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Comment by vadimberman | Hacker News Reader

Thank you.

Honestly, it's not like the author worked 10 years on a Mona Lisa painting. It's a plain shot of a tape. Boohoo.

That doesn't mean they don't deserve to be compensated. The work I did today wasn't incredibly difficult and someone else could have done it, but that doesn't mean I'd be fine if my boss decided not to pay me for it.

How exactly do you believe a random photo is to be compensated?

If it were on a stock photo website, sure. Otherwise, how do you believe the transaction were to be arranged?

It wasn't work done for Netflix. He put it somewhere and did NOT expect to be paid for it.

Take 1000 photos and 1 might make you earn enough to consider it a meager living, but you still had to take the other 999 to get to that point. That's how art works. That's how most jobs work.

I don't think there was anything close to 1000 there. It was one puny random unremarkable photo which had nothing to do with art or a job.

You are missing the point. Maybe he didnt upload those other 999 photos on the blog.

Really now? If there was a way to verify, I would put money on the assumption that he has not uploaded the other 999 photos to the blog because there were no 999 photos.

Do you upload each and every photo you take to your blog?

Do you believe that someone in sound mind will take 1,000 photos of a VHS tape to put on a low-traffic blog?

You have completely missed the metaphor. Let me break it down for you.

Everyone is not born as a good photographer. So people practice by taking many photos of various things, now all of them wont be good, some of them can be good but they probably wont be noticed by anyone but there will be that one photo which will be good and gets noticed by people that matter and they will pay a good amount for that photo.

So that 1 photo will make up for zero revenues from all the other photos. The 1000 photos is a metaphor, dont take it literally.

Now do you get it?

The point is you don't know which of the 1000 is going to be your pay day.

That's the whole purpose of a stock photo website.

To easily track down the owner of the image and buy a license to use it for money.

You can do it manually by contacting a person directly, negotiating a fee for a license to use that image, but that takes time. Stock sites speed up the process.

Just because the photo was not sourced from a stock photo website does not remove the need for copyright or payment.

It's like saying "I copied a dvd and didn't buy it from a dvd shop, so I don't need to pay for it".

That Netflix could have shot themselves. But they didn’t. It was easier (cheaper) to use someone else’s work for free.

So if the Netflix shot it, the author would not be compensated. In the current situation, he wasn't compensated.

Is there a tangible difference for the "victim"?

If Netflix did their own creative work, the author would not be compensated. But they appropriated his work instead, without paying or even asking. That’s not ok. Especially for a company who relies on copyrights to secure their own profits.

So you agree that there is no difference for the author.

No I don’t. Maybe no difference in his bank account, but morally speaking it’s the difference between being taken advantage of and being respected.

Also, there’s a 3rd option Netflix could have chosen: licensing the author’s work.

He just explained the difference. Using someones work vs creating your own work is different.

You are making a number of unfair assumptions about the actual act that took place and its motivation.

As pointed out elsewhere, it is very unlikely that Netflix as a company did this intentionally.

Unintentionally breaking the law is still breaking the law. This will cost Netflix nothing to the grand scheme to remedy.

True, but he said "Netflix could have shot themselves," when probably they had nothing to do with the image acquisition. Netflix itself, as a company, or anyone at it, most likely had no intention of using this image for free, hence some unfair assumptions made by my parent.

But the victim here still needs to be compensated.

I’m using “Netflix” to encompass them, their agents, or affiliated production company. Somebody somewhere didn’t do their job in clearing the photo. They just found something online and went with it. That wasn’t an accident unless they don’t know their job.

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