Removal of Photo Credit Qualifies As DMCA Violation 71
mattgoldey writes with this excerpt: "A federal appeals court in Philadelphia has reinstated a photographer's copyright lawsuit against a New Jersey radio station owner, after finding that a lower court came to the wrong decision on every issue in the case. Most significantly, the appeals court said that a photo credit printed in the gutter of a magazine qualifies as copyright management information (CMI) under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA prohibits the unauthorized removal of encryption technology or copyright management information from copyrighted works."
Good! (Score:2)
I had a dickhead take one of my photos, cut off the copyright notice and try and pass it off as his own.
Copyright notice != CMI (Score:3)
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also, how is it "Digital" so that the DMCA even applies?
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It's illegal if you remove it with Photoshop?
Re:Copyright notice != CMI (Score:4, Insightful)
If you use it for your own personal use (say as a background image on your computer screen), no. Though, few people are that anal to go to such lengths for such a minor thing. If you use it in any commercial way or in any manner that is shown to the public, yes. This is basic copyright 101, folks. You can't show it or make money off of it, directly or indirectly, unless you pay royalties.
This is exactly like removing the signature from a painting and passing it off as your own work. Of course they got reamed in court over it.
Lazy employee costs company millions in legal fees. News at 10...
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Wrong on a few points. Copyright doesn't mean I can't make money off a work that I don't have Copyright for. In many cases (not all, there are explicit laws preventing this universally) I can rent the Copyrighted material out.
For example, I could create a "pay-for" library. No copying takes place, and I make money "showing books to the public".
I can remove the signature from a painting, and then sell it. I can even claim I painted it; that would be plagiarism, but not a copyright violation.
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So, if I use your photo of ... a flange sprocket ... for my manual on generic flange-sprocketery which is most emphatically only distributed to card-carrying members of the Outer Mongolia Society of Flange Sprocketeers, who have to use their blood sample and DRM equipment to read the manual (this is definitely NOT "the public", in any way, shape or form), then my commercial use of your ph
Re:Copyright notice != CMI (Score:5, Informative)
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The photo was digital. The watermark was digital. What part was analog?
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The photons. :P
Sometimes.
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Nope, photons take discrete energy states when emitted (based on the potential difference between the electrons new energy level and it's energy level prior to the change). They are not analog.
At source... maybe. But they are [wikipedia.org] the instant you what to localize them in space or time - like in using certain aperture/exposure values when shooting the photo.
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The radio station published it electronically, but the original image was published on paper and scanned by t
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While I agree with your point that it wasn't really digital when it is on paper, I'm pretty sure being in print doesn't evade the DMCA in regards to the CMI (which does not specify it has to be digital). It would be trivially easy to bypass the DMCA if it were, just print and scan again. You have to remember that this just the copyright information, not a copy protection technology.
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That being said, in this case, once it was scanned, it became digital. And all the prepress on the magazine was probably digital.
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Had they included the Photo Credit information in the (digital) image's metadat, would it still have been a DMCA violation?
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They scanned a printed version of the photo that appeared in a magazine. The magazine version had a copyright notice with the photographer's name in the gutter (the spaces in between columns or between the content and the edge of the page) that the radio station employees either did not scan or cropped away. There was no digital watermark mentioned in the article.
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Unfortunately, the digital is simple the buzz word in the title. The actual law deals with all sorts of copyright issues whether digital or in print.
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Parse error on my part. It is the Copyright Act for the Digital Millennium, but I guess CADM doesn't sound as memorable.
Read the definition of CMI (Score:3)
Copyright law already protects your photo, whether the copyright notice has been cropped or not. This is a stupidly broad application of "copyright management information".
No it isn't. A copyright notice is practically the definition of
copyright management information
(1) The title and other information identifying the work, including the information set forth on a notice of copyright. ...
(2) The name of, and other identifying information about, the author of a work.
(3) The name of, and other identifying information about, the copyright owner of the work, including the information set forth in a notice of copyright.
Again, this ruling has absolutely nothing to do with the anti-circumvention or take-down notice sections of the DMCA, so don't apply what you have heard about those part of the law to this ruling.
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Sorry I messed up the link [cornell.edu] to the quoted law.
Re:Copyright notice != CMI (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd rather have the courts stick to the letter of the law and implement congress's bad law then have them try to dance around bad language and end up with a situation that's just as bad and has no clarity. This type of thing SHOULD fall under the DMCA and some high profile people should get stung by it.
Re:Copyright notice != CMI --- WRONG (Score:3)
How so? Do you believe that copyright law 'already' protects "copyright management information" (absent the DMCA and this interpretation)? Or do you believe that removing "copyright management information" like this is not a bad act and does not create any additional harm? I hope neither, because on both counts you're wrong.
Pre-DMCA co
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True, but it is also quite expected that attribution printed in the gutter of a magazine should count as copyright information; thus, this decision means 'I didn't know' doesn't fly if the info isn't attached to the actual picture.
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I believe this means you can't even crop the photo for any fair use purposes if cropping it will remove that watermark. So it's potentially different I suppose.
Of course you can. What you cannot do is crop off the authors name and then claim that it was not their photo because it doesn't have their name on it...
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Glad I wasn't the only one who thought that. This is exactly the sort of thing that copyright law should be used to protect!
Karma's a bitch (Score:5, Insightful)
We can all argue about what fair use of copyrighted materials should be, but I think we can also more-or-less agree that deliberately stripping off a creator's name is uncool. Of course, the conduct of the defendants in question (RTFA, they were shock-jock DJs who responded to the photographer's cease-and-desist with a smear campaign chock full o' slander and libel and just-plain-lies) probably made it a lot easier for the judge to apply the bitch-slap to 'em. They deserved it.
Re:Karma's a bitch (Score:5, Informative)
You need to realize that the state of mind of the defendant is often the entire point of a case and is the difference between "guilty" and "innocent" (the fancy Latin term is mens rea [thefreedictionary.com]). So if you act like a dick in court or in the actions surrounding the allegation, you may, in FACT, be convicting yourself by demonstrating your state of mind. The shock jocks demonstrated by their actions just what their state of mind was: malicious, reckless, and unrepentant. From a very real, legally defensible, well-established principle, their may well have pushed the likelihood of their guilt from "not enough proof" to "sufficient proof".
In other words, yes, they got a fair trail, because their behavior demonstrated the facts of the case. If someone is unlikeable, acts like an asshole, etc., is it more or less likely that person acted with malicious intent in the matter at hand? And is it more or less likely that the judge, with his authority to decide upon admissibility of evidence, to approve or deny motions by the lawyers involved, and discretion to decide sentencing, is going to throw the book at an asshole or Mother Teresa?
Today's lesson: don't be a dick. As far as the trial and its outcome is concerned, you'd BETTER be a likeable defendant.
Re:Karma's a bitch (Score:5, Funny)
For a car analogy of parent:
If you run over somebody, don't back into their body and run it over again. And again. The courts find it really hard to believe that it was an accident otherwise.
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> between "guilty" and "innocent"
"not guilty", not "innocent".
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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There are cases where ill intent is all that differs crime from non-crime. Example being receiving stolen goods. If you did this unknowingly and believing the goods were legit, you are innocent.
In most cases, though, while the stance shouldn't influence the "guilty/not guilty" verdict, it usually is aggravating/mitigating circumstance and in case you are guilty, will modify the scale of the sentence and may often change the classification of the act - say, manslaughter vs murder.
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I have an automated script (using Image Magick and a transparent PNG I made) that stamps the copyright at the lower left of the image. Yes, people can still strip off the copyright notice, but it would be a lot harder than a simple crop job. The script also rotates the images if need be and resizes them for posting to the web. This means that the image, even if the copyright notice were stripped somehow, wouldn't be useful for print publication.
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Clueless Courts (Score:1)
What I find jaw-dropping about this story is how all of those lower courts consistently came up with the incorrect ruling on what is a total no-brainer copyright case like this one was.
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I fail to see how the DMCA should be involved in this one. I could get the DMCA bit, if they removed a watermark or EXIF data from an image they scrounged on the web, but that's not what they did. Rather, they converted an actual, physical photograph into an electronic format.
DMCA is Digital Millennium Copyright Act, not Digital Medium Copyright Act... the medium involved is not at issue. Welcome to the digital millennium.
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I'm unsurprisingly okay with that (Score:3)
Re:I'm unsurprisingly okay with that (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah unlike the anti-circumvention portion of the DMCA which bans tools just because they could be used for piracy, and thus effectively prevent any fair use of works, the copyright management information [cornell.edu] section seems fairly reasonably. It is entirely focused on removing or falsifying attribution of copyright. I don't know that the section needs to exist; removal of attribution could just be treated as strong evidence of willful infringement, which already carries higher punishment. But it doesn't seem actively harmful.
Does this make Photoshop illegal? (Score:2)
Now Photoshop is a tool that can be used to circumvent CMI restrictions. Of course no court would declare Photoshop illegal. But what reasoning would they use?
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Unlikely because PhotoShop has significant "non-infringing" uses.
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Unlikely because PhotoShop has significant "non-infringing" uses.
More to the point, it puts Adobe in a pretty sticky situation. Adobe uses all kinds of DRM and activation on their products, and Photoshop is among the most pirated pieces of software in existence. They rank pretty high up on a list of BSA members when sorted by columns involving dollar signs, so clearly they have a very vested interest in having a DMCA to throw at pirates. They don't (at least not in any high profile cases to my knowledge), but it's certainly a back-pocket play for them, should it ever be
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This is just a stupid post but it took some creativity to come up with it.
Oh... don't even THINK about quoting this in its entirety, but without the CMI displayed below!
Do what now? How will anyone know if you're the real Anonymous Coward who posted that without being logged in? :)
Why this is covered by DMCA... (Score:2)
Too many comments asking this to reply to them all, and I don't want to explain it more than once.
The copyrighted image was being hosted without permission on a website. In order to force the site to remove it, one must file a DMCA takedown notice. If the radio station had, for instance, copied the image and had it published in a different magazine without credit (which would not happen because the magazine would have asked for a credit to publish, but go with the example anyway...), DMCA would not apply.