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Swedish Police Shoe Database May Tread On Copyright
An anonymous reader writes "The Swedish police, who have been instrumental in various raids against file-sharing sites, may have a bit of a piracy problem on their own hands. It seems they wanted to put together a database of shoe print information for matching crime scene shoe prints to particular shoe types. To do so, they used images found online, and some Swedish copyright experts have noted that this appears to violate Swedish copyright law. The police claim there's an exception for police investigations, but people (and some shoe companies) are pointing out that creating a database isn't about an investigation."
The investigations are just hypothetical and in the future!
Also, the NSA needs to spy on my phone conversations in case I ever become a terrorist. Which, I have to admit, is pretty good foresight on their part.
The enemies of Democracy are
Had they just requested sample prints, many (most?) shoe companies would probably have been happy to provide them with a full list - not because they had to, but because its a simple enough request to comply with. By doing the work themselves they ended up with less useful data that's, quite possibly, illegal to use.
Sigh...
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
kudos to you
I think you missed the point. The tread isn't the issue; the pictures are copyrighted by someone. You can't go on-line, scarf a whole bunch of pictures off the web, and then use them to conduct your business.
I can't do that with images, music, or anything else, and neither can any other agency. Otherwise, I could just download all the music in the world, and claim that I am building a database for future use in identifying stolen music.
Doesn't work that way.
Well, it's gotta be a pretty small data set. I mean, how many different kinds of Swedish Police shoes can there be?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I missed the part where police forensics are a business. Furthermore, these images aren't being tossed on their website. They're being used in an internal database. It's idiotic for people to whine about this. They're not claiming copyright or publicly using it to make money on their website. It's an internal database used solely (pun intended) for matching footprints to shoe types. I think that Swedish copyright law needs some serious work if that is somehow an issue.
If an unusual shoe print is discovered at multiple crime scenes within a certain location range and time span, it may lead investigators to look for connections between those crimes which may help identify an individual associated with all of them. Without something to connect the different crimes, it may be more likely that the an individual responsible for or at least involved in all of them would be more difficult to identify.
There are up sides and down sides to what I describe here, but it's silly to suggest that being able to cross-reference shoe prints AND identify their make/model is not a good idea for law enforcement.
Heck, they still use blood type to narrow suspect lists, if I understand correctly. And each blood type accounts for a much wider swath of the population than, I would assume, almost any shoe print. Maybe Converse Chucks, which have pretty much remained the same over the last 50 years, would have enough presence among wearers to be no more common than, say, O- blood, but otherwise, active wearers of any given shoe print probably number in the millions at any given time, not the hundreds of millions.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Hmm, perhaps I need to start selling treadless crime-shoes.
Maybe you could get police departments to invest in them, since they'd be able to catch the perps as the slip-slide around corners during foot chases.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Uh, isn't this how Google images works?
I mean, it'd be one thing if they were building this database for sale, or as a SAAS solution that other police departments were going to pay them for. But I'm sure there are lots of applications which do indeed scarf images randomly for the web and repurpose them for their own use, without threat of copyright lawsuits.
The CB App. What's your 20?
As far as I can tell from the article no shoe company has complained. It appears that some professor has merely speculated that the database may infringe copyrights.
I agree with the suggestion that they would get better quality data by working with the manufacturers, though.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Hur, de hur de hur, dee dee boom -- Tort! Tort! Tort!
If only.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
You've gotten used to the laissez faire form of copyright we all live with in the modern world where digital duplication is effortless and has no direct cost. A strict reading of copyright law indicates that any unauthorized copying outside the protections of fair use (excerpts, parody, etc.) is a violation even if you don't engage in distribution.
This is why the AHRA was put in place in the US for the narrow scope of personal music copying. Essentially, enough Congresspeople got upset about the implication that their personal mix tapes in the 80's were a violation of copyright that they created a little loophole to shut up the RIAA.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
And yet, if I download songs for my personal, decidedly private and not business use, I'm subject to damages of hundreds of dollars for each instance.
The point isn't that this is _bad_, but if they're going to go around busting down doors because people are sharing copyrighted works for personal use, they shouldn't be violating copyright for their institutional use and pretending it's OK.
What the hell are you smoking? The photographer was already paid by the shoe company, you dope, at least in cases where it was pulled by shoe company sites. The shoe company gets their return by having a picture of their shoe for people who want one and consider a purchase. How in the HELL does an internal database of these pictures in ANY way impact that business?
And when was the last time someone tried to sell a picture of a goddamned shoe tread?
It's still a copyright violation when an individual (thus not a business) downloads music or software for the purpose of evaluation (thus not for profit and with the intent of paying for it later) without the copyright holder's authorization.
Similarly, if a charity downloads images from the net and uses them in a campaign to call people's attention to problem X, it's still a copyright violation.
Copyright legislation still it illegal to copy something without authorization from the copyright holder even if only not-for-profit uses and with the best of intentions.
This is not just a peculiarity of Swedish Copyright laws.
I would reckon that this is probably one of the biggest reasons why so many of us here at /. are against Copyrights and other forms of Intellectual Property: it restricts and punishes common, not for profit uses of things like sounds, images and text.
While the market for pictures of shoes is smaller than that for music, it obviously exists. Otherwise these pictures wouldn't have been taken in the first place, and the police would not have wanted copies of them (that's the definition of a market, after all).
Is there some magic clause somewhere which says that copyright infringement only becomes a crime if your estimated target audience exceeds a certain number?
And for the record, I'm a Swedish resident. I think our police have done the morally right thing in this case, but that aspect has never been relevant when it comes to copyright law, and in particular not the Swedish police's behavior in regards to it. If there's any organisation I expect to follow the letter, rather than the spirit of the law, it's the police.
May we live long and die out