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Removal of Photo Credit Qualifies As DMCA Violation
mattgoldey writes with this excerpt: "A federal appeals court in Philadelphia has reinstated a photographer's copyright lawsuit against a New Jersey radio station owner, after finding that a lower court came to the wrong decision on every issue in the case. Most significantly, the appeals court said that a photo credit printed in the gutter of a magazine qualifies as copyright management information (CMI) under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA prohibits the unauthorized removal of encryption technology or copyright management information from copyrighted works."
I had a dickhead take one of my photos, cut off the copyright notice and try and pass it off as his own.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
We can all argue about what fair use of copyrighted materials should be, but I think we can also more-or-less agree that deliberately stripping off a creator's name is uncool. Of course, the conduct of the defendants in question (RTFA, they were shock-jock DJs who responded to the photographer's cease-and-desist with a smear campaign chock full o' slander and libel and just-plain-lies) probably made it a lot easier for the judge to apply the bitch-slap to 'em. They deserved it.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Copyright law already protects your photo, whether the copyright notice has been cropped or not. This is a stupidly broad application of "copyright management information".
Magic doesn't work in my presence. My power of disbelief is too strong.
The 1988 Copyright Act was more fair.
What I find jaw-dropping about this story is how all of those lower courts consistently came up with the incorrect ruling on what is a total no-brainer copyright case like this one was.
Even if the picture in question was released under a Creative Commons Attribution license, you'd still have to include the attribution. If you don't include attribution in the first place you should be expecting to get sued.
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
Holy shit, they cracked his Double-ROT13 encryption! Nothing is safe now!
Copyright law already protects your photo, whether the copyright notice has been cropped or not. This is a stupidly broad application of "copyright management information".
No it isn't. A copyright notice is practically the definition of
copyright management information
(1) The title and other information identifying the work, including the information set forth on a notice of copyright. ...
(2) The name of, and other identifying information about, the author of a work.
(3) The name of, and other identifying information about, the copyright owner of the work, including the information set forth in a notice of copyright.
Again, this ruling has absolutely nothing to do with the anti-circumvention or take-down notice sections of the DMCA, so don't apply what you have heard about those part of the law to this ruling.
Now Photoshop is a tool that can be used to circumvent CMI restrictions. Of course no court would declare Photoshop illegal. But what reasoning would they use?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
How so? Do you believe that copyright law 'already' protects "copyright management information" (absent the DMCA and this interpretation)? Or do you believe that removing "copyright management information" like this is not a bad act and does not create any additional harm? I hope neither, because on both counts you're wrong.
Pre-DMCA copyright law wouldn't provide any additional protection or penalty if someone removed a byline, photographer's attribution, copyright notice, or the like. At best, you might spend an inordinate amount of time and money arguing for additional damages under a tort theory like slander of title. Meanwhile, the work, stripped of any indication of source and/or copyright, would have essentially been turned into an "orphaned work." People who obtained copies of the work couldn't determine who the original owner was in order to obtain permission to legally redistribute or modify the work, or worse yet could assume that the work was released into the public domain. That's assuming that the person who stripped the information didn't have the gall to claim that it is their own -- as if that never happens.
This application is exactly what Congress intended:
It's a shame this ruling didn't happen before the whole The Oatmeal vs. FunnyJunk situation occurred. Especially since FJ was ostensibly profiting from the hundreds of stolen images, I doubt it would have been considered fair use.
This is just a stupid post but it took some creativity to come up with it.
Oh... don't even THINK about quoting this in its entirety, but without the CMI displayed below!
COPYRIGHT MANAGEMENT INFORMATION
--
The title of this work is Stupid post.
This work was created by Anonymous Coward, the copyright belonging to the same: Copyright (c) 2011.
The performer of this work is also Anonymous Coward.
Terms and conditions for use of the work are those set forth by Geeknet, Inc.
The Identifying number is displayed above.
Too many comments asking this to reply to them all, and I don't want to explain it more than once.
The copyrighted image was being hosted without permission on a website. In order to force the site to remove it, one must file a DMCA takedown notice. If the radio station had, for instance, copied the image and had it published in a different magazine without credit (which would not happen because the magazine would have asked for a credit to publish, but go with the example anyway...), DMCA would not apply. In short, the radio station's lawyers tried to argue that the source was not digital (a magazine), and the DMCA didn't apply. The appeals court correctly ruled that the site's use of the photo being digital, without regard to the source format, is covered by DMCA.
If you rip the bar code off of a bag of chips, is that a DMCA infringement?