It is a mess. It has long been my understanding, heaven knows from where, that taking a screen shot (which may include images) and reproducing it evades copyright problems. This sounds like the same thing, essentially.
A Manhattan judge has ruled against The Washington Post and the AFP for republishing a Twitter user's photos. But if the image had been inside an embedded Tweet, it may have been fine. A strange loophole.
A U.S. District Judge has ruled that the AFP and Washington Post infringed on copyright by posting photographer Daniel Morel's photos of earthquake damage in Haiti.
The photos were posted to Twitter, from which the AFP submitted them to Getty. WaPo found the images on Getty and posted them on its website. The ruling explains, over the course of about 60 pages, that just because the images were posted to Twitter doesn't mean they were fair game for reposting elsewhere. The AFP argued that Twitter's terms of service, which allows the site to "reproduce" users' images, gave it the right to do the same. The judge said no.
Here's the thing: If this same situation occurred today, there would be a legal way to repost Morel's photos without his direct permission. All The Washington Post would have to do is use Twitter's embed function.
Twitter tells BuzzFeed that embedded tweets — that is, tweets that are embedded into the site using Twitter's official embed tool — fall under Twitter's reposting rights, as outlined in its terms of service....
In other words, if you download a photo from Twitter, upload it to your servers, and publish it to your Website, that's a copyright violation. However, it's legal if you do the same thing using Twitter's embed code, where the photo is hosted on Twitter's servers.
Copyright law on the Internet is insane.
That's because copyright law was never intended to be understood by mere mortals. Copyright law is a function of the industrial era, when you needed a factory or printing press to infringe significantly enough for the law to take notice, and if you had those things you could afford to pay a lawyer to interpret crazy copyright law for you. But now everybody has a factory and printing press on their desk and in their briefcase.
While creative people deserve to get paid, perhaps copyright -- regulating copies -- is no longer the answer. For one thing, the Internet is a copying machine -- every time you look at a Web page or view a video, you're making a copy and theoretically violating copyright.
Well said. Except I'm not sure anyone (regardless of their profession) deserves payment. Obviously, people should be paid for working, but if their work is completed -- how long should they be compensated for? If my shift ends at the factory, I don't get paid for items produced after I stop working. But a recording of a song still produces royalties beyond the death of the original singer....? Something is weird there.
Not necessarily so, mhhfive. As a photographer, I might give permission to a site to display my images. I don't think I therefore give permission to anyone else to take them and display them.
I think you've just described why reading TOS's carefully is a good idea for photographers who care about their copyright/privacy. You should only upload your work to sites that have agreeable policies and robot.txt files...
And the idea that nobody could ever reasonably claim loss of earnings when their work is stolen is legally radical to say the least.
I don't think anyone suggested that NOBODY could claim a loss of earnings from copyright infringement. BUT equating a copy with a "sales loss" is economically questionable. If someone pirates a DVD, did they "steal" whatever the price of that DVD is?
Google has acted as a copyright cop on Youtube for years, now carefully screening music to make sure users aren't placing copyrighted material online without permission.
Google acts as a cop on YouTube because it knows the big music corporations will sue. Little people (bloggers, photographers) don't count so much.
The flip side of this is it's ALREADY easy to grab photos from the original web page. Just download them or take a screenshot. So can Google really be blamed for removing that very small extra step?
Try this:
it's ALREADY easy to grab an article by Mitch Wagner from his own website. Just copy and paste. So can Google really be blamed for reproducing it elsewhere?
I think this would evidently be a problem if we were dealing with text rather than images. Google sending traffic to a website is different.
Google isn't so much making it possible to take an image, they are just helping to skip steps. You could still go to the website and download the image straight from them.
True, Dave, but I think we assume for the sake of argument that the Website has rights to host the image. If stealing the image from the Website is wrong, then what's different about what Google is doing?
(If the Website doesn't have rights to host the image, then it's a bad actor like Google.)
mpouraryan - My rule is that copyright law is so fundamentally broken that it makes it incumbent on each of us to be extra-careful to do the right thing.
Like Bob Dylan said, to live outside the law you must be honest. Copyright law is so bad that we all live outside the law.
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Recently, the Obama administration has been of two minds where privacy rights are concerned. On one hand, you have an administration that vowed to veto CISPA and mandated open data for government websites. On the other hand, you have an increasingly out-of-control Department of Justice on a fishing expedition at AP and demanding legislation to let the FBI wiretap private, encrypted communications and levy fines if a company fails to comply.
The apartment and house sharing service, Airbnb, now requires members to verify their identities by demonstrating a presence on the web, and by either scanning a government ID or entering detailed personal details. Other enterprises should take a close look at Airbnb's verification policies.
Facebook advertising is a lightning rod. It seems neither brands nor consumers are 100 percent happy about the social media site's policies, placement, or procedures. But the real controversy about Facebook ads and promotions is over whether they work.
By now, you've most likely heard about the 3D-printed gun that Texas-based Defense Distributed demonstrated last week. But we haven't heard the last about the censorship war that began soon afterward.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
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The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
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