Ciao Michele (in english)
Written 1 year 24 weeks ago by SharmWeb. Last edit 32 weeks 4 days ago.
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Michele, our Italian photographer friend and us are studying to make a website concept for (semi-)professional photographers. On the topic of COPYRIGHT we published a photo "stolen" from his site (just for demonstration purposes). Below you find the full text of the email that we wrote him. You are invited to share your thoughts. It's likely you know more about it than us.
Hi Mickey,
Recently we did a search to understand a little how's the whole matter of copyright. First from the perspective of a webmaster in search of images for a new site, then from the side of a professional photographer who wants to show his pieces of art to the world, but does want to prevent others from using them outside of his site. Now, do not get mad at us Michael, it is just an example. We were, as desperate webmasters, in search of a sunset in Papua New Guinea and we found your photo here . We took the link and used it on this page. Not even giving a link to your site. Aah! Copyright Infringement! You say so? It is not a copy, but a hotlink. Read the Wikipedia in this regard . See?
"Because the copyright-protected content is stored on a server other than that of the linking person, there is typically no infringing "copy" made by the defendant linking (as may be essential), on which to base liability."
What to do? In this case, you may remove or relocate the address (URL), even putting an other image instead of the original message with some offensive message to our address ("SharmWeb sucks!"). You can also set your server to stop "hotlinking". It's possible to keep a black-or whitelist, controlling who can or can not use the image (YES to all *.org, NO to all *.com).
It's right here where we, with our concept site for photographers, can distinguish ourselves from the image hosting services already on the market (Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, PhotoBucket, etc.). They say: "You can protect an album with a password or hide the URL to search engines." Too bad that in this way, we should decline also to share a nice picture with the rest of the world. With the majority of the services, hotlinking is possible from the moment the photo is publicly viewable.
What you do in the event that your picture has been copied with a right-mouse click or screen capture, elaborated with Photoshop to remove the watermark (or just cropped to cut off the edge with your name) and put on a another server by another photographer who sells your photos in a calendar. First you have to find it, maybe possible with the excellent service of TinEye (try to use it on a couple of your images). Too bad that the false photographer excluded his site from being indexed by TinEye just with two lines in the robots.txt. The best thing TinEye could do is to disobey this file. It would stop a lot of websites from using copyright or not commercially licensed images.
If miraculously (don't know how) you found it, you must first send a "Notice of Infringement" with all related squabbles. Without this you can not start any other action (legal and otherwise). In short, a nice waste of time. And all our "friend" should do is simply remove the content in question, simply done with a click of the mouse, without even deigning to reply to you. If he "forgets" to remove the image you're lucky, because at least you can get even a bit by sending a "takedown notice" to his ISP, which usually works well.
For more information go here .
PS: If you want us to remove the picture, FORGET IT! First we want to see a Notice of Infringement! :)
Or better, it's your chance to try to prevent hotlinking from your server. If we see the image disappeared or changed, we know you succeeded, unless it is cached which brings you back at the previous option.
Hi Mickey,
Recently we did a search to understand a little how's the whole matter of copyright. First from the perspective of a webmaster in search of images for a new site, then from the side of a professional photographer who wants to show his pieces of art to the world, but does want to prevent others from using them outside of his site. Now, do not get mad at us Michael, it is just an example. We were, as desperate webmasters, in search of a sunset in Papua New Guinea and we found your photo here . We took the link and used it on this page. Not even giving a link to your site. Aah! Copyright Infringement! You say so? It is not a copy, but a hotlink. Read the Wikipedia in this regard . See?
"Because the copyright-protected content is stored on a server other than that of the linking person, there is typically no infringing "copy" made by the defendant linking (as may be essential), on which to base liability."
What to do? In this case, you may remove or relocate the address (URL), even putting an other image instead of the original message with some offensive message to our address ("SharmWeb sucks!"). You can also set your server to stop "hotlinking". It's possible to keep a black-or whitelist, controlling who can or can not use the image (YES to all *.org, NO to all *.com).
It's right here where we, with our concept site for photographers, can distinguish ourselves from the image hosting services already on the market (Flickr, Picasa, SmugMug, PhotoBucket, etc.). They say: "You can protect an album with a password or hide the URL to search engines." Too bad that in this way, we should decline also to share a nice picture with the rest of the world. With the majority of the services, hotlinking is possible from the moment the photo is publicly viewable.
What you do in the event that your picture has been copied with a right-mouse click or screen capture, elaborated with Photoshop to remove the watermark (or just cropped to cut off the edge with your name) and put on a another server by another photographer who sells your photos in a calendar. First you have to find it, maybe possible with the excellent service of TinEye (try to use it on a couple of your images). Too bad that the false photographer excluded his site from being indexed by TinEye just with two lines in the robots.txt. The best thing TinEye could do is to disobey this file. It would stop a lot of websites from using copyright or not commercially licensed images.
If miraculously (don't know how) you found it, you must first send a "Notice of Infringement" with all related squabbles. Without this you can not start any other action (legal and otherwise). In short, a nice waste of time. And all our "friend" should do is simply remove the content in question, simply done with a click of the mouse, without even deigning to reply to you. If he "forgets" to remove the image you're lucky, because at least you can get even a bit by sending a "takedown notice" to his ISP, which usually works well.
For more information go here .
PS: If you want us to remove the picture, FORGET IT! First we want to see a Notice of Infringement! :)
Or better, it's your chance to try to prevent hotlinking from your server. If we see the image disappeared or changed, we know you succeeded, unless it is cached which brings you back at the previous option.