Messing with photo rights Options

[lilburne]

Commons has yet to receive a serious legal challenge to its practices. Pro or semi-pro photographers posting on Flickr
obviously don't have the money to pursue a copyright lawsuit against Wikimedia -- it will probably take a major
corporation's involvement. In the US, in a US court. Until then, Commons gets away with (very quiet) murder.

The WMF is taking a risk by allowing this to continue. Not that anyone cares, of course.

That may change. The copyright office is looking at ways to allow small copyright owners to leverage the courts.

SUMMARY: The U.S. Copyright Office is undertaking a study at the request of Congress to assess whether and, if so, how the current legal system hinders or prevents copyright owners from pursuing copyright infringement claims that have a relatively small economic value (‘‘small copyright claims’’); and recommend potential changes in administrative, regulatory, and statutory
authority to improve the adjudication of these small copyright claims.
http://www.copyright.gov/fedreg/2011/76fr66758.pdf

Let the gnashing of teeth begin.

[Kelly Martin]

My problem with Commons, and with the Creative Commons in general, is the way both encourage people to release their works under licenses without being certain that the licensors understand the terms of the licenses they are being asked to release the works under. Bullying people to give up their rights, because you don't think it's fair for them to have them in the first place, is simply odious.

I support the right of artists and authors to release their works under the terms of whatever license they want. I do not support the right of anyone to bully artists and authors into giving up their rights for the sake of publication, and any legal rights acquired in such a manner should be treated as illegitimately acquired, ethically and morally if not legally.

[Eppur si muove]

Meanwhile, over at Wikipedia we have Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Mass_deletion_of_free_license_tags.

[Ottava]

Vigilant, darling, you're wasting too much time on Ottava. He isn't worth it.

Ottava, how do you propose Commons verify Flickr licenses, given that a Flickr user can change a photo's license at any given time, yet Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable? You don't trust robots. You don't trust other humans. Do you want to ask God or the pope to review Flickr images instead?

I already proposed it - keep a cache of the page or a screen shot at the time it was reviewed. Flickr doesn't. Google doesn't. No one does.

[thekohser]

Meanwhile, over at Wikipedia we have Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Mass_deletion_of_free_license_tags.

You know that link won't work in a couple of days, right?

[Zoloft]

Meanwhile, over at Wikipedia we have Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents#Mass_deletion_of_free_license_tags.

You know that link won't work in a couple of days, right?

Howzabout this'n?

[pietkuip]

Vintage Ottava. Good to see the boy back on top of his game.

[...]

Commons's core policy says we are to remove images if there are any doubts to its copyright status.

TranslatedFromOttavaToEnglish: I am going to be reasonable. I wish I had a friend so I could do the good cop/bad cop thingy. So alone.
Reality: I am making shit up all over this place.

Meanwhile, Ottava is trying to get me banned at Commons because I voiced doubts about the copyright status of some of his uploads:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...y_Pieter_Kuiper

Thank you, Ottava, it will strengthen my position there.

This post has been edited by pietkuip: Mon 26th December 2011, 8:29pm

[melloden]

Vigilant, darling, you're wasting too much time on Ottava. He isn't worth it.

Ottava, how do you propose Commons verify Flickr licenses, given that a Flickr user can change a photo's license at any given time, yet Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable? You don't trust robots. You don't trust other humans. Do you want to ask God or the pope to review Flickr images instead?

I already proposed it - keep a cache of the page or a screen shot at the time it was reviewed. Flickr doesn't. Google doesn't. No one does.

Where do we keep these screenshots? Upload them to Commons, too? Woo, let's add thousands of useless non-free images to Wikimedia's servers. Totally helpful in 99% cases, y'know?

[melloden]

My problem with Commons, and with the Creative Commons in general, is the way both encourage people to release their works under licenses without being certain that the licensors understand the terms of the licenses they are being asked to release the works under. Bullying people to give up their rights, because you don't think it's fair for them to have them in the first place, is simply odious.

I support the right of artists and authors to release their works under the terms of whatever license they want. I do not support the right of anyone to bully artists and authors into giving up their rights for the sake of publication, and any legal rights acquired in such a manner should be treated as illegitimately acquired, ethically and morally if not legally.

I think that Commons has deleted images when the copyright holder claims that he/she didn't understand the terms of Creative Commons licenses, despite the confusing revocability issue.

The problem is that with the Internet, people feel free to reuse pictures and plagiarize and whatnot where they please because somehow... people are stupid that way.

Wikipedia's made a half-assed attempt to make the licenses clearer at this template but that's not displayed to every uploader. I hope that OTRS is making licenses clear to the people they deal with, but who knows.

This also brings up the suggestion of Wikipedia using other "restrictive" licenses, for example the noncommercial or no-dervatives CC ones. There are many more people using these on Flickr than the ones allowed by Wikipedia, yet if they want their images to be used by Wikipedia, they'll have to change the license, and probably without understanding what it means. Some prime examples are here:

We can only use your materials if you are willing to grant permission for this under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License. This means that anyone will have the right to share and, where appropriate, to update your material. You can read this license in full at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tex...nported_License

The license expressly protects authors "from being considered responsible for modifications made by others" while ensuring that authors get credit for their work. There is more information on our copyright policy at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights

It doesn't even mention commercial use (or define "share") but points you to a long page of text. Many of the other example requests - which have actually been sent to people - are filled with silly phrases:

... an endeavour to build a fully-fledged multilingual encyclopaedia in an entirely open manner...

It is to that noble end that I make this request.

And some brighter bulb put this one in:

Consequently, you may wish to consider carefully whether you are prepared to compromise some of your rights granted to you by copyright law by licensing your work as suggested.

This post has been edited by melloden: Mon 26th December 2011, 11:36pm

[lilburne]

There were a couple of arseholes on the Creative Commons mailing list a year or so ago whining that flickr should rename CC-BY-SA as "License for Wikipedia".

[Ottava]

Vigilant, darling, you're wasting too much time on Ottava. He isn't worth it.

Ottava, how do you propose Commons verify Flickr licenses, given that a Flickr user can change a photo's license at any given time, yet Creative Commons licenses are irrevocable? You don't trust robots. You don't trust other humans. Do you want to ask God or the pope to review Flickr images instead?

I already proposed it - keep a cache of the page or a screen shot at the time it was reviewed. Flickr doesn't. Google doesn't. No one does.

Where do we keep these screenshots? Upload them to Commons, too? Woo, let's add thousands of useless non-free images to Wikimedia's servers. Totally helpful in 99% cases, y'know?

OTRS is a pretty solid place. And cached copies of pages are kept by tons of different groups, especially Google. No one has said that it violated copyright law to do such.

[lilburne]

OTRS is a pretty solid place. And cached copies of pages are kept by tons of different groups, especially Google. No one has said that it violated copyright law to do such.

Even if you have a certified timestamped copy of the license that still doesn't prove that the flickr uploader has the copyright to the image and thus the legal rights to assign a license.

If someone puts a bug photo of mine on flickr with a CC-BY-SA license, some dweeb then uploads it to wikipedia, wp takes a capture of the license, and then Monsanto uses it in some ad campaign, its Monsanto that I'm going to go after as they have the money, and they should have performed the due diligence before reusing. Every publisher I've dealt with has always wanted a statement that I own the Copyright.

The CC-BY-SA license is only taken at face value by freetards most commercial outfits, will double check the license with the copyright holder.

This post has been edited by lilburne: Tue 27th December 2011, 12:56am

[Ottava]

Even if you have a certified timestamped copy of the license that still doesn't prove that the flickr uploader has the copyright to the image and thus the legal rights to assign a license.

Agreed. My proposal was merely to solve the problem regarding what Mr. Kohs points out - if the creator has changed the license or if Commons was merely lying about the original license.

[pietkuip]

OTRS is a pretty solid place.

No, it is not. It is a secret place, we cannot see what they are doing. The claim in the OTRS ticket that "permission has been verified and archived" is a joke. They have lost permissions (the backup was also deleted when someone made a mistake). But the real problem is the claim of permissions being "verified".

As an example we can take the OTRS agent and former Foundation employee Cary Bass aka Bastique, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:...ca_Maxima_2.jpg

There is also Cirt verifying anti-scientology uploads: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:...:Lisa11-big.jpg

Also, some privileged uploaders have wholesale permission to upload anything, without anybody verifying anything, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Emi...Southerly_Clubs which is included in hundreds of uploads. But when someone modifies their uploads, they issue vehement protests http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...2650#User:Ahkka

This post has been edited by pietkuip: Tue 27th December 2011, 9:30am

[lilburne]

But when someone modifies their uploads, they issue vehement protests http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?t...2650#User:Ahkka

Removal of a DRM is a criminal offence under the DMCA regardless of copyright status. Remove "Southerly Clubs" at one's peril.

[lilburne]

Even if you have a certified timestamped copy of the license that still doesn't prove that the flickr uploader has the copyright to the image and thus the legal rights to assign a license.

Agreed. My proposal was merely to solve the problem regarding what Mr. Kohs points out - if the creator has changed the license or if Commons was merely lying about the original license.

There was a proposal to do that, or something similar about 4 or 5 years ago. Some one was going to set up a system where a re-user would pay $10 for a timestamped recording of the status of the license. It fell apart because CC users on flickr were opposed to the scheme. Personally I never saw the problem as the charges were being placed against the license not the work. But it did cause a lot of heated arguments.