UK Government passes “Instagram Act”
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
If you pass more stringent copyright laws, people roast you on a pitchfork for fucking creators over by restricting how they can use other people's works.
If you pass looser copyright laws, people roast you on a pitchfork for fucking creators over by not restricting how others can use their work.
In such a situation, where the geek world is the first to shout abuse at politicians the minute they make any changes, it's no surprise that the smoother-talking Disney lobbyists win.
As a community, we have got to get our shit together and start having a clear position. For myself, I think any step that weakens copyright is good at this point, so I think this is a great move. It opens up a huge realm of creative activity.
Now they just need to apply this to music, movies and text too.
I'm not the biggest supporter of modern copyright - I love what I understand to be the spirit of it, but not this "death + x years" crap - but it needs to work both for the little guy and the big guy.
Putting someone's picture (that happens to be on the web, publicly available) in a post on a site, where you happen to have ads does not count as "using your image" for commercial purposes. Putting your image in an ad would.
My point is that you shouldn't be able to just claim having copyright over someone's work, and then profiting from it as your own. I shouldn't be able to take the HD version of Iron Man 3, and then sell it to my local cinema. That's as far as copyright should go.
(I won't say a Facebook photo as this will be in the uploader's album, therefore associated with their account and thus can be considered non-orphaned).
Does that count as fair use?
(PS: genuine question)
There can be moral rights issues in "framing" work with your advertising too that could trump any conclusion that would otherwise fall as Fair Use.
To me it does. I don't understand the operational difference between putting someone's image within whatever div has been designated the "ad" div or outside of it, other than location. If I don't understand it, surely teams of lawyers in opposition can create complicated rationales that justify any parties' usage of any other parties' work based on how much money the first party has to spend on lawyers.
And generally the community are alright with that because they're targetting "orphan works", stuff that got swept up into hundred year plus copyrights just because Disney didn't want to lose Mickey. But is now "culture" or "history", yet it is presumed to be owned by someone or something that can't be traced and found to ask permission due to death, bankruptcy, poor recordkeeping etc.
The people protesting this law seem to be making the dubious claim that you can now steal the copyright to anyone's digital media (film, music, photo, books) you find online just by stripping some metadata. This seems, on the face of it, absurd. And if it's true then there will be better things to steal than someone's facebook photos. Why would those big nasty US coporations steal your family photos when they could steal stuff with actual value from other big nasty US corporations?
edit: a UK government response to previous scaremongering from the same source:
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121205183318/htt...
And i guess they would rather steal from someone who can't fight back than an entity that owns an army of lawyers.
That said, they might have personality rights. These vary a lot between jurisdictions, even inside the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
Well, it substantially reduces the value of copyright for a start.
Of course the community tends to favour such a position if you look at some sort of general average. The average person probably doesn't work in a creative industry where IP is how you pay the rent, so if copyright isn't effective it's nothing but upside for them, but the average person also doesn't care about redistributing works for profit, so they don't mind rules that restrict those who would.
Whether making law on the basis of the self interest of the largest single group within society is a good idea is an entirely different question. It's probably the strictly democratic thing to do, but remember the old joke about democracy being two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner.
As far as I can tell, they're against orphan works laws in any shape or form. Whether they're taking that stance to protect the semi-professional photographer as they seem to be claiming is another matter.
Any (possibly valid) criticisms of the actual form of this law (and similar outrage over one in France) seems to be incidental to the fact that they don't want any weakening of IP to occur at all, ever.
This is a significant factor to consider. Read his other work.
Google Images (for one) allows you to search by uploading a photo, and I can't remember the last time I was able to "beat" it by downloading a photo that it couldn't identify the source of.
If you're a pro and want your photos to stay yours, put it where Google (or whoever) can see it and it if somebody steals it, you have every right to sue them for failing to do their due diligence.
Am I missing something?
Yes: not all copyrighted works are freely available on the Internet. Indeed, it is the ones that are not that are probably the most important to protect in terms of the copyright holder's legal rights, and as a matter of practical reality, putting such things on a publicly available site might substantially reduce their actual value.
That tends to lead into the "so just register it with my central archive instead" argument, which effectively reverses the automatic granting of copyright that has been established for many years now and imposes a potentially expensive burden on exercising your basic legal rights under copyright law.
Bill documents — Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013: http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2012-13/enterpriseandreg...
Orphan Works impact assessment: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/impact-assessments/IA12-0...
We as a whole species are currently producing more content than the sum of humanity prior to the 20th century per day every day. Content production has become so cheap, in fact just the other day I wondered if "from each his own ability; to each according to his need" can be rightfully applied yet.
Sure, you say there are moral issues of profiting off the backs off someone's hard works. But such a law allows you to also do the same.
You might say for example, that you don't intend to do the same. Good on ya mate. Then go profit off your own work, and also allow others to profit off your work! This is not a pie that is finite in size. If someone does not intend to profit off their own work anyway, what is it to them then that someone else profits off their work?
That said, I think attribution is still a requirement as we enter the age of digital communism
That's the intention. However when the system is "I tried to find out who took this picture, I failed, therefor I can use it freely", then surely that system can and will be gamed badly?
For example a diligent search could be considered to be using a specific service, Tineye say, but another similar service was the only one that had the image. Do you have to use all services to be diligent? That would be great for the service providers as they could charge a lot and the court would be enforcing the use.
How would the prosecution demonstrate that image was available to you? On Google search is personalised - do I need to check all the results returned or just the first 100? Google's dates are notoriously unreliable too; they're certainly not at the level of accuracy needed for a court conviction.
Then there's DMCA ... couldn't you use the DMCA to have the images taken down, then when a prosecutor checks later they won't find them? Or at least they're down long enough that you can get a search notarised in which the images are absent.
But in my worst case scenario (i.e. I take a picture of a starving African child, and a hypothetical neo-nazi racist politician were to use it in saying "this is what god intends for black people"), there would be a moral outrage on my part. However, I wouldn't be outraged at the free (mis)use.
Rather, the moral outrage would be at the misrepresentation of the photo. That would fall under the likeness laws I believe. The subject of the photos I believe would probably have cause to sue in that case (of course in the case of the starving African child, it probably will not happen)
Perhaps you can think of something worse
I would not want any of my photos or content used without my consent, even if it has nothing to do with profit and money. A while back photo I posted online was used by someone with regard to subject matter that offends me and i categorically disagree with. Thankfully my work is protected by copyright so i was able to use the DMCA to force its removal.
> Sure, you say there are moral issues of profiting off the backs off someone's hard works. But such a law allows you to also do the same.
If i make my living doing photography or some other art form, i don't want to lose income because others are copying my work, nor do i want to profit off of others work because that is not my area of expertise nor likely what i want to do for a living.
Make everything on the web available by default for personal use, but not commercial use. Then have 2 licenses: No, this can't be used for personal use (eg Netflix) and Yes, this can be used for commercial use too. Both should have a modifier for Source must be attributed. Put the creator in control and get out the way. Of course we should allow more fine-grained licenses like we see for source code etc, but the two simple licenses should cover most use cases I think.
We need something more granular that people can use, and I'm not at all convinced that exists. Hmm.
now it's the same as "all rights reserved. joe@example.com", and it is the current default.
What I haven't seen anyone explain so far, and again can't check for myself until the final wording is published somewhere accessible, is what happens if someone starts copying/sublicensing an "orphan" work and then the copyright holder finds out and identifies themselves. In earlier discussions about orphan works, which have been going on for years and covered by several public reviews at this point, this issue never seemed to be dealt with in a satisfactory way.
It only applies to orphan works but you can easily and in an anonymous way strip out the metadata.
And companies like Google could take it one step further. All they have to do is start a LLC in the UK for the Google image search part of its business, go to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, ... take all the photos, strip the metadata, say it was someone else who must have done it, make a lot of money.
Google Image Search is already doing something awfully close to that, and the legality of doing so is surely going to be disputed in court sooner or later.
They appear to be bandwidth leaching in a way that has been considered poor netiquette since forever, too. In fact, in an earlier court case in the US the fact that they weren't actually hosting the material themselves even though to a viewer it would look like they were was a key point for their defence.
Someone really needs to study the history of copyright.
It does beg a question, though: I don't live by photography (otherwise my children would be starving) but if I were, wouldn't I put my name and contact into any metadata?
And then things like CloudFlare+ might optimise the image discarding meta-data during compression of the image, and a person solely relying on the image will not be able to find the creator.
The only option will be to visibly watermark the image with the creator name.
+ I'm not sure if CloudFlare does do this, but something may optimise the image and discard the EXIF or other meta-data.
Does your username in the URL e.g. instagram.com/username, constitute "information identifying the owner"?
If yes, how can they identify the citizenship of the author since we are talking about orphan works ?
If not and it applies to every pics, how does it not conflict with other legislations ?
In principle, I think a law like this in regards to truly orphaned works is not a bad thing, as long as the penalties for abuse are proper (e.g. news programmes trying to credit "YouTube" for something they've ripped off someone else, or newspapers stealing someone's Twitter photos -- where it's entirely clear how to contact the person who owns the photo).
I'm all for weakening copyrights. But this seems like weakening it only for the average person, while allowing huge organizations to scoop up any "unclaimed" work as their own -- from which they can then extract rents, even from the actual creator.
Am I misreading this?