"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
.. .
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
Joanna,
My comments in-line below:
On Sun, 11 Jan 2004 19:36:01 GMT, "J Fortuna"
wrote in Message-Id:
:
Larry,
One reason for your disagreement with Eric may be that you are speaking
about two different ways of linking.
Perhaps that is true. The way I understood Eric, he was referring to
linking via an IMG tag to a URL containing an image source on a
photographer's remote web site not owned or operated by the eBay
seller. Here's an example of the HTML source code:
: IMAGE src="http://www.erichunt.com/images/orchids/SFOS/6May03/IMG0015.jpg"
Such a line contained in the eBay orchid seller's auction page would
only display the photographic image without automatically attributing
it to the photographer. But faulting the eBay seller for failing to
attribute the photographer is groundless, as it is the photographer's
responsibility to copyright his work, not the eBay seller's. It would
be courteous for the eBay seller to attribute the photograph to the
photographer, but not required by law, IMO.
It's simple; works that contain _no_ copyright notice are not
copyrighted.
I was searching for a good article that
would explain the different types of linking and their legal implications,
here is one article that I found http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkLaw --
though, if someone else knows a better one, please post the URL to it.
(I found the text contained on that page to be a little difficult to
follow as though it were written by an individual whose first language
may not have been English.)
That page's author suggests that a 'foreign' argument be added to the
IMAGE tag markup to overcome the ambiguity. Other than that, I see no
reasonable solution to the issue of displaying remotely hosted images
that don't contain a copyright notice to web "surfers," so that they
will be readily aware that that content is coming from another web
site. As the author notes, the issue is similar to using the 'FRAMES'
tag for imbedding entire remotely hosted web pages into an HTML
document.
A problematic ebay posting might look something like this:
Phal violacea for sale.
[Image]
Price $30
The image counld be linked through "embedded linking" (the term is explained
in the article, see URL above) also called "direct linking", so that the
user actually sees the image and unless they are paying careful attention
and check the source, the user could have no way of knowing that the Image
is actually a linked image and not a part of this eBay page.
When you use the phrase 'checking the source' are you referring to
the HTML source code, or the source web site hosting the image?
People whose images are used that way have been arguing quite persuasively
that this is a kind of theft.
I am not persuaded.
Even though the image is not copied, it is
misrepresented as property of the person who posted on eBay.
I don't believe that it is _explicitly_ misrepresented.
Of course, the photographer who publishes his work for public access
on the WWW is implicitly granting the public the right to copy all the
content of his web site due to the necessity for that content,
including photographic images, to be transmitted to the public
"surfer's" web browser's cache. If the content were not transmitted,
no one could view it over the internet.
Only 'streaming' content of video and sound are currently able to
circumvent such copying, but streaming is done in real-time, and
requires a client program to receive the data-stream and present it to
the "surfer." ...
Another
argument that has been put forth is that this is bandwidth theft, since all
of a sudden the photographer is getting much more traffic through their Web
site, which might slow down their connection or overload the server, and yet
the photographer gets no credit for this.
Providing a publicly accessible web site implicitly grants the public
the right to the bandwidth necessary to access it, IMO. If it is
found that requests from certain IP address are causing a bandwidth
hogging nuisance, most web content server software (Apache for one)
provide for blocking such nuisance IP addresses. Given the current
state of the art, that would be the preferred method of dealing with
the issue today.
Some photographers have been signing their photos with copyright notices
within the photo. However, personally I find that often this spoils the
effect of the photo.
There is no need for the copyright notice to be visually
objectionable. It can be of a color that harmonizes with the
photograph, placed in a visually neutral location, and of a small
point size.
If the photographer were to also offer, for a fee, images without
obvious copyright notices, one could _pay_ to see "unspoiled" copies
of them. This would imply a contract/license between the photographer
and purchaser in which the photographer grants the purchaser use of
his photograph without relinquishing his copyright to it despite there
being no obvious copyright notice placed upon it.
Hope this helps,
Joanna
Thank you for providing your views, the link, and information on the
issue. If the WWW is to continue to provide the wealth of information
it does currently, I see no way of overcoming the objections raised by
Mr. Hunt other than those mentioned above.