"If I were Lane, I’d make sure every image of mine had a watermark. If hers did, they never would have been used in the video."
And she would never get contacted about licensing the photos by anyone who saw them at Flickr either, because they'd be ugly as f*#$! Your example is one ugly photo because of the word splashed across the center of it, if I'm going to license a photo I don't want to have to imagine what it would look like without the watermark, not when there are hundreds of similar photos that don't have one available for me to browse.
That being said, making them private guarantees pretty much the same outcome, so that's not a great answer either.
Chess
· 2 years ago
Hindsight vision is always 20/20. She's moving her images to another photosharing service to do watermarking automatically. I don't know much about Flickr but seems they may have a mass exodus if they don't get this functionality added (or easier to use), at least for more pro oriented crowd.
Robert Scoble
· 2 years ago
Mike: there's ways to make the watermarking more subtle. But the watermark would force a conversation about how the images would be used and such.
ojbyrne
· 2 years ago
I'm wondering how long it will be before someone realizes that they're also going to need model releases for those pictures.
Mike Weiss
· 2 years ago
Robert:
This is another Mike. Because of my non-existent programming experience, pardon the newb quesiton but:
Is there a way for Flickr to post the image normal and if its downloaded, copied or taken from the site it can be watermarked in that transfer. (Copying would be difficult but id imagine that if you hit download there would be a way to add a few lines to watermark it).
Would that be at least some middle ground: You can see the image non-watermarked (as mike above points out in its beauty) but when you take the image it becomes watermarked.
Id love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks!!
David
· 2 years ago
If you view a larger size of the photo, it will show the license under the picture.
I was wondering about that. You need permission from the photographer, but do you also need permission from the person in the photograph as well?
ojbyrne
· 2 years ago
If a picture is for "commercial use" you need a model release from each recognizable person in the picture. Not sure if The Richter Scales is a commercial enterprise.
Chess
· 2 years ago
They are a non-profit so I guess the model permission isn't required.
ojbyrne
· 2 years ago
I sure hope so for their sake, cause the same thing goes for trademarks. Ford, Facebook, In 'n' Out, Krispey Kreme, etc. I'm amazed there have been no complaints along that line.
I don't see any indication of them being a non-profit. And when I go to buy their CD there is no indication there either.
Skip
· 2 years ago
So how does this all work anyways, for images on the web? I mean, the way browsers work is they copy the images down to a temporary directory on the client system. "All rights reserved" would presumably mean that this implicit copy wasn't allowed, so that can't be right. So either the web, as currently implemented is violating copyright on virtually every image on every webpage, or there's at least an implicit right granted.
Simon Brocklehurst
· 2 years ago
I guess part of the problem is that a photo is often worth more when the copyright is infringed, than if it was offered to be licensed in the first place. So, a photo that might be worth only a few dollars in the open market, can be worth thousands (or even more) to a photographer that can prove their copyright has been infringed. That's just the way the law is - for right, or wrong.
For commerical use, I often use photos from iStockphoto - the license terms are clear; and the prices are reasonable.
idid
· 2 years ago
That YouTube "piano playing cat" is playing a song I wrote and have a copyright on... I'm waiting for the cat to get signed by a media company before I move in to protect my "rights".
The best outcome from the Lane Hartwell exercise in "Internet Rights Management" will be that more people understand concepts like "Fair Use", "derivative work" and that lawyers expect to be paid... and they cost more than photographers.
I think Lane's going to eat the legal costs in the end but she will probably continue to fund the "good fight" to control the use of her work.
"The safest course is always to get permission from the copyright owner before using copyrighted material. The Copyright Office cannot give this permission."
True. But I still think it's better to ask forgiveness than permission for community donated "art". Why give power to others over art when "Fair Use" extends protections that can be assessed based upon 4 factors:
1.the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3.amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The Richter Scales guys are a non-profit, they do benefits gigs and they sell a few CD's. The act of creating the music video in question probably took a lot of free time away from family for a guy that has a day job.
Re-generating the video with a new image after the DMCA take-down cost another round of invested hours.
Let's support legal use of cultural artifacts in "folk art"
EFF: "Free the Richter Scale"
NOTE: the contested image and 10 others are still available for derivative works at:
watermarking is nice and dancy and I use "URL to the blog" as watermark on my doodles but what when somebody removes this copyright/watermark and place it on his blog servers - as Jason Calacanis did to me? How come this is not copyright violation?
please note also that perez hilton - the number one blogger in the world uses other people's images a lot but at least he links to the source...
Deepak
· 2 years ago
I think the problem lies with the content producers as well (although users need to understand CC, etc). Lane could have chosen a service more conducive for professional photographers, e.g. Smugmug. If you're that touchy about it, use the right safeguards.
JeffH
· 2 years ago
Robert, If I'm not mistaken, Lane's photo was taken from a client of her's web site where it was legally posted. Lane had little to no control over the security of her photo, even though she still owns the copyright. A watermark would not have been an viable solution in this case protect the image. I suppose she would have some legal ground to go after the client for letting her image get stolen. Probably not a viable alternative either...
JeffH
· 2 years ago
@4 I made this same point on another forum. You are free to shoot people without need for a model release. Where the need comes in is based on usage of the photo. If it is used for editorial or personal uses, no model release is needed. If it is used for commercial purposes a model release may be needed. So Richter Scale may have opened themselves up to liability not only from Lane for stealing her photo, but also from all of the people pictured in their video. Those people could conceivably come after Lane also, even though she did not consent to the commercial usages of the image. Land NEEDS to pursue this issue legally to protect her liability.
Thomas Hawk
· 2 years ago
If a picture is for “commercial use” you need a model release from each recognizable person in the picture. Not sure if The Richter Scales is a commercial enterprise.
Yes and no. It depends on the commercial use. For both editorial and artistic pursuits you generally do not.
For instance. I can take a photograph of anyone I want without a model release and publish it in a for profit newspaper or magazine.
The courts have also offered artists much broader protection for commercial use. When Erno Nussenzweig, a New York Hasidic Jew, tried to sue artist Philip-Lorca DiCorcia for unauthorized commercial use of his likeness (DiCorcia sells his photographs for thousands of dollar) the courts upheld that as the purpose of the photograph was artistic that DiCorcia did not need a model release.
In other cases where there is no artistic or editorial redeeming value model releases are needed. For instance, you can't take a photo of Robert Scoble and then put it on an advertisement that says Robert Scoble uses Crest toothpaste.
In the case of TRS, a fairly easy case could be made that their use of these imagery was both editorial commentary as well as artistic pursuit and thus no model releases would likely be needed for this use.
I've pilfered more than my fair share of images for my blog, but never from Flickr, because Flickr is clearly a place for people to share their photos. Flickr isn't a stock photo repository, and I don't think it should be treated as such.
I think a lot of us do play fast and hard on the net when it comes to copyrighted images, but I also think it's not fair to blame Flickr for our negligence. It's up to us to have better sense than to take photos from professional photographers and pretend they're cheap stock photos.
Neil
· 2 years ago
"Most human beings skip over that kind of text because it’s legaleze"
Most human beings don't want to use my photographs for their own purposes, either. If you want to use somebody else's work, you should do due diligence to find the licensing terms.
If you want to use somebody else's work and the licensing isn't clear, then you should contact them to discuss terms rather than stealing it. Full stop.
If you use somebody else's work without doing these things, don't whine when their lawyers contact you.
Dave McClure
· 2 years ago
@neil: your repeated use of the word 'should' isn't helpful, and doesn't scale. you *should* drive 55 miles per hour too, but if 90% of humanity is driving 65-70 and the other 10% is going even faster, how do you apply the legal penalty in any reasonable fashion?
in general, lawyers are a means of last resort, not a primary solution. artists "should" probably be hiring web marketing consultants to promote their work, not lawyers to "protect" it by threatening to sue people.
to paraphrase your last point: if you hire a lawyer instead of a marketer / salesperson, don't whine when you get lawsuits & expenses instead of customers & revenue.
Chris Brennan
· 2 years ago
@Dave: How does this scale: You have no right to use an image without permission.
Shun
· 2 years ago
Problem is, Flickr makes it trivially easy to infringe copyright. "I just need to right-click on this image, here..." Not to kick Flickr in the groin, because I believe that they are probably the innocent party, but seriously, without that capability, this would be a non-issue.
Another possibility is that the image was "stolen" by someone else, left unattributed, and Richter Scales came by the third-party web-site, saw that it was unattributed, and just grabbed the image. Who knew?
The web was created to allow, and indeed encourage, information redundancy. That means that there are going to be lots of copies of the same thing floating around all over the place. If this somehow does not fit into your business model...well, I don't know what to tell you. It's going to happen, regardless of any one person, or country's intent.
One thing I'm baffled by: how much money did Richter Scales get for producing their parody? I know they got over a million hits, but did they actually get paid anything? Does Hartwell deserve even 1/100th of whatever putative rewards came their way?
This is having such a negative Streisand Effect...I just don't see this going over well. I bet Lawrence Lessig is just burning to get in on this.
PXLated
· 2 years ago
In the past, before all the blogs and such, the biggest copyright infringers I've ever seen/known have been (probably still are) Powerpoint mavens...sales people and speakers. How many presentations have you seen with images? Bet very, very few have ever gotten permission or even thought about it. I've always warned my clients that they need to rein in all infringment or they're going to get burnt and as Robert mentioned, the damages are treble whatever the creator thinks they're worth.
Louis
· 2 years ago
don't most DSLRs have the ability to place your name ok the picture when taken? Hard to dispute in that case
JP Daigle
· 2 years ago
Am I missing something in the smugmug interface? I opened up Scoble's gallery (then a few other random galleries), brought up a few pictures, and unlike Flickr, I can't see any licensing information on any of the pictures. I can't find a way to search for creative-commons licensed pictures either. OK, so it offers optional watermarking, but it doesn't answer the basic licensing questions unless the info's hidden somewhere I haven't noticed.
Flickr may not make it super-obvious, but at least it's there on each photo page.
andy754
· 2 years ago
It's strange how so many photo "sharing" sites seem to enable pirating photos. It's not just that they make pirating easy, but that they don't even aid the viewer in legally using the photo if they want to.
As a photographer, I found this troubling some time ago and helped co-found www.photrade.com to try to tie together photo sharing to photo selling so that photographers have a simple one-stop system that allows them all the benefits the web has to offer. Why should photo selling be a separate site from photo sharing?
We're in a private invite-only beta right now (as we've bootstrapped the business and can't afford more servers) but I would love to give people a tour and show them how we plan to help photographers.
My apologies if this comes across as spam, just wanted to share the knowledge with a group of folks who sound like they care about this issue as much as I do.
Mike
· 2 years ago
Scoble,
Your photographs should be free, they suck. Horrible photography will never be worth anything. Same goes for the writing on blogs. Worthless. If you make money at it it's only because real writers are still working the print thing till it's dead but when they switch over you will be out of a job.
You have to make your living as a photographer to be considered anything above average. Getting "paid" for photos you'd gladly give away for free only means you suckered some dumbass.
Flickr is where you belong. That's why they love you.
Mike
Robert Scoble
· 2 years ago
Mike: I once made my living as a photographer. My photo of Ronald Reagan is still hanging in Silicon Valley's Republican Headquarters. I've probably been shooting before you were born. I notice you don't offer up your own photography so we can see how sucky you are. That speaks volumes. Also, at least part of my salary comes from doing the Photowalking show: http://www.podtech.net/home/search/photowalking
Nathan Weinberg
· 2 years ago
Robert! The link that lists the number of comments on your posts is KILLING my RSS reader. I get 50 new items every hour, or rather the same items appearing as new over and over again. If this is a feature you turned on, get rid of it! If it's a new Wordpress.com feature, tell Matt it's driving your readers nuts!
Robert Scoble
· 2 years ago
Nathan: I just turned it off. What reader are you using? I'm using Google Reader and I'm not seeing that behavior.
Bernie Goldbach
· 2 years ago
I know several professional photographers who electronically tag their images with Digimarc. Then they merely invoice the places where the images appear. It's a simple work process and more than pays the cost of Digimarc services.
People will always lift images without attribution because they don't understand copyright. If it right-clicks and saves, there's no issue, right?
Tech For Novices
· 2 years ago
Dear Sir
So you are promoting Smugmug ?
Tech For Novices
Robert Scoble
· 2 years ago
Tech For Novices: what should I promote? Lots of my pro photographer friends are on SmugMug and I like their service better than any other I've tried so far.
Chuck Olsen
· 2 years ago
I'm glad Thomas Hawk weighed in here. That pretty much clears the air.
I pilfer Google Images like crazy for some episodes of Vlog Santa, usually not paying any attention where they come from, since I consider it an artistic/editorial use.
Where it gets tricky though - I'm hosting videos on Revver, so there is potential for ad income. Granted, I've never offset the amount of time, etc. so it's at best "hobby income."
Likewise, if this video promotes Richter Scales, cd sales, other paid work, etc. than the video is really serving as a marketing tool.
Damn these gray areas.
nowe samochody
· 2 years ago
I agree with author.
dan
· 2 years ago
That is exactly why I use smugmug, if I don't want someone to use it, it gets watermarked, and no right click save as, but 90% of my pictures I don't care, but I do want attribution. Hey to each their own, but I agree that the problem is flickr.
Derrick
· 2 years ago
@33 Well I'd have to agree, your photos are average quality at best. I wouldn't say they suck. If you were a professional photographer, why did it take you so long to figure out how to use the ISO settings on your new camera? Should have been second nature. If you were that good you'd still be making money. The random shot of Reagan? Well, like they say..a broken clock is right twice a day.
As for dismissing Mike's criticism because he hasn't shown his photos....well I guess we should dismiss any future criticisms you have of any product or service, since you've never developed one
Mickael
· 2 years ago
I think the problem lies with the content producers as well
Nathan Weinberg
· 2 years ago
I'm using Bloglines, and since you turned off the the feature, the problem's stopped happening. Must be something in the way Wordpress changes the comment number that changes the new feed item state, and Bloglines much be too sensitive to it. Feedburner has a similar feature, but its never triggered a bug on this scale (50 new items every hour).
Hans Doddema
· 2 years ago
How does this work on Zoomr? There's a copy-paste function for photos to blogs, I didn't see any licensing mentioned along?
Wasn't Zooomr also working on some microstock marketplace thing? Something like this may work for Flickr to help photographers concerned about their photos ending up somewhere without attribution and/or revenue share.
Havagan
· 2 years ago
You figure that the pro photographers would be using a program like Photoshop and could just create their own watermark on the photos they post to Flickr. It smells like offloading of responsiblity to say "Flickr should have done what I could easily do."
None of this addresses the underlying copyright/use. Since we're discussing a single photo sharing service, we're ignoring how many other ways a photo is distributed online. Arguing about services isn't addressing the core need: the contradictions in legislation.
All Comments
And she would never get contacted about licensing the photos by anyone who saw them at Flickr either, because they'd be ugly as f*#$! Your example is one ugly photo because of the word splashed across the center of it, if I'm going to license a photo I don't want to have to imagine what it would look like without the watermark, not when there are hundreds of similar photos that don't have one available for me to browse.
That being said, making them private guarantees pretty much the same outcome, so that's not a great answer either.
This is another Mike. Because of my non-existent programming experience, pardon the newb quesiton but:
Is there a way for Flickr to post the image normal and if its downloaded, copied or taken from the site it can be watermarked in that transfer. (Copying would be difficult but id imagine that if you hit download there would be a way to add a few lines to watermark it).
Would that be at least some middle ground: You can see the image non-watermarked (as mike above points out in its beauty) but when you take the image it becomes watermarked.
Id love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks!!
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=9236447...
I don't see any indication of them being a non-profit. And when I go to buy their CD there is no indication there either.
For commerical use, I often use photos from iStockphoto - the license terms are clear; and the prices are reasonable.
The best outcome from the Lane Hartwell exercise in "Internet Rights Management" will be that more people understand concepts like "Fair Use", "derivative work" and that lawyers expect to be paid... and they cost more than photographers.
I think Lane's going to eat the legal costs in the end but she will probably continue to fund the "good fight" to control the use of her work.
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html
"The safest course is always to get permission from the copyright owner before using copyrighted material. The Copyright Office cannot give this permission."
True. But I still think it's better to ask forgiveness than permission for community donated "art". Why give power to others over art when "Fair Use" extends protections that can be assessed based upon 4 factors:
1.the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3.amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The Richter Scales guys are a non-profit, they do benefits gigs and they sell a few CD's. The act of creating the music video in question probably took a lot of free time away from family for a guy that has a day job.
Re-generating the video with a new image after the DMCA take-down cost another round of invested hours.
Let's support legal use of cultural artifacts in "folk art"
EFF: "Free the Richter Scale"
NOTE: the contested image and 10 others are still available for derivative works at:
http://blog.wired.com/business/2007/05/geeks_an...
please note also that perez hilton - the number one blogger in the world uses other people's images a lot but at least he links to the source...
Yes and no. It depends on the commercial use. For both editorial and artistic pursuits you generally do not.
For instance. I can take a photograph of anyone I want without a model release and publish it in a for profit newspaper or magazine.
The courts have also offered artists much broader protection for commercial use. When Erno Nussenzweig, a New York Hasidic Jew, tried to sue artist Philip-Lorca DiCorcia for unauthorized commercial use of his likeness (DiCorcia sells his photographs for thousands of dollar) the courts upheld that as the purpose of the photograph was artistic that DiCorcia did not need a model release.
In other cases where there is no artistic or editorial redeeming value model releases are needed. For instance, you can't take a photo of Robert Scoble and then put it on an advertisement that says Robert Scoble uses Crest toothpaste.
In the case of TRS, a fairly easy case could be made that their use of these imagery was both editorial commentary as well as artistic pursuit and thus no model releases would likely be needed for this use.
I think a lot of us do play fast and hard on the net when it comes to copyrighted images, but I also think it's not fair to blame Flickr for our negligence. It's up to us to have better sense than to take photos from professional photographers and pretend they're cheap stock photos.
Most human beings don't want to use my photographs for their own purposes, either. If you want to use somebody else's work, you should do due diligence to find the licensing terms.
If you want to use somebody else's work and the licensing isn't clear, then you should contact them to discuss terms rather than stealing it. Full stop.
If you use somebody else's work without doing these things, don't whine when their lawyers contact you.
in general, lawyers are a means of last resort, not a primary solution. artists "should" probably be hiring web marketing consultants to promote their work, not lawyers to "protect" it by threatening to sue people.
to paraphrase your last point: if you hire a lawyer instead of a marketer / salesperson, don't whine when you get lawsuits & expenses instead of customers & revenue.
Another possibility is that the image was "stolen" by someone else, left unattributed, and Richter Scales came by the third-party web-site, saw that it was unattributed, and just grabbed the image. Who knew?
The web was created to allow, and indeed encourage, information redundancy. That means that there are going to be lots of copies of the same thing floating around all over the place. If this somehow does not fit into your business model...well, I don't know what to tell you. It's going to happen, regardless of any one person, or country's intent.
One thing I'm baffled by: how much money did Richter Scales get for producing their parody? I know they got over a million hits, but did they actually get paid anything? Does Hartwell deserve even 1/100th of whatever putative rewards came their way?
This is having such a negative Streisand Effect...I just don't see this going over well. I bet Lawrence Lessig is just burning to get in on this.
Flickr may not make it super-obvious, but at least it's there on each photo page.
As a photographer, I found this troubling some time ago and helped co-found www.photrade.com to try to tie together photo sharing to photo selling so that photographers have a simple one-stop system that allows them all the benefits the web has to offer. Why should photo selling be a separate site from photo sharing?
We're in a private invite-only beta right now (as we've bootstrapped the business and can't afford more servers) but I would love to give people a tour and show them how we plan to help photographers.
My apologies if this comes across as spam, just wanted to share the knowledge with a group of folks who sound like they care about this issue as much as I do.
Your photographs should be free, they suck. Horrible photography will never be worth anything. Same goes for the writing on blogs. Worthless. If you make money at it it's only because real writers are still working the print thing till it's dead but when they switch over you will be out of a job.
Get over it. You're just a place holder.
Mike
Flickr is where you belong. That's why they love you.
Mike
People will always lift images without attribution because they don't understand copyright. If it right-clicks and saves, there's no issue, right?
So you are promoting Smugmug ?
Tech For Novices
That pretty much clears the air.
I pilfer Google Images like crazy for some episodes of Vlog Santa, usually not paying any attention where they come from, since I consider it an artistic/editorial use.
Where it gets tricky though - I'm hosting videos on Revver, so there is potential for ad income. Granted, I've never offset the amount of time, etc. so it's at best "hobby income."
Likewise, if this video promotes Richter Scales, cd sales, other paid work, etc. than the video is really serving as a marketing tool.
Damn these gray areas.
As for dismissing Mike's criticism because he hasn't shown his photos....well I guess we should dismiss any future criticisms you have of any product or service, since you've never developed one
Wasn't Zooomr also working on some microstock marketplace thing? Something like this may work for Flickr to help photographers concerned about their photos ending up somewhere without attribution and/or revenue share.
None of this addresses the underlying copyright/use. Since we're discussing a single photo sharing service, we're ignoring how many other ways a photo is distributed online. Arguing about services isn't addressing the core need: the contradictions in legislation.