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Internet and copyright infringement
Copyright, as most of you know, is the rights of the owner to direct the copying of a piece of intellectual material, like a photo. Prior to the Internet, Copyright was a rather easy thing. In order to reproduce the image, you truly needed to make a copy in a tangible medium. The internet however, has eliminated that necessity. With the ability to link (deep linking) directly to an image on a page, in order to reproduce the image on another page, you no longer have to make another copy. In layman's terms, I could literally build a website of 1000 copyrighted images, and as long as they are linked into the page, and not stored on my server, I am not violating copyright. An example of this is Google's Image Search. If you go there in type in "dog" then search images, Google's web page will display a slew of copyrighted images. When you click on a particular image, It will display that individual image as well, and provided the page is still up, the web page it took the image from. Now Google may be crossing the line a bit since it actually caches the image for it's website. (because you can have the image thumbnail and the page may no longer be found) As artists / photographers, What are your feelings on this subject? Would you object to a website of say nude models that is nothing more than a set of links to images from MM that are rated 18+? If so, then would you object to Google caching your images as well? Understand that Google has already won a court battle over a similar issue involving the New York Times, where the courts ruled that Google's news search engine did not violate copyright for deep linking to NY Times articles (even though it originally bypassed the need to pay to view the article in archive for the Times) I think this is an issue that all of us should keep an eye out for in the future, because a website, such as I mentioned is a definite possibility for any programmer (I can create it rather quickly myself). Opinions? Oct 07 05 08:03 am Link Great idea for a thread. Yes, it has been tried before and Ty it might be helpful if you can find one of your old ones to make a link to it so we do not have the same problem as before. People see this issue differently. Just the facts mame. Let's all try not to insult each other. But this issue is central to our business so doing it again is not a bad idea. But I am still waiting for cliff notes from the last large thread. pre emptive strike. Play nice. Mhana moderator. Oct 07 05 08:39 am Link Ty Simone wrote: It is also called hotlinking and that too is illegal. It is also called theft of bandwidth. When you link directly to an image on another server, each time that image is called up it uses someone elses bandwidth and they could find it necessary to have to purchase additional bandwith from their host in order to keep their site visable online. Oct 07 05 08:46 am Link skoffphoto wrote: Actually, it is not Illegal, as I said Google does it and has won in court over it. Oct 07 05 08:55 am Link ty...do you have a problem of people stealing your images for profit??? Oct 07 05 08:58 am Link BCG wrote: I have had a problem in the past, which is why all the images I use for commercial are never posted on a site like this. Oct 07 05 09:00 am Link I remember the case and the big reason that google won was because they clamed that they were only indexing images and websites in a directory. Also google does not use anyone elses bandwidth to operate their directory. What you also need to remember when hotlinking to someone elses image is that you also give them access to your site. I have an image of kittens that keeps getting linked to and one day when I was really bored I found a site that used my image as their background. It was repeated many times over the page. I made a new file called kittens.jpg which read "I have been caught hotlinking and using copyrighted material". I uploaded the new file to my server and anyone who hotlinked to that image received the same file on their site. I could have just as easily sent them something nasty. Steve Oct 07 05 09:06 am Link skoffphoto wrote: So what you are saying is that it truly is copyright infringement on their part? Oct 07 05 09:18 am Link Which now leads us to, If they are making a copy, and it is not copyright infringement, then does that add in a new fair use category, and if so, then can that not be exploited drastically? Ok, I did some research. since the time of the first case, which involved deeplinking, Google does in fact make a copy of the images, and stores and displays them. At present, Google has been served with several lawsuits based on their actions. http://news.com.com/Adult-site+publishe … 43006.html http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,13 … n_6bizhead (their new initiative) However, Any images hosted by Google are thumbnails, and a federal appeals court ruled that the usage of thumbnails does not constitute a copyright violation. Oct 07 05 09:20 am Link skoffphoto wrote: My wife is a professional web designer and makes most of her own divider and background images. They are frequently stolen and hotlinked. When this happens she replaces it with an image with text that reads, "I am a bandwidth-stealing a**hole." Then she watches to see how long they leave it up. The record so far, IIRC, is three weeks. Oct 07 05 09:21 am Link Ty Simone wrote: Deep linking is indeed not copyright infringement, but there are some cases out there dealing with other issues (and the terms escape me at the moment, but they have to do with bypassing the original web site's pages, possible ads contained within these pages, etc). The linking in itself is not the issue anyway, it's someone else making money off the linked content. If they do, linking or not doesn't matter much anymore from what I can tell, since they're using your images for gain without permission. Oct 07 05 09:22 am Link I have a problem with this thread. The problem is that it is making broad legal interpretations of a limited legal decision. The purpose of copyright is to prevent the commercial exploitation of the creative work of another, not to prevent duplication. Indeed, the act allows some forms of duplication. It has the "fair use" provisions, the commentary provision, etc. You can make a reasonable number back-ups of copyrighted software, for example. The act is designed to regulate how others make money off of the creative work of others. It is one protection people have, but it is not the only protection. It is true, Google won a case in New York. But Google won the case on a specific set of facts. Without reading the case (and all other applicable cases) one can't know if it applies to a particular situation. In other words, what they did might have been legal, but a slight variation may not be. Also, appellate decsions are only binding in the district for which they are written. A panel in a 4th district, a conservative one could rule for business and then the 9th, a more liberal court could rule against (or visa versa). The 4th could even find a statute unconstitutional, but that would not ban its enforcement in California. The Supreme Court typically gets involved in cases where multiple appellate panels reach different decsions. Put another way, if three districts came to the same conclusion, even on a controversial issue such as abortion, the Supreme Court would probably decline to hear the case, even though the subject matter is controversial. The reason is that the interpretation of the law would appear to be settled. They would probalby only opt in if a substantial number of justices disagreed with the appellate decisions and felt compelled to intervene. The Supreme Court has often let stand decsions they don't necessarily agree with if there seems to be widespread agreement in the lower courts. My point is this, in a lot of ways, I agree with what you are saying. There are certainly circumstances where hotlinking is legal. But you are also dancing on the line. For example, could you start a paysite based totally on content that you had hotlinked from other websites? I can think of a zillion issues that a court might consider. I have no idea how they would rule because there are so many variables that might affect a decision, but I can tell you that if you are making money off the work of others, eventually some clever lawyer might find a good theory and then litigate. That is how law is made. We call that case law. A lawyer looks at other cases, other statutes and sometimes other jurisdictions and comes up with a theory. He sues, he wins and an appellate court upholds the decision and the case gets published. Lo and behold, it is a precedent and is binding on other courts in the district. Losing at the appellate level can also create caselaw as well. Another important point to remember, in most jurisdictions, appellate cases may only be cited in court if they are published. Appellate courts rule on things every day without publication. They only publish that which they find to be appropriate for re-use on a broader basis. So in the end, this whole thread Ty started makes a good intellectual discussion. I think it is important and we should talk about it. Just remember, this is just a discussion. Most of us are photographers, not lawyers. Please, if you are going to dance on the line, ask a lawyer first. There are too many little things that can come back to bite you. Oct 07 05 09:28 am Link I'm not a lawyer and never played one on tv and often times what I know and what I think I know are very different but in the case of google using images does fall under fair usage as seen by the courts. Images used for news or educational purposes fall under fair usage and I suspect that making a directory for the purpose of educating people as to were to find works by a particular artist or where to find pictures of kittens could be seen that way. I wouldn't hotlink to an image for the simple reason being that it would be just as easy to send me a transparent gif containing a virus or something as it would be to post a nasty message. Steve Oct 07 05 09:30 am Link Increased vulnerability is the down side of the Internet for Photographers. No matter how much effort you put into water marks or names on your images, there is someone right behind you with the ability to remove and call it their own. For $200.00 I put a great copyright attorney on retainer. She is available whenever I see or hear of someone using my images and literally has a "fill in the blanks cease & desist letter" she zaps out to the bastards. 99.9% of the time that works. It's that .01% that they either play stupid or stubborn at which time she gets vicious but that costs me a few bucks. Oct 07 05 09:39 am Link well, since my last post, I am doing a lot of reading on the lawsuit and the NY times issue. NY Times actually settled with Google before it was all said and done. The result as I understand it is that the link to their archived items takes a person to the registration page instead of the article. Google makes a killing of off it's image search feature (and it's others) So, it is a money thing for them. I want to say something about the referrer issue as well. The referer issue can be defeated. A programmer from Barclay's bank in England proved it once. Is it something easy, no! can it be done, Yes! .htaccess is a much better method of prevention. Here is how for those interested...... To begin, copy the code below and paste it into a text editor (like notepad, not word or wordpad) and save it as: .htaccess That's a dot followed by htaccess in all lowercase letters, your machine might change it to .htaccess.txt and that is okay for now. RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$ RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yoursite.tld/ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yoursite.tld [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?anothersite.tld/ [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?anothersite.tld [NC] RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.yoursite.tld/stolen.gif [R,L] Yes, REFERER is spelled correctly, (for this purpose) don't change it. Next change all instances of yoursite.tld to your actual domain name. If there is another site where you want your images to be able to display then change both instances of anothersite.tld to the other sites actual domain name, if not then you can remove those two lines. If there is more than one other site where you want your images to display just add more lines of code. Now notice in the last line of code where is says: http://www.yoursite.tld/stolen.gif (yoursite.tld should have been replaced with your actual domain name) You may not have an image in your directory named stolen.gif and that is fine, you don't need one. Without it, whenever an unwanted site tries to display one of your images by direct linking to it, a broken image will appear instead. If you create an actual image, name it stolen.gif, and upload it to your directory then whenever an unwanted site tries to link to one of your images, stolen.gif will be displayed instead. Cool, right? Finally, upload the file in ascii mode into the folder(s) where your images are stored. Make sure that you don't overwrite a .htaccess file that is already there! Oct 07 05 09:47 am Link Ty Simone wrote: And make sure the stolen.gif/jpg is copied from a wonderful site like goatse (is it still there? I don't dare to look) or tubgirl Oct 07 05 09:52 am Link C R Photography wrote: Very true and guess what? The U.S. Law doesn't apply to the rest of the world. I could be a rare occurance that we have a treaty covering our copyright and even if we did how many have the time and the means to persue an international lawsuit? Oct 07 05 09:56 am Link luxmosaic wrote: There is a standard method of doing a referer check that uses redirection of the page. The Java one can be fooled, The other one can not. (at least to my knowledge) Oct 07 05 10:02 am Link Slightly off topic, how do these images get indexed? IOW, how does Google know it's pulling up a picture of a dog? Paul Oct 07 05 10:46 am Link Paul Ferrara wrote: mostly from the title and the megatag data Oct 07 05 11:02 am Link any webmaster that can't control their site from being hotlinked (via .htacess) doesn't deserve to be on the net. Oct 07 05 11:39 am Link Ty Simone wrote: JavaScript - yes - not a good way to implement any security mechanism. The other one can be circumvented such that you would still not make a copy of the image (and this can be easily done, too, but only for a limited time until it's discovered) but it's beyond what most people would/could accomplish. I am a computer security consultant, so I guess it'll always be easier for me Oct 07 05 11:43 am Link johnny olsen wrote: I bet most old-school photo pros are not exactly webmasters, though ... but then again, they can pay people to do this for them. Oct 07 05 11:44 am Link Personally, I think the best way around a lot of this stuff is just keeping web-shared images smaller and watermarked. Leave the big pretty versions for shows and authorized print use. As far as swapping hotlinked images goes... my personal favorite to use is that goatx.se guy. The images get taken down REALLY fast, heh. Oct 07 05 02:00 pm Link Interestingly I was just playing with an application that supposedly attempts to secure images behind a Java implementation. [http://www.artistscope.net/] It works... sort of. When images are served they are served by a Java referral and the image itself is in a Java class file and behaves when served to the html page as if it has a transparent gif overlay with a hyperlink embedded. Any mouse click on the image causes the browser to call the Artistscope home page. Disabling Java causes the html page to be served blank (no image is called). I didn't check but I don't think the image is actually cached in temp files either. So far so good - BUT - screen cap and file>print are not disabled. Now, screen cap will only capture a fairly low res rendering, but I easily printed to a PDF and then captured the image from the PDF file - full res. Where there is a will there is a way. Studio36 Oct 07 05 03:13 pm Link studio36uk wrote: Java somewhat works, and so does Flash - aside from the annoyance from the JVM or Flash plugin starting (which I find _incredibly_ annoying and leads me to just not view the rest of the site) and the inability for Google to index the images (which I do like.) But JavaScript doesn't work at all Oct 07 05 03:25 pm Link Oct 07 05 03:49 pm Link dissolvegirl wrote: From the site: Oct 07 05 07:59 pm Link I dunno, but you've gotta admit it's pretty sweet peace of mind for $15 a month. Oct 07 05 09:11 pm Link I think that the courts (based on a conversation with an IP attorney this weekend) will have a hard time with this issue. Here is the logic. Everytime you go to a web page, It is cached on your computer (with few exceptions) That means that you are making a copy of every image you view. To eliminate that from web browsing is not in the best interest of the consure, nor law enforcement (which can use the cache to determine crimes in cases like chid porn) Therefore the courts are most likely going to leave the ability to cache a thumbnail as a non-violation of copyright. If that is the case, then it is possible to create a cach program with a database and a search engine front hooked to a database to store thumbnails of copyrighted images. (similar to google) There is no prohibitation to making money / charging for such a service (google does make money off of their search engines) I think that the legal front on this opens a pretty serious loophole! For example, I could literally write a program to scan MM and cache every image on here in thumbnail size (with the source and full size link) I could then use a keywords based system to catalogue the images (blonde female nude breasts) etc... I could then create a website that interfaces with that database for members only, and even charge a monthly fee for it. then a member could search all of MM for any images of nude blondes, get thumbnails, and then go to the direct picture, or the photog page or model page And at this point (since I am covered by the 9th district court) it is not illegal. Google does have some protections against that BTW. Oct 11 05 11:12 am Link Wouldn't the more legitimate argument for those on this site be to protect imaging at the source level? Such as...all the CD's of hi-res images being distributed to models... The $$ amount on lost revenue from models making their own prints, posters, marketing collateral is by far exceeding that of the images pilfered through renegade websites. The photography community has done a poor job of policing itself toward any sort of standization other than allowing itself to be overrun by TFP, then TFCD...with cries of, "I didn't get my CD." I've heard the prevailing thought, "gee, I don't make that money on prints; it isn't worth it." Well, if a photographer is losing out on 2,000 prints per year and the little profit of only $10 per print is lost...it sure is a lot more to worry about than what a $250 buck web photo will bring. Taking on the web behemoths like Google is a little senseless when the photography community can't even look to itself by first and foremost slamming those that enter to do as the forefathers of this industry did...protect your images by not freely distributing your files. Oct 11 05 11:49 am Link One other method to reduce hotlinking, that I have seen a couple time -- and I mean very few -- is to break the images into smaller chunks. The most excessive was like 100 tiny images to produce one image. Seems excessive, and time consuming (however I'm assuming there probably is an application that does this) already. Anyways, I prefer the Referer method, and it can be fooled like any other online security measure but generally people are pretty lazy. Theft of bandwidth is just immoral, but not illegal... at least not at this time. Josie, that goatx.se guy is awesome. There was another one that involved 3 old men, one looked like johnny carson, in the middle of some threesome it also served that purpose very well. Why I found that picture is a whole other story  One thing to watch for, is Fusker websites. The idea is the same as google images, but they take it a step further. They try and guess what your image names are and post them on their websites. Recently, I was fusker'd and while mildly amusing it did increase my hits and HUGELY increased my 404 errors which evenually filled up my server space very quickly. Note, the fusker script is usually associated with nudity/porn websites. Oct 11 05 11:53 am Link Ty Simone wrote: And now try that with you cpying the full-size images onto the searching site. We'll see how well the judge likes your explanation of 'just trying to provide a search system'. Oct 11 05 01:19 pm Link There are a large number of people who now use firewalls that rewrite HTTP_REFERRER to xxxx://xxxxxxxxx (literally) or simply strip it out. My logs show that this is about 30% of all hits these days. You can't check HTTP_REFERRER if the client strips it. You can simply deny access without a valid HTTP_REFERRER, but then you're denying around a third of the viewers. But there are other things you can do. For example, look at the image I've linked below. Check out the header... recognize that IP? Oct 11 05 01:28 pm Link Here's some food for thought... Does anyone know how much it costs to take a copyright infringement suit to trial? Oct 11 05 01:33 pm Link The Art of CIP wrote: That's like saying, "How much to repair my car?" Oct 11 05 01:38 pm Link Chris Ambler wrote: It doesn't prevent linking, unfortunately, which is the problem at hand. I can see how it somewhat effectively prevents re-distribution of the image, and I've toyed with similar ideas - down to embedding a client-specific steganographic message in the image to track back copyright infrigement when the image pops up somewhere. Oct 11 05 01:46 pm Link Chris Ambler wrote: I guess I should simplify the question - Does anyone know how much it costs to file the suit? Doesn't matter where you're from - every jurisdiction has a filing cost.. Oct 11 05 01:56 pm Link luxmosaic wrote: That's exactly what it's doing. Steganography in the image, but the IP in the clear in the header as a clear warning to those who realize what that means. Oct 11 05 01:57 pm Link Chris Ambler wrote: Don't deny them. Just deny the clear violators. The empty referrer pattern is already part of the before-mentioned .htaccess-based method. Just add the other pattern(s) and redirect the violators to tubgirl Oct 11 05 05:27 pm Link |
