"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

"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

Larry,

One reason for your disagreement with Eric may be that you are speaking
about two different ways of linking. 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.

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.

People whose images are used that way have been arguing quite persuasively
that this is a kind of theft. Even though the image is not copied, it is
misrepresented as property of the person who posted on eBay. 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.

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.

Hope this helps,
Joanna

"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

"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.

On Sun, 11 Jan 2004 23:27:02 GMT, Larry Dighera
wrote:

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.

Larry, clearly the internet presents some interesting copyright
issues, but your last statement above is absolute untrue. Works do
not have to contain a copyright statement or notice for copyright law
to hold. Obviously, your mind is pretty well made up and I doubt my
comments will sway you, however I would suggest others do some
research before adopting your position.

deg

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
...

[snip]
It's simple; works that contain _no_ copyright notice are not
copyrighted.

This isn't correct. Ray posted a quote from the US Copyright office website
that states that copyright exists from the moment the copyrighted work is
created. All of the text posted in this newsgroup is therefore copyrighted,
even though folk rarely, if ever, attempt to protect such copyrighted
material. Certainly, though, anyone who produces copyrighted work has a
right to place restrictions on how that work can be used. Whether or not
such restrictions is enforceable is another matter.


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.


But in making such a judgement, you would be too pessimistic.

There are a thousand and one ways to accomplish just about anything in IT.
In this instance, you can, for example, create your website inside a
firewall and configure it to respond only to requests coming from a proxy
you establish outside this firewall (but protected by its own firewall which
needs to be configured to allow normal http traffic). This just makes it
more difficult to break into the site and find the coprighted material.
Then, instead of constructing the website with hard coded HTML pages
containing the links to the image files, create it using PHP or Perl or
VBScript or JScript or C++ or any of seeming countless languages that can be
used for CGI and/or ASP programming). What this, then, allows you to do is
check for the referring page/site. You then have the ability to decide,
even on a page by page basis, what to send in response to a request for an
image. There are countless security policies you can establish, and a great
many ways to try to enforce them; there are so many options it is hard to
know where to begin. You could set up your policies so that the only access
to the images is by navigating through your home page; or you could have
this as the default policy, but provide, for a subscription fee, links from
other websites directly to selected images (but this still give you the
ability to decide precisely how your material is used since you can refuse
links to certain kinds of site/pages or require prior approval of the pages
containing the link before selling a license to link to your material). You
can even go so far as to create your own Java applet that will browse links
to your images, and that can be the only browser to which your website will
send copyrighted material you want to protect. Such an applet will not have
access to the disk or the printer, and while the user could take a snapshot
of the desktop, the result would likely be a reduced quality image. While
any and every measure that can be taken to protect copyrighted material can
be defeated, it isn't that hard to make it much more expensive to violate
copyright than it is to obtain legally (or in the case of pirating images
for use in eBay auctions, much more expensive to violate copyright than the
seller can reasonably hope to get from the auction). That is, in fact, the
best you can hope for. But of course, you face costs (in terms of hardware
on which to run the proxy, and extra routing hardware, and in terms of
programming cost, which may be the most significant expense unless you know
how to do it yourself), and the visitors to your website may pay some cost
(e.g., in the case of using a Java applet, those running Windows XP and
later will have to download and install the Java runtime because MS no
longer ships it with Windows). So you end with a cost/benfit analysis for
both the copyright owner and the pirate: in both cases, a judgement needs to
be made, is the effort/cost justified by the benfit/profit that can be
realized.

HTH

Cheers,

Ted

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 08:44:01 -0500, "Ted Byers"
wrote in Message-Id:
:

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
.. .

[snip]
It's simple; works that contain _no_ copyright notice are not
copyrighted.

This isn't correct. Ray posted a quote from the US Copyright office website
that states that copyright exists from the moment the copyrighted work is
created.

Perhaps you and Ray are correct. I haven't done the research to
verify that.

I'm happy to see that neither you nor anyone else has challenged my
contention that because the photographs are NOT being copied, there is
no copyright infringement in the example at hand.

All of the text posted in this newsgroup is therefore copyrighted,
even though folk rarely, if ever, attempt to protect such copyrighted
material.

If that is correct, Google Groups has failed to pay me any royalty for
archiving and redistributing my usenet articles. I wonder how Google
gets away with "illegally" copying and redistributing all those usenet
articles without a having to defend themselves against a myriad of
tort suits. :-)

Certainly, though, anyone who produces copyrighted work has a
right to place restrictions on how that work can be used.

If said producer places his work on the WWW for public access,
hansen't he implicitly abrogated the right to control the viewing of
it? How could s/he provide public access and then cry foul when the
work is publicly accessed. Such a policy would seem to create a
public nuisance.

Whether or not such restrictions is[sic] enforceable is another matter.

At least we agree about that.


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.


But in making such a judgement, you would be too pessimistic.

There are a thousand and one ways to accomplish just about anything in IT.
In this instance, you can, for example, create your website inside a
firewall and configure it to respond only to requests coming from a proxy
you establish outside this firewall (but protected by its own firewall which
needs to be configured to allow normal http traffic). This just makes it
more difficult to break into the site and find the coprighted material.
Then, instead of constructing the website with hard coded HTML pages
containing the links to the image files, create it using PHP or Perl or
VBScript or JScript or C++ or any of seeming countless languages that can be
used for CGI and/or ASP programming). What this, then, allows you to do is
check for the referring page/site. You then have the ability to decide,
even on a page by page basis, what to send in response to a request for an
image. There are countless security policies you can establish, and a great
many ways to try to enforce them; there are so many options it is hard to
know where to begin. You could set up your policies so that the only access
to the images is by navigating through your home page; or you could have
this as the default policy, but provide, for a subscription fee, links from
other websites directly to selected images (but this still give you the
ability to decide precisely how your material is used since you can refuse
links to certain kinds of site/pages or require prior approval of the pages
containing the link before selling a license to link to your material). You
can even go so far as to create your own Java applet that will browse links
to your images, and that can be the only browser to which your website will
send copyrighted material you want to protect. Such an applet will not have
access to the disk or the printer, and while the user could take a snapshot
of the desktop, the result would likely be a reduced quality image. While
any and every measure that can be taken to protect copyrighted material can
be defeated, it isn't that hard to make it much more expensive to violate
copyright than it is to obtain legally (or in the case of pirating images
for use in eBay auctions, much more expensive to violate copyright than the
seller can reasonably hope to get from the auction). That is, in fact, the
best you can hope for. But of course, you face costs (in terms of hardware
on which to run the proxy, and extra routing hardware, and in terms of
programming cost, which may be the most significant expense unless you know
how to do it yourself), and the visitors to your website may pay some cost
(e.g., in the case of using a Java applet, those running Windows XP and
later will have to download and install the Java runtime because MS no
longer ships it with Windows). So you end with a cost/benfit analysis for
both the copyright owner and the pirate: in both cases, a judgement needs to
be made, is the effort/cost justified by the benfit/profit that can be
realized.

The methods your creative genius has imagined seem very valid; in fact
it was I who suggested IP filtering to control access from "offending"
sites in a previous followup article.. I agree, it is the
responsibility of the photographer to _directly_ control the content
s/he provides the public, as opposed to crying 'theft' when the
photographs s/he has made publicly accessible are in fact accessed by
the public.

And I still submit, that because no actual copying of the photographs
has taken place, there is no copyright infringement perpetrated by the
eBay seller who embeds links to another's photographs in his eBay
auction page.

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 08:44:01 -0500, "Ted Byers"
wrote in Message-Id:
:

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
.. .

[snip]
It's simple; works that contain _no_ copyright notice are not
copyrighted.

This isn't correct. Ray posted a quote from the US Copyright office website
that states that copyright exists from the moment the copyrighted work is
created.

Perhaps you and Ray are correct. I haven't done the research to
verify that.

I'm happy to see that neither you nor anyone else has challenged my
contention that because the photographs are NOT being copied, there is
no copyright infringement in the example at hand.

All of the text posted in this newsgroup is therefore copyrighted,
even though folk rarely, if ever, attempt to protect such copyrighted
material.

If that is correct, Google Groups has failed to pay me any royalty for
archiving and redistributing my usenet articles. I wonder how Google
gets away with "illegally" copying and redistributing all those usenet
articles without a having to defend themselves against a myriad of
tort suits. :-)

Certainly, though, anyone who produces copyrighted work has a
right to place restrictions on how that work can be used.

If said producer places his work on the WWW for public access,
hansen't he implicitly abrogated the right to control the viewing of
it? How could s/he provide public access and then cry foul when the
work is publicly accessed. Such a policy would seem to create a
public nuisance.

Whether or not such restrictions is[sic] enforceable is another matter.

At least we agree about that.


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.


But in making such a judgement, you would be too pessimistic.

There are a thousand and one ways to accomplish just about anything in IT.
In this instance, you can, for example, create your website inside a
firewall and configure it to respond only to requests coming from a proxy
you establish outside this firewall (but protected by its own firewall which
needs to be configured to allow normal http traffic). This just makes it
more difficult to break into the site and find the coprighted material.
Then, instead of constructing the website with hard coded HTML pages
containing the links to the image files, create it using PHP or Perl or
VBScript or JScript or C++ or any of seeming countless languages that can be
used for CGI and/or ASP programming). What this, then, allows you to do is
check for the referring page/site. You then have the ability to decide,
even on a page by page basis, what to send in response to a request for an
image. There are countless security policies you can establish, and a great
many ways to try to enforce them; there are so many options it is hard to
know where to begin. You could set up your policies so that the only access
to the images is by navigating through your home page; or you could have
this as the default policy, but provide, for a subscription fee, links from
other websites directly to selected images (but this still give you the
ability to decide precisely how your material is used since you can refuse
links to certain kinds of site/pages or require prior approval of the pages
containing the link before selling a license to link to your material). You
can even go so far as to create your own Java applet that will browse links
to your images, and that can be the only browser to which your website will
send copyrighted material you want to protect. Such an applet will not have
access to the disk or the printer, and while the user could take a snapshot
of the desktop, the result would likely be a reduced quality image. While
any and every measure that can be taken to protect copyrighted material can
be defeated, it isn't that hard to make it much more expensive to violate
copyright than it is to obtain legally (or in the case of pirating images
for use in eBay auctions, much more expensive to violate copyright than the
seller can reasonably hope to get from the auction). That is, in fact, the
best you can hope for. But of course, you face costs (in terms of hardware
on which to run the proxy, and extra routing hardware, and in terms of
programming cost, which may be the most significant expense unless you know
how to do it yourself), and the visitors to your website may pay some cost
(e.g., in the case of using a Java applet, those running Windows XP and
later will have to download and install the Java runtime because MS no
longer ships it with Windows). So you end with a cost/benfit analysis for
both the copyright owner and the pirate: in both cases, a judgement needs to
be made, is the effort/cost justified by the benfit/profit that can be
realized.

The methods your creative genius has imagined seem very valid; in fact
it was I who suggested IP filtering to control access from "offending"
sites in a previous followup article.. I agree, it is the
responsibility of the photographer to _directly_ control the content
s/he provides the public, as opposed to crying 'theft' when the
photographs s/he has made publicly accessible are in fact accessed by
the public.

And I still submit, that because no actual copying of the photographs
has taken place, there is no copyright infringement perpetrated by the
eBay seller who embeds links to another's photographs in his eBay
auction page.

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 04:08:35 GMT, Dewitt
wrote in Message-Id: :

On Sun, 11 Jan 2004 23:27:02 GMT, Larry Dighera
wrote:

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.

Larry, clearly the internet presents some interesting copyright
issues, but your last statement above is absolute[ly] untrue. Works do
not have to contain a copyright statement or notice for copyright law
to hold.

Do you have any idea when that became fact? I was under the
impression, that the author had no right to the work unless s/he
placed a notice within it.

Obviously, your mind is pretty well made up and I doubt my
comments will sway you, however I would suggest others do some
research before adopting your position.

I'm swayed. :-)

Regardless if the necessity to place a notice within the work is
mandatory to claim a right to it or not, you've got to admit that
phonographs that do contain such a notice are automatically attributed
to their creator unlike those that don't.

In any event, I still see no copyright infringement occurring as
result of an eBay seller imbedding links to images located on
another's web site. I could be wrong about that too. But until
someone provides a credible citation to the contrary, such a belief
seems grounded in reason, IMO.

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 04:08:35 GMT, Dewitt
wrote in Message-Id: :

On Sun, 11 Jan 2004 23:27:02 GMT, Larry Dighera
wrote:

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.

Larry, clearly the internet presents some interesting copyright
issues, but your last statement above is absolute[ly] untrue. Works do
not have to contain a copyright statement or notice for copyright law
to hold.

Do you have any idea when that became fact? I was under the
impression, that the author had no right to the work unless s/he
placed a notice within it.

Obviously, your mind is pretty well made up and I doubt my
comments will sway you, however I would suggest others do some
research before adopting your position.

I'm swayed. :-)

Regardless if the necessity to place a notice within the work is
mandatory to claim a right to it or not, you've got to admit that
phonographs that do contain such a notice are automatically attributed
to their creator unlike those that don't.

In any event, I still see no copyright infringement occurring as
result of an eBay seller imbedding links to images located on
another's web site. I could be wrong about that too. But until
someone provides a credible citation to the contrary, such a belief
seems grounded in reason, IMO.

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 08:44:01 -0500, "Ted Byers"
wrote in Message-Id:
:

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
.. .

[snip]
It's simple; works that contain _no_ copyright notice are not
copyrighted.

This isn't correct. Ray posted a quote from the US Copyright office
website
that states that copyright exists from the moment the copyrighted work is
created.

Perhaps you and Ray are correct. I haven't done the research to
verify that.

I'm happy to see that neither you nor anyone else has challenged my
contention that because the photographs are NOT being copied, there is
no copyright infringement in the example at hand.

Whether or not the pictures are copied is debatable, since a copy must be
generated at some point in order for the image to be viewable by the visitor
to the site. Maybe that is a gray area that needs better definition. This
would not be a surprise since the technology of the Internet and what is
possible seems to be well ahead of what existing law can handle.

All of the text posted in this newsgroup is therefore copyrighted,
even though folk rarely, if ever, attempt to protect such copyrighted
material.

If that is correct, Google Groups has failed to pay me any royalty for
archiving and redistributing my usenet articles. I wonder how Google
gets away with "illegally" copying and redistributing all those usenet
articles without a having to defend themselves against a myriad of
tort suits. :-)

Probably because the vast majority of copyright holders for the material
they archive don't care about their rights to the material they posted.

Certainly, though, anyone who produces copyrighted work has a
right to place restrictions on how that work can be used.

If said producer places his work on the WWW for public access,
hansen't he implicitly abrogated the right to control the viewing of
it? How could s/he provide public access and then cry foul when the
work is publicly accessed. Such a policy would seem to create a
public nuisance.

No, definitely not.

I don't know if you're a software developer or not, but either way, you may
want to visit www.gnu.org and take a look at their various licenses for gnu
projects. For all gnu projects, the source code is readily available to
anyone who wants to look at it and/or compile or modify it. However, the
license to do so places significant limitations on what can be done with it.
For example, IF i were to use a GNU library, the license would require me to
distribute my software with source code (or at least object code for my work
and source for the library used). It is the license under which copyrighted
material that determines whether or not a given work can be used for a given
purpose, and it is the fact that the copyright owner owns the copyright that
gives him the right to specify the terms under which his work is
distributed. It is, in fact, why I generally do not use Gnu libraries in my
own projects, because I will not accept the restrictions on the consequent
distribution of my own work. I DO use Gnu software, though, because it is
generally of very good quality.

Since I own copyright on all the software I develop, I have a right to
specify the terms of the license to which you must agree in order to make
use of it. Now, in my case, you'd have to pay a license fee, but in
principle, the same thing applies to to copyrighted material that is
distributed without a licensing fee.

Many companies that develop software development tools provide versions of
their software for a nominal fee, if any, with the license stipulating that
the trial version may be used only for evaluation purposes, or in some
cases, development purposes, and require a different license with very
different licensing fees when you switch your activity from development to
distribution. Oracle, one of the leading database developers has made their
software available for free to developers, and I recently downloaded their
latest product. However, the license stipulates that I can use it only for
development. If I decide to use it to deploy a database product, however,
I, or my client, would have to obtain a different license and pay many
thousands of dollars for a license fee. The development version is exactly
the same as the production version; it must be in order to relaibly develop
new products using it, but what you can do with it is strictly determined by
the license to which you must agree in order to install it.

[snip]
The methods your creative genius has imagined seem very valid; in fact
it was I who suggested IP filtering to control access from "offending"
sites in a previous followup article..
Good. ;-)

I work as a software developer and have been studying and experimenting with
different means of protecting copyrighted material that is published on the
web for a number of years now. ;-) But fully fledged
development/implementation/deployment is an expensive proposition and to
date I have found few willing to go to the expense of doing it right. While
IP filtering is relatively easy, a website owner could be facing costs of
many tens of thousands of dollars, and possibly up into six or seven figures
(depending on the scale required), to do it thoroughly and well.

I agree, it is the
responsibility of the photographer to _directly_ control the content
s/he provides the public, as opposed to crying 'theft' when the
photographs s/he has made publicly accessible are in fact accessed by
the public.

I only half agree here. It is up to the producer to actively protect his
property, but I would maintain that copyright violation is a form of theft,
regardless of the way in which the copyright violation occurs. It seems
insignificant to me whether the violation is in terms of someone
photocopying parts of a book or journal article (though note, some
publications expressly permit some copying for personal/academic fair use),
or making an illegal copy of my software or using my software in a way not
expressly permitted by the license I have chosen to use.

Actually, in many cases, the least expensive option for protecting copyright
is to implement your own security, and in many others, the threat of legal
action may be the least expensive. It all depends on how much paterial
needs protection, the nature or peculiarities of your local legal system
(e.g. how long will the proceedings take and how many thousands of dollars
per day will your lawyers charge). I would expect that a mixed approach is
most likely to be optimal, with the owner investing a few tens of thousands
of dollars on security measures and being willing to risk legal fees should
someone risk legal action and break into the site anyway. Whatever the
copyright owner does will depend on how much value he places on his
copyright and how far he is willing to go to protect it.

And I still submit, that because no actual copying of the photographs
has taken place, there is no copyright infringement perpetrated by the
eBay seller who embeds links to another's photographs in his eBay
auction page.

In this instance, it is not the making of a physical copy that matters but
rather the violation of the terms of use specified on the website that
matters. Mind you, I would recommend that the owner of copyrighted material
maintain a gateway page through which any visitor to the website must pass
in order to view the copyrighted material, and on the gateway page, spell
out in detail what the permitted uses are, and do not allow further requests
browsing deeper into the website until the visitor specifically agrees to
the license. This would apply regardless of whether or not any fees are
requested.

Cheers,

Ted

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 18:16:58 GMT, Larry Dighera
wrote:

Do you have any idea when that became fact? I was under the
impression, that the author had no right to the work unless s/he
placed a notice within it.

Many years ago (30+?), printed matter did require (or at least it was
strongly preferred) a copyright statement, but as Ray noted in his
post, current copyright law does not require that. I don't believe
that photo, artwork, or the like ever required a copyright notice.


Obviously, your mind is pretty well made up and I doubt my
comments will sway you, however I would suggest others do some
research before adopting your position.

I'm swayed. :-)

Cool, that was easy! :-)


Regardless if the necessity to place a notice within the work is
mandatory to claim a right to it or not, you've got to admit that
phonographs that do contain such a notice are automatically attributed
to their creator unlike those that don't.

I do agree that a notice in a photo makes it easier for the author to
prove ownership and can make a copyright claim easier. It also
provides some attribution, but copyright and attribution are two
separate issues. Simply providing attribution does not make it legal
to use a copyrighted work.


In any event, I still see no copyright infringement occurring as
result of an eBay seller imbedding links to images located on
another's web site. I could be wrong about that too. But until
someone provides a credible citation to the contrary, such a belief
seems grounded in reason, IMO.

There are four ways I can think of to make use of someone else's photo
on the web:
1) Copy the image to your website use it from there
2) Embedded a link to the photo in one of your webpages
3) Provide an explicit link directly to the image
4) Provide an explicit link to the webpage where the owner displays
the photo.

The use of 1) is a clearly copyright violation. The use of 4) is
almost certainly not a copyright violation though some website owners
don't like it. The use of 2) and 3) start to get a bit murkier. I
doubt anyone would get very far persuing a copyright violation case
based on 3) though I consider it pretty tacky.

That leaves 2) which most of the prior discussion has focused on. I
can't point to a legal case on this, but strongly believe that the
courts see 2) as functionally equivalent to 1) and therefore a clear
copyright violation. Imagine that I setup a website called DNN
(Dewitt's News Network). To keep my cost low, I embedded links to AP
and UPI pictures that I find on CNN and MSNBC in my website. I have
absolutely no doubt that AP, UPI, CNN and MSNBC would all slap me
with a copyright suit and win in the courts. Eric probably doesn't
have the financial resources to defend his copyright the way those
companies do, but that doesn't mean would should respect his copyright
any less.

deg

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 08:44:01 -0500, "Ted Byers"
wrote in Message-Id:
:

"Larry Dighera" wrote in message
.. .

[snip]
It's simple; works that contain _no_ copyright notice are not
copyrighted.

This isn't correct. Ray posted a quote from the US Copyright office
website
that states that copyright exists from the moment the copyrighted work is
created.

Perhaps you and Ray are correct. I haven't done the research to
verify that.

I'm happy to see that neither you nor anyone else has challenged my
contention that because the photographs are NOT being copied, there is
no copyright infringement in the example at hand.

Whether or not the pictures are copied is debatable, since a copy must be
generated at some point in order for the image to be viewable by the visitor
to the site. Maybe that is a gray area that needs better definition. This
would not be a surprise since the technology of the Internet and what is
possible seems to be well ahead of what existing law can handle.

All of the text posted in this newsgroup is therefore copyrighted,
even though folk rarely, if ever, attempt to protect such copyrighted
material.

If that is correct, Google Groups has failed to pay me any royalty for
archiving and redistributing my usenet articles. I wonder how Google
gets away with "illegally" copying and redistributing all those usenet
articles without a having to defend themselves against a myriad of
tort suits. :-)

Probably because the vast majority of copyright holders for the material
they archive don't care about their rights to the material they posted.

Certainly, though, anyone who produces copyrighted work has a
right to place restrictions on how that work can be used.

If said producer places his work on the WWW for public access,
hansen't he implicitly abrogated the right to control the viewing of
it? How could s/he provide public access and then cry foul when the
work is publicly accessed. Such a policy would seem to create a
public nuisance.

No, definitely not.

I don't know if you're a software developer or not, but either way, you may
want to visit www.gnu.org and take a look at their various licenses for gnu
projects. For all gnu projects, the source code is readily available to
anyone who wants to look at it and/or compile or modify it. However, the
license to do so places significant limitations on what can be done with it.
For example, IF i were to use a GNU library, the license would require me to
distribute my software with source code (or at least object code for my work
and source for the library used). It is the license under which copyrighted
material that determines whether or not a given work can be used for a given
purpose, and it is the fact that the copyright owner owns the copyright that
gives him the right to specify the terms under which his work is
distributed. It is, in fact, why I generally do not use Gnu libraries in my
own projects, because I will not accept the restrictions on the consequent
distribution of my own work. I DO use Gnu software, though, because it is
generally of very good quality.

Since I own copyright on all the software I develop, I have a right to
specify the terms of the license to which you must agree in order to make
use of it. Now, in my case, you'd have to pay a license fee, but in
principle, the same thing applies to to copyrighted material that is
distributed without a licensing fee.

Many companies that develop software development tools provide versions of
their software for a nominal fee, if any, with the license stipulating that
the trial version may be used only for evaluation purposes, or in some
cases, development purposes, and require a different license with very
different licensing fees when you switch your activity from development to
distribution. Oracle, one of the leading database developers has made their
software available for free to developers, and I recently downloaded their
latest product. However, the license stipulates that I can use it only for
development. If I decide to use it to deploy a database product, however,
I, or my client, would have to obtain a different license and pay many
thousands of dollars for a license fee. The development version is exactly
the same as the production version; it must be in order to relaibly develop
new products using it, but what you can do with it is strictly determined by
the license to which you must agree in order to install it.

[snip]
The methods your creative genius has imagined seem very valid; in fact
it was I who suggested IP filtering to control access from "offending"
sites in a previous followup article..
Good. ;-)

I work as a software developer and have been studying and experimenting with
different means of protecting copyrighted material that is published on the
web for a number of years now. ;-) But fully fledged
development/implementation/deployment is an expensive proposition and to
date I have found few willing to go to the expense of doing it right. While
IP filtering is relatively easy, a website owner could be facing costs of
many tens of thousands of dollars, and possibly up into six or seven figures
(depending on the scale required), to do it thoroughly and well.

I agree, it is the
responsibility of the photographer to _directly_ control the content
s/he provides the public, as opposed to crying 'theft' when the
photographs s/he has made publicly accessible are in fact accessed by
the public.

I only half agree here. It is up to the producer to actively protect his
property, but I would maintain that copyright violation is a form of theft,
regardless of the way in which the copyright violation occurs. It seems
insignificant to me whether the violation is in terms of someone
photocopying parts of a book or journal article (though note, some
publications expressly permit some copying for personal/academic fair use),
or making an illegal copy of my software or using my software in a way not
expressly permitted by the license I have chosen to use.

Actually, in many cases, the least expensive option for protecting copyright
is to implement your own security, and in many others, the threat of legal
action may be the least expensive. It all depends on how much paterial
needs protection, the nature or peculiarities of your local legal system
(e.g. how long will the proceedings take and how many thousands of dollars
per day will your lawyers charge). I would expect that a mixed approach is
most likely to be optimal, with the owner investing a few tens of thousands
of dollars on security measures and being willing to risk legal fees should
someone risk legal action and break into the site anyway. Whatever the
copyright owner does will depend on how much value he places on his
copyright and how far he is willing to go to protect it.

And I still submit, that because no actual copying of the photographs
has taken place, there is no copyright infringement perpetrated by the
eBay seller who embeds links to another's photographs in his eBay
auction page.

In this instance, it is not the making of a physical copy that matters but
rather the violation of the terms of use specified on the website that
matters. Mind you, I would recommend that the owner of copyrighted material
maintain a gateway page through which any visitor to the website must pass
in order to view the copyrighted material, and on the gateway page, spell
out in detail what the permitted uses are, and do not allow further requests
browsing deeper into the website until the visitor specifically agrees to
the license. This would apply regardless of whether or not any fees are
requested.

Cheers,

Ted

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 18:16:58 GMT, Larry Dighera
wrote:

Do you have any idea when that became fact? I was under the
impression, that the author had no right to the work unless s/he
placed a notice within it.

Many years ago (30+?), printed matter did require (or at least it was
strongly preferred) a copyright statement, but as Ray noted in his
post, current copyright law does not require that. I don't believe
that photo, artwork, or the like ever required a copyright notice.


Obviously, your mind is pretty well made up and I doubt my
comments will sway you, however I would suggest others do some
research before adopting your position.

I'm swayed. :-)

Cool, that was easy! :-)


Regardless if the necessity to place a notice within the work is
mandatory to claim a right to it or not, you've got to admit that
phonographs that do contain such a notice are automatically attributed
to their creator unlike those that don't.

I do agree that a notice in a photo makes it easier for the author to
prove ownership and can make a copyright claim easier. It also
provides some attribution, but copyright and attribution are two
separate issues. Simply providing attribution does not make it legal
to use a copyrighted work.


In any event, I still see no copyright infringement occurring as
result of an eBay seller imbedding links to images located on
another's web site. I could be wrong about that too. But until
someone provides a credible citation to the contrary, such a belief
seems grounded in reason, IMO.

There are four ways I can think of to make use of someone else's photo
on the web:
1) Copy the image to your website use it from there
2) Embedded a link to the photo in one of your webpages
3) Provide an explicit link directly to the image
4) Provide an explicit link to the webpage where the owner displays
the photo.

The use of 1) is a clearly copyright violation. The use of 4) is
almost certainly not a copyright violation though some website owners
don't like it. The use of 2) and 3) start to get a bit murkier. I
doubt anyone would get very far persuing a copyright violation case
based on 3) though I consider it pretty tacky.

That leaves 2) which most of the prior discussion has focused on. I
can't point to a legal case on this, but strongly believe that the
courts see 2) as functionally equivalent to 1) and therefore a clear
copyright violation. Imagine that I setup a website called DNN
(Dewitt's News Network). To keep my cost low, I embedded links to AP
and UPI pictures that I find on CNN and MSNBC in my website. I have
absolutely no doubt that AP, UPI, CNN and MSNBC would all slap me
with a copyright suit and win in the courts. Eric probably doesn't
have the financial resources to defend his copyright the way those
companies do, but that doesn't mean would should respect his copyright
any less.

deg

Xref: kermit rec.gardens.orchids:54325

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 19:22:21 GMT, Dewitt
wrote:

Eric probably doesn't
have the financial resources to defend his copyright the way those
companies do, but that doesn't mean would should respect his copyright
any less.

We should, however, try to avoid typos that garble our sentences. The
above should read ". . . but that doesn't mean we should respect his
copyright any less."

deg