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.
... 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
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."
I'm sorry for the lack of clarity. I did in absolutely NO intend to support any kind of copyright infringement. I merely meant that the woman who posted the picture didn't feel that she was in any kind of position in which her security was compromised. She found it to be "quite creepy." I was simply trying to show a circumstance with more contrast in which someone felt they had suffered something more personal as a direct result. In some cases, it would be possible to be damaging to the individiual's reputation and therefore impact their business or personal life. This is a clear infringement of their rights that someone else stole their image and unlawfully used it for marketing purposes without prior consent, but the woman in this particular case wasn't slighted as badly as she admits the possibilities are. It begs the question of what could happen with other such abuses of information. I am pleased that this woman has made it off relatively unscathed while I am scared for the doors it may open and abuses we aren't even aware of.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
'He said he thought the image was computer-generated'
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."
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! ;-)
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.