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UK Passes "Instagram Act"

Posted by samzenpus on from the all-your-pics-are-belong-to-us dept.

kodiaktau writes "The UK govt passed the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act which effectively makes so-called 'orphaned' content posted on social media sites public domain. Corporations now only need to have made a "diligent search" to find the owner of the content before use. From the article: 'The Act contains changes to UK copyright law which permit the commercial exploitation of images where information identifying the owner is missing, so-called "orphan works", by placing the work into what's known as "extended collective licensing" schemes. Since most digital images on the internet today are orphans - the metadata is missing or has been stripped by a large organization - millions of photographs and illustrations are swept into such schemes.'"

4 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Great an image laundering scheme for big business by RichMan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    a) find image you want to use at site X
    b) have someone strip the the image of identifying information and repost it at site Y
    c) discover image at site Y lacking traceable information
    d) do "due dilligence" based on image from site Y
    e) declare image from site Y as 'orphaned'

    f) PROFIT

  2. What the hell is going on here? by DigitAl56K · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How is it possible that copyright not only keeps being extended to prevent works of corporations from entering the public domain, but now other laws start stripping rights of the public for their own works for the benefit of corporations?

  3. Re:hint.... by omnichad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No...it means don't allow anyone else in the world to find/scan/copy your work and post it online or they own it. You don't have to ever post something online yourself to be affected by this.

  4. Re:hint.... by eth1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If it's not worth enough to go to the bother of registering it then it's not worth adding to the legal quagmire that is default copyright.

    The problem with this is that a picture I take might be worth something, but that worth is less than what it would cost me in time/effort to get the money out of it (as opposed to an established publisher or news organization), so I don't. This legislation basically lets those established players hoover up that stuff and get money out of it, but without ever having to compensate the author.