9th Circuit: Thumbnails Are Big Enough For Fair Use 456
An anonymous reader submits: "According to an article from law.com, yesterday's decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (U.S.) will have far-reaching effects on web publishing. From the article: '... The court found that reproducing photographs to create thumbnail images is a fair use of the material, but displaying full-sized images violates the copyright owner's exclusive right to publicly display his works....But the court found that displaying the full-sized images through linking and framing was not transformative and harmed the market for the original photographs.' One lawyer is quoted as saying, 'It's basically going to do away with linking or framing without permission.'"
Penalities for Violations? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Penalities for Violations? (Score:2, Interesting)
Which makes you wonder just how many people are going to file lawsuits against Google soon. Too bad I really loved their image search.
But what about enforcement? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:But what about enforcement? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:But what about enforcement? (Score:2, Insightful)
In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
and therefore drains my bandwidth....
and deprives me of any ad revenue or anything else as a result....
I have to provide permission first.
Hmmm... is there a problem here?
Note, this doesnt' stop someone from creating a thumbnail and using it to link to my site... where someone can see the whole image.
-Restil
Re:In other words (Score:4)
If you want to use countermeasures, such as checking HTTP_REFERER, hacking your web server to verify that a banner ad loaded first, etc., that's your right, but it might just drive the people you want away from your site.
If you want to make it available that way, and complain when people "cheat" you or "steal" from you by "directly" linking to your image, that's also your right, but it's not going to accomplish anything terribly useful. If it's on the web, and it's anything anyone gives a darn about, it's going to be looked at, captured, stored, manipulated, and shared. I miss the days when more people thought that was a good thing than not.
Re:In other words (Score:2)
The whole thing is a sense of ownership, and at the moment dignity and trust to not just steal other peoples work. And don't give me the "it's just digital, I'm not costing him any money" argument, because you are. Hosting costs money. Bandwidth costs money.
If you think you can violate copyrights just because it's put on the web, I have a clue-by-four I'd like you to meet.
Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
you put a poster of a painting you did up to advertize your exibit at the musium.......some person comes along, whips out his industrial imaging copier to digitize the poster as good as possable, he puts the poster back, and a week later he is using it to promote his [enter project here]. by putting the poster up, you should have to deal with folks taking a picture of it with their cameras, but to take your poster, copy it then use the exact copy to promote whatever it is I am doing is Copyright violation. even though I put it out in full access of the general public.
I however do think it would be nice if folks would just lighten up and only get pissy if they are not sighted as the creater of the work (when there is no wide spread distrobution with no compenation going on)
Re:In other words (Score:4, Insightful)
Tired comparisons to stealing your couch don't make the link correct. While it might not be terribly courteous to spider someone's webspace or link into it, it's a hazard of putting your stuff on the web. Copyright is nice and all, but without enforcement, it means bupkus. And unless you're http://riaa.org [slashdot.org], you won't be getting any of that.
Executive summary: if you don't want people to look at it except on your terms, publish a book, not a web site.
Re:In other words (Score:2)
The issue at hand is not as to whether or not you want people to access it. The question is whether or not I want people to rip me off. Obviously, the answer is no.
The whole problem with this is that morality and integrity, and general accountability has gone out the window and replace with this "But I can do it so easy on the internet it can't be wrong!" mentality.
Re:In other words (Score:2)
Re:In other words (Score:4, Insightful)
Nonsense analogy.
What makes index.htm magic? Or what permits me to visit www.nerdfarm.org? I didn't get your explicit permission to view it. Do I need it? It's agreed that no, by setting up something that will respond to my request, you have implicitly given me and everyone else permission to view it.
So why is www.nerdfarm.org/fatdrunkandstupid.jpg magically different? You've put it up there in directly accessible form. Don't want me to get it? Indicate that through the accepted protocol of HTTP_REFERRER; if I forge that, I'm misrepresenting myself, and that way lies fraud. Likewise, don't want spiders? Create a robot.txt file. If I spider you anyway, you've revoked the implicit yes for spiders, so by ignoring it I'm in the wrong.
But the default for web content is you can get what you can URL. Given that there are ways to indicate that you don't want that default, that's what should be done -- not a change to that default assumption.
Re:In other words (Score:3)
Spamming is not the same unless it's a publically listed e-mail address.
Re:In other words (Score:4, Insightful)
Lit Crit 101 (Score:3, Funny)
Dude, if someone is dumb enough to go to the trouble of photocopying an entire John Grisham novel, they've already got trouble. Double that for anything by Tom Clancy. Do these guys get paid by the pound, or what?
Re:In other words (Score:2)
loading an image from someone else's site on your website w/o permission: bad
linking an exteral image w/o permission: fine
everything else can be derived from here.
Re:In other words (Score:3, Interesting)
After all, you put your e-mail address, an openly specified protocol, on a public network, for anyone to access. It's just plain absurd to whine that people dare to actually use the methods in place to send you commercial e-mail.
I'm sure the Direct Marketing Association is glad to hear that you've opted in to their grand sche^H^H^H^Hpla^H^H^Hopportunity.
Re:In other words (Score:3, Insightful)
Precisely. I totally agree with alecto. I am usually in favor of protecting copyright and the like, but this goes too far. You have posted your images on the Internet. Not in a magazine, not at a gallery, not in a museum. The Internet ! If you don't like what the Internet is (a shared medium) then don't put your pictures there! Nobody is forcing you to put your pictures there, if they're proprietary or important to you in some other way, password protect your site - a .htaccess file in the images directory will work just fine.
This ruling is absolutely ridiculous and I so very much hope that the EFF takes issue with this ... in a big way. I'll be writing my check out next payday ...
Re:In other words (Score:2)
I hate to break it to you, but the only places making money on the Web are porn sites. Advertising banners are about as useful as window screens on a submarine.
Re:In other words (Score:4, Informative)
ShackNews [shacknews.com]
Fuckedcompany [fuckedcompany.com]
There are others.
Re:In other words (Score:2)
While we're on this topic, please don't reply and say that Amazon is a profitable venture; they get billions of dollars per year and lose all but a couple million.
Re:In other words (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:In other words (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking at it in a broader context - lets say that in a few years the whole web has moved to XML with Stylesheets to format it. And some popular news site, lets say CNN.com, has a /news.xml on its server which they would normally display to the end users with their /news.xsl stylesheet. So I decide that I like their news data, and I want to make a search engine to help people find news from all sorts of sites - theirs in particular. To help people find things easier (and of course to force them to stay on my site since eyeballs==$$$) I decide that while I'll give a link to the source, I'll at the same time take that XML content and use my own stylesheet to reformat it for display inline in my site. The browser is still retrieving the XML file from CNN.com's server, and all I'm doing is overriding the appearance of it for display in my site. Is that fair use?
I can't imagine anyone who understands the issue thinking that it's fair use. Deep linking is not theft, but inlining other people's content is. Plain and simple.
Re:In other words (Score:3, Funny)
The same situation could apply to music or any other media. You can right now tell a browser to play a music clip when it loads a page, that clip can be on any server. So if a band puts up a web page with clips of their copyrighted music on it so people can listen to it, I can embed a link to those music files on my web page. When people come to my web page they hear them, and even if I offer a link to the bands site in attribution it's still not fair use... it's not copying either in the true sense of the word, but it's violating the spirit of the copyright laws -- What it comes down to is that you're not allowed to profit from other people's copyrighted work without permission.
Tell me how inlining copyrighted images is different than inlining copyrighted text or music? And what makes one fair use and the others not?
Re:In other words (Score:5, Informative)
It would seem that the terminology being used is somewhat confusing. "Linking" appears to indicate a direct URL reference in (say) an IMG tag, rather than a "link to a page" (A tag).
Essentially there is no problem with providing a link to the original page, where the image will be displayed in context, but pulling the full image out of context is an issue.
From previous legal challanges and discussions, it would seem that "framing" is much less clearly defined. Providing a banner which indicates that you are supplying content as a proxy (or similar circumstance) appears to be okay, but having a site embed content from another site (say in another frame) where there is no indication that the content is not yours, would be considered framing.
This tends to happen most often when the site with the content has frames, and you have frames (in both cases, HTML frames), and you can link directly to one of their frames without the rest being displayed.
yes there's a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't want other people transcluding your images, just set up your server to not serve the images unless the referer header points back at your site. Don't go whining to the government just because you don't know how to set up a web server to check a referer header. Read the server documentation instead.
Re:In other words (Score:2)
,br>
So how big is a thumbnail? (Score:3, Interesting)
--Jeff
Re:So how big is a thumbnail? (Score:2)
*Sue
Re:So how big is a thumbnail? (Score:5, Funny)
Don't you mean that... (Score:2)
Re:Don't you mean that... (Score:2)
as in, "big enough for fair use purposes".
Personally, I think it's bullshit.
It's not like copyright laws stop anybody anyway.
That's still wrong (Score:2)
Well, it finally happened. (Score:2, Interesting)
but to be honest, i never really expected any less to happen
Re:Well, it finally happened. (Score:2, Interesting)
There's nothing in the ruling about linking to an article. You can also still post a thumbnail as a link.
Those independent news sites can still post links to other sites, but don't get to steal their bandwidth. Personally I appreciate sites that are largely text based - they generally have something worthwhile to READ.
Bah! More enforcement (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bah! More enforcement (Score:3, Informative)
You might want to check out www.perl.org [perl.org]. It's terribly obscure, I know, but the tiny handful of programmers there have created a text-processing language that could "sift through" millions of lines of httpd server logs in a matter of minutes or even seconds, catalog the referrers and hit counts to a database, and then automatically email alerts to the legal department about infringers operating on a large enough scale to be worth pursuing. Who knows, but you might even be able to interface this "perl" with another tool called "whois", which can be used to determine the full address of the party legally responsible for the infringing domain, and maybe even use the DNS system to figure out the identity of their service provider. How cool is that?!
Ahem. For organizations with sysadmins experienced enough to apply tools more sophisticated than cat, tracking down significant bandwidth and IP thieves is trivial. And if you don't think suing significant violators is effective, go talk to Shawn Fanning. Stopping insignificant offenders generally requires little more than an email to the abuse address at their web host.
Re:Bah! More enforcement (Score:3, Funny)
Isn't there a wizard in MS Frontpage that will do this for me??
Yeah, my boss uses it the whole time. It goes something like:
[Next][Next]["Scott, write some code to make this work"][Finish]
Sounds right to me (Score:5, Interesting)
IOW, the ruling protects me from you passing off my work as yours. But it does let you borrow a thumbnail of my images, perhaps to link in a fair way to my site. Sounds good to me.
So what is a thumbnail defined as? (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if that's sufficient to get around the ruling.
Re:So what is a thumbnail defined as? (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably not. If you read the Court's discussion, you would have seen that thumbnails were ok, in part, because they had been sufficiently transformed from the originals to be unsuitable to serve the same purpose as the originals.
I would be that most 99% thumbnails could substitute pretty well for the original pictures.
This is a good thing - the frame content war. (Score:4, Interesting)
If this isn't allowed, finally we'll be able to have some place where the author of the work has either the rest of his website recognized or has it branched away from the "link-pirate".
Re:This is a good thing - the frame content war. (Score:2, Informative)
Right here on /. (Score:2)
Mixed Feelings (Score:2)
Re:Mixed Feelings (Score:4, Informative)
The ruling was against linking directly to images. More specifically, it was for linking directly to and displaying images without any of their original context.
People could see Kelly's images without knowing they came from Kelly's site, or without any of the information he might wish to have associated with them.
To add insult to injury, they'd use his bandwidth to serve them up!
Re:Mixed Feelings (Score:3, Insightful)
No, images are displayed by the browser, not the "site".
All that Arriba did was construct an HTML command to request that Kelly's webserver give the image to the end user's browser. Kelly's webserver said "yes" to the request with the full knowledge of the refering page. The fact that Kelly doesn't check the refering html page or use some other programmatic control means that Kelly has placed his image in a format where the HTML standard allows framing. The court today said essentially that these acts mean nothing. That's crap -- if Kelly didn't want to expose his image to the full capabilities of HTML, he should have used some other technology.
referer (Score:2, Insightful)
Simple. Use technology, not the law.
Re:referer (Score:2, Insightful)
images.google.com got it right, then? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:images.google.com got it right, then? (Score:2)
Re:images.google.com got it right, then? (Score:2, Informative)
Nothing about Google really makes much of a basis for legal argument, because they're always willing to back down. Same deal with www.archive.org.
Good, saves some people trouble. (Score:4, Informative)
$WEB_MONKEY[0] at $SITE[0] can't put a
link like this: <img src="http://$SITE[1]/image.jpeg">
without being smacked down by
the admins at $SITE[1]. In the early
days of the Web people who resented such
linking would hack Apache to demand the
right referrer before serving an image.
It's still the better solution in my view,
but the courts are right to intervene.
This is not a troll... (Score:5, Interesting)
What effect does this decision have on everyone in the world who isn't in the USA?
Would enforcement rely on a Skylarov effect [slashdot.org], or an 'effective place of publication' ruling [slashdot.org], or both?
ninth court? expect a reversal (Score:5, Interesting)
some references:
"Let's say this is a court on the cutting edge of jurisprudence," Richards said of the 9th Circuit court. "It may be the most reversed court." [mpp.org]
"Of course, this is the Ninth Circuit, the most reversed court in the country, so the road is likely to be bumpy." [donoharm.org.uk]
"Our final area of concern is that we are talking about the Ninth Circuit. That Circuit is much too large, which has made it difficult to develop any collegiality. As a result, judges have not developed common legal approaches to their decisions, and they are often even unaware of each other's decisions. The case law that has developed from this situation is often conflicting within the Circuit. Further, as judges have learned to act as laws unto themselves, they have frequently made unconstitutional decisions. It is by far the most reversed court in the country." [senate.gov]
jon
Re:ninth court? expect a reversal (Score:2)
there, hopefully that will help.
jon
Re:ninth court? expect a reversal (Score:3, Insightful)
I might be wrong, but I believe there is in fact only one higher court, the United States Supreme Court.
Better solution! (Score:2, Funny)
SetEnvIfNoCase Referer www\.yourdomain\.com good_referer
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
Allow from env=good_referer
ErrorDocument 403 http://goatse.cx/hello.jpg
</FilesMatch>
Re:Better solution! (Score:2)
The hypocrites are posting.... (Score:4, Troll)
Why is that bad? Why is that "against a free and open Internet"? That protects copyright. That's ALL. A photograph is copyright by the original author. So is a written work. So is source code. In fact, copyright and license is all that's stopping a popular enemy of many of the readers of this site from running off with a lot of source code and using it in proprietary products. This law protects the originators of work. It gives the author the ability to control and decide how that work will be used.
Anyone can still create excerpts of works for research, indexing and review purposes such as short links to stories, quotes of larger works, and now, thumbnails. This law extends the long-respected and venerated copyright law into the realm of digital images, and in what I personally feel is a responsible and very fair way.
For once, the law appears to be creating and extending a statute by case law in a fair way, in line with the intention of the original law, and it's getting slagged by some of the people it protects. How disappointing.
Try to weigh the rights of an author to own their labour vs. a free for all. This law protects and extends the right of each of us to create something, and either give it away, or sell it, or distribute it in some other novel way. Without that, anyone can take anything any of us does and use it in any way they wish, without our permission, and without compensation, and most importantly, without any concerns as to the intent for the use of the work originally.
Thus endeth the rant. Just think.
Re:The hypocrites are posting.... (Score:2)
Re:The hypocrites are posting.... (Score:2)
-Paul Komarek
Re:The hypocrites are posting.... (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, copyright and license is all that's stopping a popular enemy of many of the readers of this site from running off with a lot of source code and using it in proprietary products.
Umm, if there were no copyright law, there wouldn't be any proprietary products in the first place.
Being against this ruling and against copyright law is not hypocritical. Being for the ruling and against copyright law is. (Being against copyright law and for the GPL, except as the lesser of many evils, also is).
Trade secret law (Score:3, Insightful)
Umm, if there were no copyright law, there wouldn't be any proprietary products in the first place.
Yes there would; they'd just be protected under trade secret + contract law rather than copyright law. Copyright infringement cases are generally civil cases, and damages usually don't top five figures per work infringed. Trade secret cases [execpc.com], on the other hand, carry even bigger damages, plus jail time for all involved.
Being against this ruling and against copyright law is not hypocritical. Being for the ruling and against copyright law is.
I agree with many of the general principles of copyright, and I agree with this ruling, but I don't agree with the specifics of the implementation of copyright in the United States. For instance, I don't agree with the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA as interpreted in recent cases (the courts have flatly ignored many of the exceptions), and I don't agree with life+70 copyright terms [wikipedia.com]. I also don't like companies whose products teach a message of sharing but who do not themselves share (i.e. license to individual webmasters under reasonable terms) their own IP [preciousmoments.com]. Does that make me a hypocrite?
Re:The hypocrites are posting.... (Score:2)
Hmmm, seems to me, that it is copyright that created a popular enemy of many of the readers of this site. If there was no copyright, that enemy would not exist, and there would be no reason to protect this code from them, and through circular logic, no need for copyright.
Re:The hypocrites are posting.... (Score:2)
Re:oops (Score:2)
Intellectual Property Rights (Score:2, Insightful)
This is absurd. (Score:4, Insightful)
This is absurd.
Imagine some site has a web page that displays a picture surrounded by adds. Lets keep things simple, and say there is one image for the picture and one image for the ad. A normal web page directs your browser to request the image for the picture, tells you where to display it, tells it to request the ad image, and then where to display it. (actually, the ad probably comes first!).
In this case, you could view the html source yourself, type in the URL for the image you want, and voila, just the image would pop up. No copyright infringement, because they have built their site to provide the image to any anonymous client on demand.
But now if I write a page that instructs your browser to go to the other site and request the original image, then surround it with flowers instead of ads, this is copy right infringement. But they gave it to you on your request.
Its like if I tell you, go to Addison-Welsey, and ask them to give you a free copy of the latest Britney Spears Bio, and they'll give it to you, and they do, and then charge me with copyright infringement.
If they don't want people to access the data anonymously, all they have to do in not give it away anonymously
In our simple exam, the site could post a single gif image that has the adds and the original image combined.
Re:This is absurd. (Score:5, Informative)
Mod this guy up.
I worked for an artist one time on a website to sell nice framed prints of his artwork [kennethwyatt.com].
The trick was that the guy didn't want to put any pictures of his art on the website.
I told him very clearly and simply that he had two options. He could choose to give anyone who wanted it tiny versions of the art for free... a 1024x768 jpeg of any given piece of large framed art probably suffers about 90% resolution loss... and hope that the people who liked them would buy the full-sized wall-hangers, or he could not put them on his website and expect people to buy works of art they couldn't see.
I convinced him after a little while, and he made a few thousand dollars selling stuff. Then one of his relatives convinced him that people were stealing from him by downloading the images of the website, so he took most of them down. Now he doesn't make much money any more.
I just checked the site again, and a few of the pictures are back up... at a greatly reduced filesize. I bet he starts making money again.
Re:This is absurd. (Score:2)
Re:This is absurd. (Score:3, Interesting)
Technically you may be right. But that's not the point (IMHO). It's about the user's perception. If you downloaded a copyrighted image from my site and put it on your site, that would be illegal copyright infringment (whether you think it should be or not). Linking to the original image on my site from your site looks identical to the user - how can they tell without reading the html what you have done?? Therefore the end result is the same (the user thinks you have something to do with the image, that you owned or created it) when in fact you did not.
If this is recent... (Score:2, Informative)
And these other articles as well dating back to Nov 1999.
Note 276 In Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., a California federal district court ruled that the defendant's use of "thumbnail" images in its search engine was fair use and did not infringe on the rights of plaintiff photographer. [jurispub.com]
[mishpat.net]
* Thumbnail photo not infringing *
Ditto.com uses an automated program to crawl through the web collecting and building a database of images. When a user puts a specific term into Ditto.com's search engine, thumbnail reproductions of those images pop up. A California photographer who specializes in images filed a copyright infringement suit. A Southern California federal judge handed a preliminary ruling in favor of Ditto.com
My girlfriend always used to tell me... (Score:2, Funny)
Thanks Slashdot. When I get back from work today I can shout to her "Hey! Size does matter after all."
No wait.....
The relevant site (Score:4, Interesting)
Note: Reality filter in effect, suggested changes added in parentheses.
On another note, this decision really has nothing to do with hyperlinking, only with embdding other content into a page without attributing it, i.e. either using frames or the SRC of an IMG. The only way it even vaguely relates to hyperlinks is that it's not really clear under this decision whether creating a hyperlink to an image directly instead of linking to the page that contains the image is forbidden. I don't see any language to that effect, but it could be considered unattributed display nonetheless.
Re:The relevant site (Score:3)
Why, in this context, is Kelly, who produced the pictures and who hosts them and whose bandwidth was serving the pictures up, a money-grubber, but Arriba, which was trying to make a buck off of Kelly's work without paying a dime or even paying to host the pictures, isn't?
Re:The relevant site (Score:2)
and here's a yummy quote!
Clearly this person is either ignorant or stupid.
Size (Score:3, Funny)
Application to .m3u (Score:2)
The easy solution... (Score:3, Interesting)
Just include some text imbedded on the images on your site with your URL. That way, if another site links to your image, at least you get some advertising out of it.
Now here's a related question... if I take someone else's picture and convert it to colored HTML text, like the random babe @sciifyer [newsqueak.com], is that considered fair use?
Posting public URLs is implicit permission to link (Score:3, Insightful)
IANAL, but as I see it, by posting somthing on the web via a publicly-accessable URL you are giving implicit permission to everyone on the planet to view, and link to, your content. I would imagine that failing to have any kind of access control mechanism on your site would provide the would-be linker with an automatic defense. You can't put up a billboard in a public place and then complain that the wrong kind of people are looking at it, or that someone took a picture of it.
If you want to control the way people use the content you put on the web, you need to rely on technical means, and not the law, as your primary means of defense. If you want to control deep linking, set up your site so that it requires a password, or cookies, or requires a referrer field from an internal URL. Without some attempt to control access, I'd imagine you'd have a very hard time convincing a judge and jury that you were not giving the world an implicit license
Big thumbnails (Score:3, Redundant)
"Copyright" Anti-Consumer Terrorism (Score:2)
"But the court found that displaying the full-sized images through linking and framing was not transformative and harmed the market for the original photographs."
This is sheer thuggery, as is much of current so-called "copyright" law. Simply pointing to an image which was voluntarily, knowingly posted by the owner (or authorized party) on a publicly supported Internet[work] specifically for anonymous viewing, is gloatingly labelled "theft" by word-twisting professional liars.
Bullpucky.
The better anology is a man who is accused of theft because he pointed to a window, whereupon curious onlookers went over to look at the window and what was behind it, namely publicly mounted curiosities which the arrogant owner had expected only to be viewed by a very few people who even knew of the location of the shop, let alone that odd curiosities were there to be seen with which to begin.
If the arrogant owner hadn't wanted people on the public sidewalk to see his curiosities for free through his window, then why did he put them in the damn window with which to begin? He could have charged admission for people to enter a private room, or he could have put a curtain over the inside of the window, to be whipped aside only for paying customers. He is NOT ENTITLED, however, to essentially steal the public sidewalk from the public who paid for that sidewalk!
The courts are populated by bubbling morons who've taken it into their pinheads that their smarmy success at political cronyism means they are real judges. A plague on the lot of them.
Regulate them! (Score:2, Interesting)
Let's see an Australian wondering, why this sort of things are not government regulated and require all this pricey legal procedings instead...
After all, it is so much easier to pay taxes to support the additional government machinery and then you just file a few forms and have your problem resolved by a government employee! And you can even appeal a decision you don't like -- to the employes's boss...
Funny first impression (Score:2)
On the other hand, maybe this law will help end one of the many html frame abuses. Maybe we'll see more laws in the future which make bad web design illegal. Imagine if popping up windows you didn't ask for was declared vandalism, whether done by javascript or some installed program's registration reminder or advert. That would, perhaps, be the greatest day in gui history.
-Paul Komarek
Disturbing case (Score:2)
If my users need a specific image from your site, why should they have to download the image, which they need, and all that surrounds it, which they don't? The net shouldn't be slowed down by such nonsense. Also, your server bandwidth is wasted because your server has to upload the image which they want, along w/ alotta stuff they don't.
What about Google.com's image searcher, which allows images from sites displayed in-frame? What if I want to include an image from your website in my site, but just that image, and in a specific place? Why should the efficiency of the net be hindered by having the same information stored in different places, when need not be? (Of course, some would argue this is a virtue, as redundancy reduces vulnerability to data-loss).
The simple fact is, the internet should not be allowed to be harmed by IP laws. Such rulings diminish and reduce the usefulness of the internet, its functionality, even its it ideology.
This brings me to a suggestion I was thinking of for quite some time regarding the net. Why should web-publishers dictate to users HOW they view information? Why should they have to bother? What I propose is a system whereby information is transmitted in groups, packeted, its layout not completely controlled. For example, take slashot. Under my system, the web-publisher would write something like (in pseudocode)
TITLE: "XYZ".
SUBJECT #,type,date,#character,size-of-all-responses,#res
Etc.
You guys get the point. Instead of dictating to users the exact layout of sites, sites would give them information about the sections of the sites, and individual's browsers would CHOOSE how to display them, based on the user's preferences. I haven't attempted to explain this idea to its limits, but the possibilities are endless. Its representative of the true nature of the internet: minimal control.
Re:Disturbing case (Score:2)
However, this is suboptimal for several reasons.
(1) It allows possibilities of privacy violations.
(2) It violates the principle of end-to-end. Control and intelligence would be centralized in networks, rather than at the ends. This is precisely the type of thing which the internet's early "creators" did well to avoid, because avoiding such allowed vast flexibility.
Re:Disturbing case (Score:2)
Its about general page layout.
Under my system, TITLE would tell the browser something is a title, and provide tagger information for that title. Then, based on my preferences, the browser would decide where to place the title, what size to make it, what color, whether or not to outline it, and if it wanted to put a background behind it.
As an example, when typing this comment, I notice that above it there is a line which says, "Post Comment" in white, and then has a brown bar extending to near the right end of the page. Under my system, the code would say, (in effect), "Section header "Post Comment" with background bar"...and then my browser, based on my pref., would choose what color/size/font to make "Post Comment" and what color to make the background bar, or if to rescale a repeatable image horizontally to make the bar.
You mean the "big images" exist?! (Score:4, Funny)
This case is a landmark for me because it provides evidence that non-thumbnail pr0n is actually out there somewhere.
:)
What about google? (Score:3, Interesting)
How would the ruling affect this case?
What if the original is small? (Score:2)
Now all they need to decide.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Stuff the law - think of the spirit of the thing (Score:3, Interesting)
Just for 1 second...
I've got a personal website, www.dionic.net [dionic.net] (Come /. my ISDN ;-)
Just a handful of holiday snaps - not professional grade at all - but OK. I put them there because some people may find them interesting.
Trouble is - if you link directly to the larger scale images, as someone else said, you eat my feeble bandwidth and no-one knows about my site (unless they can be bothered to examine and dissect the URL a bit).
What I would consider more reasonable would be:
On point 4 if your site get's major hits I may need to chat about my link getting slaughtered and may suggest moving to scheme 3. But upto that point, at least your site is visibly linking to mine in some form so it's good for me :-)
Sure - I could do also sorts of things to the server like traffic throttling, HTTP referer checking etc. But for this thread I'm just considering the ethics from my POV.
My idea of what's fair won't be someone else's. So if you want to use other people's stuff to enhance your site - just ask. You may be pleasantly surprised - especially if you try to do something for them by way of advertsing their site in return.
Why can't we all just try the cooperative route before banging on about rights?
Judge doesn't understand (Score:3, Interesting)
You make it publicly available, you have to live with the public seeing it. There are server directives for when you don't want it to be publicly available.
TWW
Key Qs: Right to Display + Fair-Use Analysis (Score:3, Interesting)
I think the discussion may have missed both a novel aspect of the case [findlaw.com] (PDF) and a significant factor in the court's analysis:
First, the infringement didn't occur because ditto.com copied the work, but because they violated Kelly's right to publicly display [findlaw.com] his work. A run-of-the-mill infringement claim is going to involve copying or creating a derivative work, which makes the analysis in this case relatively interesting.
Second, the question of whether ditto.com infringed on Kelly's right to display his work still came down to a question of fair use [findlaw.com]:
In this case, the infringement of the right to display came, essentially, because Kelly was trying to sell copies of his photographs and ditto.com displayed the images in a way that made it less likely that people would ever visit his site (why bother? they could right-click the images displayed on ditto.com's site) and buy copies of his works.
In other words, the analysis could be different if the copyright holder isn't trying to sell copies of their work. It could also be different, I think, if one of the other factors tilted more strongly in favor of the defendant: for example, a not-for-profit use of a work in a context of political or artistic discussion.
Mike "Still Bitter About Submitting This Story Yesterday Morning and Having it Rejected" Skoglund
Inline Linking Decision Is Awful (Score:3, Insightful)
It shouldn't be a "fair use" case at all, but rather a question of whether permission is given for the use. Arriba use of an inline link is nothing more that a REQUEST to use the images. The result is that a http GET command is sent to kelly's website. Kelly is the one who chose to put his files in the web server. Kelly controls the programmatic response of that web server. When Kelly's web server responds by sending the image, it is Kelly that is authorizing display on the end user's machine.
The fact that such an image can be framed is a flexibility directly supported by the browser paradigm and HTML standard. When Kelly puts his images in a web server, he is de facto authorizing their use in the HTTP/HTML/browser context. The court doesn't even ponder this.
It is completely absurd to say that Arriba is "displaying" their images unless Arriba puts full sized copies on their own web server. Instead it is more appropriate to say that Arriba is providing the end user with a request form (HTML) to display. That isn't "use" at all.
The Ditto.com perspective (Score:3, Informative)
All thumbnails displayed are served from our own servers, not using the bandwidth of the sites being displayed in our search results. The issue that came into play was what happened when a user clicked on a thumbnail. When that happened, we would pop up two windows (as ugly as that is). One would contain just the full-sized image hosted on that site's server. The second window would be the actual page that the image was found on. Because of the judge's ruling, we no longer pop up the full-sized image, just the page that the image was found on.
I don't think this ruling will have much impact on us and others like Google [google.com] who are providing the same type of service. The judge ruled upheld the previous ruling about fair use of thumbnails, which is the primary concern of this business.
Protecting the stupid (Score:3, Informative)
Here, from the HTTP 1.1 RFC [isi.edu], the section on referrers. Any browser worth it's spit should provide the correct Referrer header.
14.36 Referer
The Referer[sic] request-header field allows the client to specify,
for the server's benefit, the address (URI) of the resource from
which the Request-URI was obtained (the "referrer", although the
header field is misspelled.) The Referer request-header allows a
server to generate lists of back-links to resources for interest,
logging, optimized caching, etc. It also allows obsolete or mistyped
links to be traced for maintenance. The Referer field MUST NOT be
sent if the Request-URI was obtained from a source that does not have
its own URI, such as input from the user keyboard.
Referer = "Referer" ":" ( absoluteURI | relativeURI )
Example:
Referer: http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/Overview.
If the field value is a relative URI, it SHOULD be interpreted
relative to the Request-URI. The URI MUST NOT include a fragment. See
section 15.1.3 for security considerations.
Re:stupid (Score:3, Interesting)
So what you're saying is that if I want my copyrighted book protected, then I shouldn't place copies in libraries? Is that right? I mean, libraries are public places. Or, if I publish a magazine full of copyrighted pictures, then someone has the right to scan them into their computer and post them on the Net? Or if you post some interesting content on your Web site, I can come in and take that content, transfer it to my site, represent it as being mine, and make money off it? Just wait until someone does one of these things to you, then you can decide who the dumbass really is.