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Are Flickr Images Abused By Foreign Businesses?
eldavojohn writes "My friend Drew was notified via Twitter that one of his Flickr images had been selected as poster child for freeloaders who abuse the benefits system in an Elsevier news story in the Netherlands. The original image clearly gives an CC BY-NC 2.0 license to the image which doesn't appear in the story — a story which generates revenue for Elsevier. My friend doesn't speak Dutch so he's a little confused about what, if anything, he can do in this situation. I'm reminded of a family's Christmas photo showing up on a billboard in Prague and I wonder if photo sharing sites are treated as free to abuse regardless of copyright by foreign businesses? Has anyone else heard of this sort of thing happening with images from social photo sharing sites?"
When information wants to be free?
There are several international copyright laws. That link will show you the participating countries. But even so, unless you're a top-tier photographer, it's not really worth the time it would take to pursue legal action. Your best bet is a good defense.
If you upload full size images to Flickr, etc, you're really just asking for someone to steal it and use it without your permission. So if you're that worried about it... don't use Flickr. But if you absolutely must, then you can take the annoying step of putting a watermark across the whole image, or, if you don't like to deface your work, there's also no reason you can't downsize the image to something like 800px at a low to medium DPI which makes it practically unusable for print.
All of that said though, people who steal images and use them without permission are, at least in my mind, in the same boat as people who steal music, warez, etc... if they can't get it for free they aren't going to buy it anyway.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Because you didn't do anything creative. The photographer is the one that's responsible for pretty much all of the creative work with regards to a photo. You can't copyright a performance of a play, but you can copyright the play itself. Photography is the same way, you can copyright the depiction, but not the seen.
And ultimately, the photographer is the one that decides what is and isn't going to happen in the photo.
Maybe it would make sense if there were people willing to pay for pictures of you.
They don't, at least not under some laws, like those of the United States. Someone needs to obtain a release if they are going to make money off of a picture of you (unless there's no way to recognize it as YOU).
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Very good question. Given how almost everybody does that, it should not be difficult to find out. Maybe someone who does can enlighten us? Here on /.?
I fear, however, that the answer will lead to even more troubling questions.
About every dutch person speaks English, so just write them an email saying you own the copyright to that image and would like to be payed a _reasonable_ amount for the usage of your photo. The Netherlands isn't some backwash country where they don't respect copyright. We don't always respect patents, when it comes to software patents, but we do with copyright, although not with the same absurd duration. Also, Elsevier is a politically right-wing magazine, and although I don't know their specific view on copyright, the political right tend to favor longer and stricter copyright terms. Perhaps that could be an advantage here. Also, don't start threatening with any legal action in the first email. That'll only incite a counter-attack. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar and all.
Manuals are your last resort only
Original article: http://www.elsevier.nl/web/Nieuws/Nederland/288453/Gemeente-wil-aanvragers-uitkering-eerst-thuis-bezoeken.htm
Elsevier editors email: redactie.elsevier@elsevier.nl
Posters above already mention that 95% of Dutch people speak English so I would just send them an email.
My life is an ongoing creative work. Any photograph of me is a derivative of that work.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"I bet the famous Afghan girl never saw any of those millions that the photographer did."
You are mistaking journalistic photography for commercial photography. Steve McCurry took that photo for National Geographic. He probably makes pretty good money working there, but I can assure you it's not millions.
Generally speaking, Creative Commons is a fine license for most sorts of creative output for one simple reason: piggybacking. If you make music, you can use somebody's CC'd vocals in your track, they can use your drum loops or guitar riffs. In writing, you can use somebody else's characters, somebody else can use the world you've created. And so on.
For photography, it sucks. The photographer gets nothing out of it. They produce, but there's no reciprocation. Your photos get used by other people, sometimes they'll do something cool with it (I've had some of my stuff used as the basis for illustrations) but usually it's to illustrate some bullshit article on some crap blog. This is where the bigger problem with CC comes into play: your work gets tied to people who use it.
If I take a picture of a dog biting a dark skinned man and release it with a CC license, it can get legally picked up by a neo-nazi site/magazine, printed and credited to my name. Not only do people whose politics I find to be morally repugnant get to use my work, they get to tie me to their publication. Boned. Think that's unlikely? How about this example, where a french girl's self-portrait was used to illustrate an article about a lawsuit involving hotel pool sperm.
Just so you know, five years ago, a Dutch judge ruled that Creative Commons licenses are enforceable. See here: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5823 . This is the Adam Curry case from 2006, for those who follow the history of such things. There was also a later scenario in 2009 that he also won.
Summary from the Wikipedia article:
|/usr/games/fortune
You missed the whole world part. Your a) or B) can be accomodated perfectly well without putting the picture on a blog for the rest of the planet to see.
The going rate for use of a photo is, according to the Dutch photojournalist union, 700 euro's per use of a single picture in low resolution. Plenty of jurisprudence, so getting that shouldn't be a problem. TS's friend can contact the NVJ (http://www.nvj.nl/rechtshulp/) for assistance. Don't worry, their English is at least as good as most Dutch slashdotter's.
and an awful lot of people are not technically savvy enough to accommodate any of your solutions..
So your extended family can see it without a lot of hassle.
Here's a better question: why not put it up for the whole wide world? Let's say you're the 1 in 1,000,000 that winds up on a billboard in Hungary. Who cares? If anything it's kind of cool. You were never going to get paid for your photos, and now you still aren't. Big deal.
I never understood why photographs can be copyrighted. If somebody takes a picture of me, then why do they own the picture?
I bet the famous Afghan girl never saw any of those millions that the photographer did.
They did the creative work, however, without a model release from you they are limited in how they can use it commercially. As for the Afghan girl, NG reports:
Asked if Sharbat would benefit financially from her famous image, Matson said she was "being looked after."
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
When you say, foreign, remember that copyright violations are pretty common in the USA too, both by individuals and by organizations. From the perspective of most citizens of this planet, the USA is also a foreign country :-) (and GPL violations happen without regard for national borders, too)
Is is harder to take action against people in other countries. You may have to travel there to appear in a court, in extreme cases, and you may have to demonstrate financial losses as a result of the use of your image.
Many countries give a legal moral right to be identified as the author/creator of a work, and also give the creator ongoing rights to say how the work can be used. This may strengthen the poster's case here, although in the US, using creative commons may be seen as waiving some of those rights. Here in Canada, the rights are inalienable: you can't ever get rid of them, which in principle may not be compatible with some creative comments licenses (and GPL for that matter): there's no "public domain" in the same legal sense as in the USA.
Write a letter in general terms in the first instance - e.g., "I am writing because you are making commercial use of one of my images without permission; who would I contact in this matter?" Be firm but very polite at all times.
If you are prepared to settle for acknowledgment, and perhaps a small payment to compensate you for your time, then when you do get a reply, be polite and accept their offer if it's in the right ballpark, or negotiate for a little more. If the reply is unsatisfactory, immediately seek legal advice from a lawyer who specializes in cross-border/international copyright disputes. They are expensive, but you should get a free consultation that will get you started.
Do not be rude, arrogant, or demanding - not only is it likely to make people act defensively, rather than trying to cooperate with you in finding a friendly ("amicable') solution, but it can also actually weaken your case if you do end up with legal action. Similarly, be terse, don't volunteer information. Saying "I don't have much money, I'm a student" for example is also saying "I can't afford to sue you, you can do what you like!"
Do not attempt to base any sort of argument on the Wikipedia pages on copyright; every time I look at them I find errors (often with people fiercely defending them), and I'm not even a lawyer. Reading the actual copyright acts is difficult without legal training - e.g. knowing that a phrase like "time shall be of the essence" in US law might mean "if you don't make the deadline, all bets are off", or finding a footnote on page 50 that says, "hereafter, and everywhere in this document, the term "Ship" shall mean "Ship or hovercraft", or discovering some other law that amends the one you were reading... and even after reading the law, what matters is how individual judges ("courts") interpret it. Sort of like how different Web browsers react to the syntax errors that riddle most HTML pages - the specification says one thing, people do another, the Web browsers resolve it. Except that judges are human, of course, and consider each case as it happens. This isn't so much a criticism of Wikipedia as a note that, like any other resource, you have to know its strengths and weaknesses. For that matter I've seen official government web pages on copyrights that had serious errors in them (such as giving incorrect figures for duration, and then a while later silently changing them!) so it's all a bit of a minefield.
Live barefoot!
free engravings/woodcuts
This story is written poorly (shocking for /., I know) because it has little to do with any of the players mentioned: Creative Commons (as opposed to other license writing organizations or other licenses), photography (as opposed to other artistic media), or Flickr (as opposed to other hosting services). This is just another instance of a wealthy organization (which can certainly afford the expense for due diligence) allegedly infringing someone's copyright. It can be dealt with on that basis and resolved amicably for the copyright holder. And, as with so many other copyright infringement cases, how amicable the resolution is for the alleged infringer is, at best, of secondary importance particularly because the license allows the licensee to do so much (derivative works, for example).
Speaking directly to your complaints: First, there are so many different CC licenses and they say significantly different things. So we can't have a reasonable discussion about them by lumping them together and referring to them as if they're a cohesive unit except to note that they're written and published by the same organization. Second, photos are no more exempt from extraction, reuse, and building upon (making derivative works) than any other form of expression (particularly with digital photo manipulation tools we have today). Third, I think the heart of your complaint has to do with what are referred to as "moral rights" in some jurisdictions. But moral rights have little to do with the CC licenses and far more to do with regional powers conferred to authors (moral rights aren't in the US, for instance). Any proper discussion of them would be independent of the copyright licensing for the work. If you want the power to reject the reuse of some work because of you disagree with a potential derivative work, you probably should not license the work to them at all under any license. Then, should they commit copyright infringement and make an unauthorized derivative work anyway, you get to see how CC licenses had nothing to do with that.
Digital Citizen
Elsevier is known for doing this. Get a Dutch lawyer, sue and make a buck. You're very likely to win. See Adam Curry's and other cases against them.
Foreign? It's not just foreign. I see it happen at American sites all of the time. Heck, BoingBoing is both one of the biggest fans of Creative Commons licenses and one of the biggest abusers. They always post the CC license link prominently when it allows copying, but when it doesn't they just post the image anyways. And they're about as commercial as a website gets charging some of the heaviest ad rates around. ($20 CPM.) They reportedly raked in more than $1 million in 2006. (http://blogbuildingu.com/articles/making-money-blogging-profiles-of-6-very-successful-blogs)
There's a reason why their masthead lists two lawyers but no staff photographers. They would rather pay the lawyers to spew squid ink about fair use than to pay anything to the people who contribute the art. This attitude, of course, is not unique to this site. A number of sites do it.
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/04/george-bernard-shaws.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/06/startups-of-londons.html
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/ol-space-food/
Maybe he should start by contacting Elsevier/Reed Business: http://www.reedbusiness.nl/contact/voorwaarden/gebruiksvoorwaarden/index.cfm?articles_id=29A897BD-9E7D-451E-BD73-4229943FB264
The bottom of the page roughly translates to:
We respect I.P. If you suspect your rights are being infringed, we request that you send us the following information:
-postal address, telephone number and email address
-description of the infringed work
-description of the place you found said work
-statement why you think said work is being infringed upon
-statement that the above information is correct and you are the rightful owner or are empowered by the owner to act upon his behalf
-sign the above letter and include a copy of an identity card
Send this to:
Reed Business bv
Afdeling Juridische Zaken
Postbus 4
7000 BA Doetinchem
The Netherlands
Flickr just announced its list of ways to counteract foreign photo stealing for stock photo-like purposes:
1. be really ugly
2. have a cheap, crappy camera
3. just take really bad, crooked, blurry shots
4. Photoshop a cheesy top hat, moustache, and monacle onto all your photos
It looks like a lot of folks on Flickr have already implemented these security measures.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Due to the oversimplified and poorly written terms of the CC licenses, which leave many details undefined, neither the copyright owner nor the publications wishing to license the owner's work can have any certainty about which uses are permitted and which prohibited, in some borderline cases. Moreover, since the CC license is irrevocable once granted, content creators can easily find themselves unable to stop others from using their work in ways that they don't want, and didn't anticipate, or which they mistakenly believed were expressly prohibited.
This article has a good discussion of the problems inherent in the CC licenses.
BoingBoing does the same thing with Creative Commons photos all the fucking time, and nobody ever calls them on it. I guess it's because it's "open source friendly" and Elsevier isn't?
Either way, sounds like hypocrisy to me.
Comment of the year
Just use some steganography software to embed a version of the DeCSS code into your pictures. I prefer the haiku version myself...
If you dont want your pictures all over the internet...dont put them on the internet. Sorry but whining about the use of pictures placed on imgur or flickr is the equivalent of dumping a pile of random pictures on a table in the break room of a busy office then complaining when one of them shows up on someones desk.
As TaoPhoenix alluded to, what if your likeness is being used to promote (i.e. make money for/increase usage of/improve the public image of) something that you vehemently oppose, or that paints you in a bad light, or whatever?
I hardly think you would be happy to be used in the advertising for an extreme political party that has views at the opposite end of the spectrum to you, or even on a less extreme level, if you were used to promote Windows while being a rabid Mac/Linux/whatever fanboy. In the actual instance that the article is about, the person in the photo is being painted as freeloader, which is hardly something which has any kind of "cool-factor" to it. If you agree to be painted in such a light (whether you are being paid or not) then it's OK, but otherwise it isn't.
That doesn't even touch on the rights of the photographer, for which the same things apply more or less (not wanting to promote an opposing ideology or for a company to profit from their hard work without compensation etc).
While most wouldn't care that much if their likeness were used on some random billboard, and many wouldn't about photos they had taken, that doesn't give anyone the right to do it without permission from both parties (assuming it is in private property, otherwise only the photographer has rights I think, although morally speaking it wouldn't hurt to ask).
Knowing people who work there, I can assure you that this is not a case of an evil corporate monster trying to keep "the man" down and profit for nothing. They review licenses and probably used the image from the OP because it was CC and did not or mistakingly read the fine print. I know for fact that they avoid copyrighted material and email original authors and artists for permission to use materials. This is either an honest mistake or an individuals rushed negligence. Either way, simply email them and ask about it. There is no story here.
We don't always respect patents, when it comes to software patents, but we do with copyright, although not with the same absurd duration.
Come again? Netherlands and the rest of the EU had a life+70 copyright term five years before the United States extended its own copyright term to match. See European Bono Act.
I can follow your reasoning, but lack of understanding is not an excuse. If you ignore the chinese warning signs and walk on to a random military base, you're still going to get shot, and it's a safe assumption that chinese bullets are just as deadly as english ones.
What a depressingly stupid machine.