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Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Damned if you do, damned if you don't!

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.

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I think the community position is clear - violating copyright for personal, non public, non profit purposes is OK. Exploiting others work for commercial gain without permission and compensation not OK. What's so hard about that?

Exactly. This is all you need to know about copyright. Reality on the ground always trumps theoretical reality, so everyone can stop hyperventilating and breathe normally. Abolition of copyright would heavily favor entrenched forces.

Well, the stated purpose of this law is to make it easier to exploit the work of others for commercial gain without permission and compensation (edit: actually it seems you have to pay, even if it's an orphan work and the money is kept for rights-holders who come out of the woodwork later, which further reduces the chance of someone stealing your facebook photos).

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...

Facebook photos would be/are extremely valuable to advertisers. And very few would have contact metadata attached, which is irrelevant anyway after your mate reposts the image to imgur for a Reddit post.

And i guess they would rather steal from someone who can't fight back than an entity that owns an army of lawyers.

"No contact metadata" will be mostly irrelevant in the next years, when computer vision along with some automated social engineered photo correlation will be able to cleanly identify individuals out of photos, linking to their social network profiles.

The photographer holds the copyright, not the people depicted in the photos (except when they're the same person, obviously), so that wouldn't help a lot. Not to mention all the pictures that don't have anyone in them, of course.

Wait, it's one thing for someone to take photos of their friends and post to Facebook or Instagram. If anyone were to use them for profit however, do the people showing in the photos have no rights? I'd think that it's not actually as simple as you put it, but that the people appearing on the shot have no reasons normally to go after their rights, but in reality they usually didn't give written consent for being shot (I don't think posing for a photo qualifies as legal consent for the photo then to be used however the photographer wants, much less by third parties.)

Well, as I said, the people in the pictures don't have copyright.

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.

Here's what the position should be. You're free to use other people's stuff that appears online, but not for commercial purposes.

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.

Does commercial purposes count for supporting non-profits that you may disagree with? There is nothing special, nor onerous, about commercial activity that should grant it any special privileges, nor penalties.

Similarly, how about context. If there's a photo of someone on the web and you can't find the owner/subject's contact details you could put this in a post about STDs; if that post becomes popular the subject's image is then associated with the content despite them having no relation to the subject matter and not having given their consent, which could lead to awkward scenarios for that person.

(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).

How about I use those photos in my ad-supported private blog, or my ad-supported private youtube stream. Or in some way that indirectly increases my profits in the future (say buying fame instead of money)?

Does that count as fair use?

(PS: genuine question)

If you're selling advertising space then in UK and US copyright law that would likely be considered to be commercial use. That doesn't mean that it's not allowed or [in the US] Fair Use but it's a strong mark against that conclusion.

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.

>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.

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.

The difference is that if someone's image is in the advertisement, there is an implicit message that this person uses/endorses whatever the advertisement is proposing. Whether or not this difference is material is an exercise for the reader.

Running ads means you make money. That's commercial just as much as charging people money directly. Whether the user pays with currency or with privacy or with brainwashing, they pay nonetheless so there isn't much distinction between the two.

There is an issue with this though. Lots of sites run ads to pay things like hosting bills. If hosting costs $100/month and you pull in $50/month in ads, this is generally not what people think of when they think of a 'commercial enterprise,' even though it's the technical definition. Granted, a "trust me, I'm not making that much money" statement from the owner is pretty worthless to.

The problem with this is that it weakens copyright from the wrong direction: it makes more content available to big corporates without them having to give anything back.

I agree that it might open up a "huge realm of creative activity" on the amateur or cottage industry side, but it also removes a lot of content creators' rights when larger corps who can afford licensing fees rip us off.

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.

Pretty much all damage to copyright at this point is good, if only for setting the precedent that copyright is something that you can damage.

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