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Comment by vadimberman | Hacker News Reader

So let me get it straight.

You, a designer in a big company, see a plain, unremarkable photo that has no artistic value on a private blog that has 5 visitors a month. You go to your boss and say, "Mr Boss, there is no price here but I would like to negotiate with the owner of the blog and pay them. Can you please ask the accounting to open a vendor file for kewldude32893, owner of WakeUpSheeple.org, and issue a purchase order and ask the legal department to send him a SOW?"

No, it's more like exceeding the speed limit on an uninhabited island. Nobody is impacted and nobody cares.

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Your analogy -

I'm allowed to copy John Carter (2012) dvds and do what I like with them because it made a loss of $125m and the only people who saw it were the director's family, next door neighbour and pet dog.

The bigger the design firm, the more aware they should be of copyright law and their legal obligations.

The fact they used the photo shows it had value, otherwise they would have taken a custom photo themselves. There are plenty of stock photos of VHS tapes, the fact they used google is a massive error on their part.

This is their daily job and the image will be reproduced millions of times. This is not simply someone who borrows a photo for their personal blog.

Except the photo that was copied was not created in order to make a living. That is sorta kinda the point.

There's nothing in copyright which takes that into account. The photo is copyrighted. Netflix makes a huge deal about copyright and goes out of its way to restrict what you can see and do with their stuff. Yet they ignore copyright because reasons.

Why would it be ok to copy a photo because then another company can make money off it because the initial person may or maybe not made the picture to make money?

this is a great and very clear standard, I'm sure it will scale to every photograph on the internet.

Yup. It's called "common sense". Many people on HN should adopt it, challenging as it is.

> that has no artistic value

Which has no bearing on copyright status.

> You go to your boss and say, "Mr Boss, there is no price here but I would like to negotiate with the owner of the blog and pay them."

Stock photo websites exist to solve this problem. If you really, really couldn't find a suitable image on a stock photo website, that kind of demonstrates the value of the image and the necessity of negotiating with the creator directly.

Designers do try to find the author. Some of them don't because they lack ethics or they are pressured by their management, but most do so.

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