"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
.. .
On Thu, 08 Jan 2004 22:32:06 -0700, Susan Erickson
wrote in Message-Id: :

Some of them were hijacking pictures from copyrighted sites [...]
sending each visitor thru to the site [containing the pictures]
and tying it up.

What you describe as 'hijacking' is known as linking. It provides a
means of overcoming duplicate content and copyright infringement on
the world wide web and is one of its fundamental concepts.

On Sat, 10 Jan 2004 07:29:37 -0800, "Eric Hunt"
wrote in Message-Id: :

Larry,

It's still copyright infringement when you have notices all over your site
that reuse of your photographs is permitted only for educational
non-commercial use. The original academic users of the internet would have
respected that. That's no longer the case with the general public.

I have never seen a marketeer with respect for the public. :-)

I almost put up pornography on my site under a bunch of orchid file names
that a guy in the Netherlands was direct-linking from my site in order to
sell his plants, but he stopped linking after I sent him several nastygrams.
If he'd been in the US, all I would have to have done was email his ISP and
had his site shut down.

On what grounds? Have you been successful with tactic in the past?
Doubtful.

Us photographers are very particular about how our images are reused. =)

-Eric in SF
http://www.erichunt.com/orchids/SPECIES/ab.html


Eric,

Because we seem to disagree, perhaps I fail to understand the issue
completely. Let me recap my understanding, and perhaps you can spot
my misapprehension.

1. A photographer freely publishes copies of his photographs on
the World Wide Web for public viewing.

2. A commercial orchid-sales web site provides links to some of
the photographer's images for the purpose of providing his customers
with an idea of the appearance of the orchid species s/he is selling.
The photographer's images are not copied nor hosted from the
commercial orchid-sales web site.

3. The photographer feels that his copyright is being infringed,
because s/he has not been credited nor compensated for the commercial
use of his work that s/he freely published on the WWW for public
access.

Is this correct?

If so, I fail to see how the photographer's creative work (placed in
the public domain for public access over the WWW) is being used in
violation of the photographer's copyright. The commercial orchid
marketer has not taken nor copied the photographer's creative work.
S/he has merely provided his customers the address URL to the
copyrighted work the photographer has himself freely provided to the
public.

So if there has been _no copying_, how can the copyright have been
infringed? And the photographer's act of providing the public free
access to his work verges on placing it into the public domain and
thus forfeiting his copyright to exclusive use.

I would suggest that photographers place copyright notices directly on
the publicly accessible versions of their images, so that they receive
due credit whenever their images are viewed.

Further, I would characterize the posting of notices attempting to
limit the use of the photographer's images, accessed through a URL to
the photographer's web site, to 'non commercial use only' as absurdly
unenforceable. The photographer has placed his work on the WWW for
public viewing; in doing so s/he has obviously given up the right to
control who views his images, unless a password is required.

In any event, I see no fundamental difference between a commercial
orchid-sales web site and Google or Yahoo providing public links to
the photographs you have provided for public viewing; they all do so
in conjunction with a commercial venture.

If I've got it all wrong, I'm sure someone will attempt to correct me.
:-)

--

The true Axis Of Evil in America is our genious at marketing
coupled with the stupidity of our people. -- Bill Maher