The European Court of Justice has determined that a website must get permission from the copyright owner of an image before it can use the picture itself – even if that photo or illustration is readily available elsewhere.
That may seem like an obvious conclusion, however, the official advice delivered to the Euro court by its general advocate argued otherwise, with disagreement centered around the legal definition of what represents a "new public" when it comes to publication.
The question asked of the ECJ was: "Whether the concept of 'communication to the public' covers the posting on a website of a photograph which has been previously published on another website without any restrictions preventing it from being downloaded and with the consent of the copyright holder."
The court ruled on Tuesday that yes, it does. And that has huge implications for anyone in charge of a website.
[...] The implications are huge: it will embolden copyright holders to demand payment from any website that hosts their images. And that could potentially force millions of websites to take down all their pictures if they are hit repeatedly with payment demands.
It will also mean that every website – even school websites – will have to make sure that they only post images that they have permission to post. And pretty much everyone is going to have to reeducate themselves about what is and is not allowable online.
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https://techpinions.com/is-firefox-search-worth-375myear-to-a-yahoo-buyer/45144
As the search deal between Yahoo and Firefox is not standing on the winning side seen in profit numbers as it seems lately, a possible Yahoo buyer could have less interest in sponsoring Firefox as it is a very expensive contract.
If there would be a chance for a possible buyer to cancel the contract, Mozilla suddenly would be without main sponsor.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 09 2018, @11:46PM
Quickly, quickly! There was no time to waste. They had to get everything ready before next month, or it would be too late. Yes, these three men firmly believed this to be the case; they firmly believed that the apocalypse was imminent.
The apocalypse. To them, it was only 35 days away, and so their haste was understandable. This was why they were rapidly stockpiling supplies in their underground bunker in preparation for the end of the world. Would they be able to meet their goals? They can and they did, with just a week to spare. But upon doing this, something went terribly wrong.
The supplies were simply too delectable. At first, it was just one. Then, it was another, then another, and then yet more. The men continued playing with the toys and breaking them, all the while convincing themselves that just one more can't hurt anything. It did not take long before they had expended all of their supplies. And the apocalypse, they believed, was only a day away.
They couldn't believe it. How had this happened? How!? They had captured over 200 cute, young children to violate after the apocalypse occurred, but now they were all utilized and beginning to rot. The men wondered, 'Why were we so greedy!?' The men feared, 'How will we survive the end of the world now!?' The men cried, 'Why are children so fragile!?' They wept, cried, and screamed, but the corpses of the expended children simply continued to rot.
Some would call the men foolish. Others would understand what had transpired, since ignoring such delicacies would be very difficult. But regardless of which view one holds, one thing was certain: The men were tragic victims. After all, their intent was simply to survive what they believed to be the end of the world, and yet all those children broke far too easily. Without a doubt, the men's fundamental rights had been violated. It was a tragedy of the highest order.
But then these men - these kind-hearted men - were given another chance. You see, the apocalypse they so firmly believed would happen never actually occurred. At first they were surprised and confused, but then their surprise and confusion became relief. Their calculations had been off all along. The apocalypse, they now believed, would actually occur in two months. The men smiled to themselves, their hope restored and their hearts strong.
It was time to begin gathering supplies. And, this time, they would not make the mistake of gathering so little...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday August 09 2018, @11:50PM (6 children)
How about an explicit exemption for non-profit schools, dear IP leeches ?
Besides that, it's pretty natural that "he did it first" is not an excuse to profit from someone's work without permission.
And since everyone has cameras, and there's a lot of CC stuff, and there are multiple image banks, it's not exactly difficult to get material on most topics.
(Score: 5, Informative) by edIII on Friday August 10 2018, @12:19AM (1 child)
This is true. 10 years ago I took over control of a few systems, including the website, of a medium sized business. I worked with the web developer to remove all images that we couldn't prove we own. That proof had to be that it was available online, with explicit royalty free permissions for others to use. We made a copy of it. The other accepted proof was a receipt, for a royalty-free image. All web pages and media content had an accompanying manifest that detailed the sources.
Of course, none of this will stop the vultures and bullies. Even though we had iron clad proof of proper licensing, those assclowns at YouTube constantly allowed our stuff to get flagged for IP violations. What was so damned frustrating, was that the people behind the flagging claimed ownership, but were too fucking stupid to realize they were going after all the legal users as well as the IP infringers. YouTube didn't make it easy at all to contest these bullshit DMCA takedowns either.
So even with a receipt, you will still be fucked with. The only license that really works anymore is the CC. That's only because there aren't some fraudsters with the balls to claim ownership yet.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @08:02PM
So, contact the company, ask for a refund on your purchase, and let them know they will not have your business again. Problem solved?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 10 2018, @01:05AM
From an American point of view, this decision doesn't look really great. But, what about licenses like Creative Commons? It doesn't seem to great a burden, all things considered, to only use images that are actually licensed for public use.
Although, fair use seems a lot better. At least as long as people are conforming to the intentions of the fair use laws.
ICE is having a Pretti Good season.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @06:06AM (1 child)
In the Netherlands there is an exemption for education. But it doesn't apply to the public internet, it applies to the classroom. There is no objection to using the kid's presentation in the classroom, but publishing anything on the internet needs permission from the copyright holder. As copyright law is harmonized across the EU to a large extent I wouldn't be surprised if this is true Germany as well.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @12:53PM
This appears to also true in Germany, and this is what the child was responsible for doing.
Unfortunately, the school (not the child) later uploaded the presentation to their public website, and shit ensued.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @08:05PM
Schools already have an exception for educational usage. They do not have an exception for marketing usage, which was the purpose of the website.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by realDonaldTrump on Thursday August 09 2018, @11:55PM
But we had a very young intern who was doing the pictures for my campaign, for the digital. And our intern was using stock pictures. Very nice, right, very fair. But it wasn't so nice. Because we wanted to honor our great, and very brave soldiers. But a picture of Fake Nazis slipped in there by mistake!!!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @01:10AM
That's certainly how I learned good manners -- ask permission first before using other's work. Certainly in the USA and many other countries, copyright rests with the author/creator unless specific contract language such as "work for hire" is in place.
In the engineering books I've been involved with we either got explicit permission to (re)use photos or graphics (in a very few places), or else we had the figure done by our own technical artist from scratch. One photo came to us from a friend with permission, but he didn't remember that he got it from a pro photographer--who subsequently contacted our publisher and settlement of a few hundred dollars royalty was negotiated.
Since then (first book out in mid-1990s) I can't count the number of times figures from our books have been scanned and straight copied on websites and in theses. Sometimes there is a half-hearted attempt at giving credit, but often the author pretends that it is their own figure! I probably could look up and count the number of times that an author asked politely--that would be less than a dozen.
One of the most blatant was a chapter we wrote for free, contributed to a book for students. The publisher of the book also published magazines sold to a commercial audience. Without telling us, they took our short chapter and used it as an article in one of their magazines. We were able to negotiate based on the price per word paid to their other magazine authors, plus a small penalty for being stupid.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @01:44AM (1 child)
Reading German media, a pupil took a nice picture from a website (no restrictions on downloading) of a nice place, made by a professional photographer, and pasted that into his school report.
The school then put that school report, with the picture visible, on their own web page, as part of a "cool things our students do" page.
The photographer asked the school to cease and desist using his picture on their web site.
I don't think this was a bad or unusual decision.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by nitehawk214 on Friday August 10 2018, @03:25AM
Also the title is needlessly clickbaity. The photographer asked the school not to post the image, not the child. If it had never been posted, nobody would have cared.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @01:55AM (1 child)
At first glance I saw Euro Cunt.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @02:22AM
You're going blind, and I can guess why.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday August 10 2018, @03:52AM (2 children)
-er.
A professional photographer took a photo at burning man that later went viral on some other guy's website. The actual photographer never got any credit for it.
There's a certain nature photographer who devotes quite a lot of time and effort to locating unlicensed copies of his works. He really shouldn't have to.
The copyright forum at webmasterworld discusses mostly how to track down content scrapers. One real good way that's worked for me is to google and entire sentence out of the middle of one of my pages, in quotes.
It's very common for machine-generated linkspam and clickbait websites to use content they scraped from legit sites. After a while they all stopped stealing complete pages, and replaced that with just one paragraph per source page - so a full clickbait page would have one paragraph each from dozens of legit sites.
I mentioned that when I interviewed at Google. My interviewer said that's called "tiling".
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @04:28AM
for images, search with tineye.com I've had very good luck with this image search engine.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday August 10 2018, @05:52AM
I am absolutely serious.
I was quite puzzled that I couldn't just pop in my payment card number. Rather I entered my email so that a week or two later a sales rep emailed me.
She wanted to know what I planned to use their strip for - local, national, worldwide, dead-trees or online.
I told her my website had international appeal. About a month later she got back to me with the info that they would charge $250 per year. I regard that as reasonable.
However, Scott Adams isn't going to have a whole lot of luck with legal licensing until they can make the process a whole lot more automated, or at least a whole lot more expeditious.
In other news, DailyKos was built with the very same Scoop CMS that Kuro5hin was. Kos hired Rusty Foster to build him a political site back in the day.
At k5 I could run a self-service text ad for ten bucks for I think 20,000 impressions. The only part that wasn't automated was Rusty's quick glance to approve the ad.
So I figured I'd do the same at DailyKos, but it asked me to email their ad department with my phone number so a sales rep could call me.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @04:02PM (1 child)
sometimes the courts are just plain dumb!
TECHNICALLY the internet only works because copies can be made.
any law against the "very nature of the internet" is just plain dumb!
a book can be copied but for a book to work it doesn't need to be copiable .
i find laws offensive that go against the nature of things...
asking or rather informing the original uploader is a act of courtesy not a requirement of the law!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @07:32PM
photographers who wish to enforce this are basically just slaveware peddlers. they could get paid once by a party to take some pictures, but that's not good enough for these masonic fuckers. they just want to take one picture then get paid for every copy forever. fuck them and their stupid pictures.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 10 2018, @08:07PM
No you moran. It's not "stealing". It's "unauthorized use" which magically becomes "fair use" when you do it for education, which is why this verdict is a farce.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday August 11 2018, @06:25AM
1. upload ORLY meme to imageboard/forum
2. tip author
3. site gets shut down
4. no ???
5. PROFIT!
The only thing I agree on, DO NOT MAKE EXCEPTIONS FOR CHILDREN
Children are exploited for crimes here, because they get lighter sentences or no sentence. There MUST NOT be any practical advantage to employing children, for their OWN SAKE.
Account abandoned.