In the narrowness of this particular case, you’re right. It’s not the same thing. I’m probably speaking at too high a level and should be focused on the particulars here, so I appreciate you redirecting me.
2 Likes
In some cases the problem is that the ‘link’ is not actually a link, depending on how things are setup you may well be creating a copy of the image on your device even if only for a few seconds or milliseconds.
If you are not legally entitled to make copies of the image - that’s an infringement.
Almost certainly, yes. It’s generally best to assume that pretty much anything you do on the internet is technically in breach of some law or other.
The internet has essentially turned into a venue for mass breaches of copyright. Lawmakers haven’t really caught up with how to deal with that yet.
Hence why we have all the various DMCA-type pieces of legislation, the EU’s stuff, various technologies being suggested, etc.
Everyone is still floundering around trying to come to terms with the fact that what was once difficult - making and distributing high quality copies of copyright works en masse - is now trivial.
There are basically two choices:
a) accept that copying is going to happen and ignore it, i.e. scrap copyright (and patents, etc. inevitably fall away as well) or
b) come up with a way to put a lid on unauthorised copying.
A) is unpalatable to a lot of people because they think if people (read - businesses) can’t control the distribution of their works, they won’t make them or will at least keep them as secret as possible.
B) has so far proven to be impossible but there are a lot of people spending a lot of time and money persuading lawmakers that the technical means to either prevent copying or to trace infringing copies easily already exist or will be available any day now… (cold fusion anyone?)
ETA:
Digging my way through the chain of essentially the same articles to get to the article the other’s are all paraphrasing (thereby just avoiding copyright infringement themselves), I see that the legal issues are a little more nuanced.
The right at issue in the most recent decision is not the right to copy images, it’s the right to control how your image is displayed and to be correctly attributed as the creator.
“Copyright” as such isn’t really a thing - as the old legal saw has it, it’s “a bundle of rights”. Lots of separate rights, each of which can be separately enforced or waived or licensed, etc. but which are routinely bundled up and treated as one big ‘thing’.
In this case, the photo linked to had the correct attribution but that was only visible if one actually clicked on the little image Twitter provides as a preview.
That’s not good enough.
It’s then hard to argue that every person sending a tweet with the cropped image isn’t at least displaying the cropped image even if they are not creating a copy.
3 Likes
Then the “ReTweet” as a technology is broken, legally. I as a user can’t know whether the original author owns the words and/or images, even if they say they do. They may think they do and be mistaken, like models who post photos of themselves which the photographer actually owns.
If the retweet process informed the author of the original tweet and verified that the person retweeting had permission to copy/link their words and/or images… it still wouldn’t matter to the real copyright owner. To them Twitter shouldn’t have trusted the original tweet author to give permission, and their material has still been “shared” umpteen million times. The responsibility would fall to Twitter to verify independently that the original tweet was legit, millions of tweets per hour.
It’s an unenforceable law, at least in terms of social media. Any social media site can be shut down at any time, at the leisure of the powers-that-be. That becomes a tool of repression.
What prevents Trump’s Justice Department from saying “I am shocked SHOCKED to find copyrighted material on [site that Trump hates]” and forcing them to shut down until it is all removed?
2 Likes
This logic is completely absurd.
Downloading and storing an image from the internet–however temporarily–is what you have to do to see it in the first place.
If you see something from the internet on a phone or computer, you have already downloaded it.
In effect, you’re claiming that every time anyone views any copyrighted content on the internet, they have committed copyright infringement.
1 Like
That is actually true for any other sort of illegal content on the Internet. If they find it on your hard drive, you are in “possession” of it, and you are criminally liable. How it got there doesn’t concern them.
Whether you intended to see it or not, whether you actually SAW it or not, whether you searched for it, or it just appeared on your screen from a malicious pop-up or scrolling through a chat or forum, if it is on your hard drive you “downloaded” it, and that’s that.
In this case though, one could be legally liable and not ever had any sort of possession of anything. In the case of this forum, all I have to do is post a link. The site itself adds the image from the linked page, I don’t even need to have seen it or download it to be in violation.
1 Like
If we workshop this a bit, I’m sure we can craft a solution that will satisfy all the stakeholders.
…
Hey – how about blockchain? That’ll fix it, right?
4 Likes
Yup.
According to the Japan Times article, it appears that re-tweeting itself isn’t considered to be an infringement, it’s the use of the cropped image with the attribution removed.
That’s all on Twitter. They chose to crop the image and force users to display the cropped image when retweeting.
Like most (large) internet businesses, Twitter’s business model relies on ignoring existing rules and claiming that following them would be technically onerous or make their business impossible.
If society agrees that the service they provide is worth the disruption, we will eventually come up with a work around.
As Charles Stross says, real villains don’t commit crimes. They do things on such a scale that what they do becomes legal.
For the moment, we’re stuck with pretty much everything internet related being technically a breach of some law or other and relying on the vast majority of breaches going unpunished.
Basically nothing which is what the EFF and like groups have been banging on about for decades now.
3 Likes
You can dislike the outcome but the logic is inexorable.
In cases where they view the image without being legally entitled to do so, that is correct.
You can say it is absurd but it is only absurd if you posit that being able to do view images whenever you like in the way it is currently technically done is something that we should be able to do.
If you were to argue that if you want to read a book, you should be entitled to take any existing copy of that book, run it through a photocopier, put the first book back, read the copy you just made and then throw it away when you’ve finished, that would just as clearly be absurd.
In legal terms that is however exactly the same thing.
It is allowed in terms of internet images, etc. because specific laws were passed making it legal. See for example Article 5 of Directive 2001/29/EC or if you prefer your copyright law with a US flavour:
which specifically exempts service providers from liability for exactly such ‘transitory’ images.
Note - that’s the service provider who gets the exemption not us poor sap end users. We’re still on the hook if there’s a copyright problem.
1 Like
yes , please !!
any year now !! maybe as soon coming as hot fusion !!
maybe ?!
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but I’ve heard linking to copyrighted material does not generally constitute infringement. The issue is copyrighted material being copied.
It’s called “fair use”. Sorry, but no, you are NOT going anywhere with this; you are demanding something that can not actually be properly enforced, nor should it.
You can claim it’s “infringement” for simply viewing an image you didn’t even know was not allowable, and it may even be de jure, but that’s utter bullshit. Stop being complacent about obvious legal overreach.
For example, when I see a pic on someone’s FuckBook Timeline, what if THEY didn’t take that pic and it’s totally not legal? How the hell am I supposed to know that, especially if the FB algorithm has trimmed the appropriate data? Yeah, no, you’re not going to be able to show me some kind of failure by the viewer.
2 Likes
That still doesn’t follow that someone who didn’t post the content becomes responsible for it wrt retweeting. The retweet doesn’t transform the original post into their own. In fact, the metadata which also is visually displayed makes the distinction. The judges in this case haven’t made a compelling argument that the act of retweeting is the same as digitally reposting (as in a user manually downloading the image and reposting to their account through their own actions). This an integral distinction because the way the Internet works is that it’s inherently permissive, especially wrt the web. Everything is open by default unless encrypted or otherwise cordoned on. This would be akin to suing someone who sees a movie for free because someone else violated copyright by showing it in a public space. Essentially, this makes it possible to sue bystanders rather than actual copyright infringers which the photographer already enjoys that protection per law.
Also, I would like to point out that the photographer already had an easily available recourse on Twitter: reporting the original post and having it removed. In fact, it’s quite easy to report and have removed unauthorized distributions of content on Twitter. The fact the photographer would rather sue retweeters than leverage their already protected right to file such a claim means something else is going on in this situation.
3 Likes
Exactly this.
Entities around the world, like the EU, have been endeavoring in recent years to make linking itself legally liable. Linking to someone infringing on copyright is seen by them as equal to sites that host torrent files pointing to copyrighted media. Simple links in Japan are okay, but…
“However, if the system of linking is accompanied by the act of reproduction within another server, the authorization should be obtained. In such a case, if any, attention should be paid also to the right of integrity.” - Digitized & Networked Society" and Copyright | Copyright in Japan Q and A | Copyright Research and Information Center CRIC
That is what makes stuff like tweets and our article links here a bit of a grey area, because whether the act of tweeting, and retweeting, other sites articles and images, or even creating the formatted article links here is “reproduction” is iffy. In terms of the images involved, I dunno how it really couldn’t be.
It doesn’t seem to be here in the US, because the DMCA has a clause that protects the site and the host from the actions of their users. Unfortunately the other side of that is it is guilty-until-proven-innocent. The user has their stuff removed immediately, before any real determination of guilt is made, and it is up to the user to fight the notice.
Jeez, that is an incredibly reasonable response. I just want to give you a huge amount of credit. Online, most of us are so completely focused on the other person being wrong and us being right (even when there is legitimate nuance in the question) that actual discussion is impossible. Thanks for rising above that! I’ll try to do the same.
4 Likes
Generally but not nearly always, sites “hotlink”. In other words, they simply fetch that link’s data if/when needed for display, and it is only temporarily cached on their side. This allows them to stop storing images no one is looking at.
Now to an uninformed Japanese judge, say, this may seem like the receiving site is “stealing” the image; they do have a temporary copy, right? But the caching site has NO WAY of vetting such images with any realistic, reliable chances of success, at this time; the technology to do so reliably AND properly simply does not exist.
It is also utterly legal to post your own pics with no attribution, tagging, or metadata all, in most Western countries at least. You expect FB to somehow determine attribution? What about a smaller company, with 10 employees and a tiny fraction of the resources?
On the other side of it, expecting users to even realize the site has trimmed the attribution data (which notably was present when the original was posted, before auto-cropping by Twitter) is absurd. You are not going to convince me YOU micro-inspect every image post you’ve made anywhere, sorry ^^'.
It’s a drastic overstep and completely unenforceable, overall. This judge simply has no idea how the internet actually works.
1 Like
Thanks yourself! I’m far from perfect, but do try to recognize when I’m being a putz and correct it. Sleeping on it usually helps, I think better in the mornings (I’m that rare morning person everyone hates).
1 Like
Ultimately the courts determine whether a given incident is infringement or fair use. Not every case of somebody reposting copyrighted material (with or without the original copyright notice inadvertently trimmed) is infringement, nor is it every such case fair use.
Agree 100%, and thank you for bringing up some relevant points such as pursuing recourse through Twitter rather than the retweeters. Too often the law is used as a bludgeon rather than a dispenser of justice.
1 Like
Doesn’t matter in the slightest. Unenforceable laws are worse than useless, of course.
