I recently found one of my images stolen and put up on a scooter site. When I contacted the site admin, he told me it wasn't stealing and that I should make it impossible for folks to "inline" images from my server.
That's akin to saying, "oh, you should lock your front door otherwise you cannot call people stealing food from your refrigerator as theft". I think his is is a patently absurd argument, based on a limited understanding of copyright law.
Basically, my rights were violated when the image was referred to (using img src), thus forcing my server (and me) to pay the price of serving up the image to his users. So I suffered immediate and quantifiable damage in monetary terms. Beyond that, a fairly recent court case has addressed this specific issue:
"On February 6, 2002, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals announced its decision in Kelly v Arriba Soft. In favor of Ditto.com, it did uphold the right of image search engines to display thumbnail copies of images within their search results so long as the website URL was linked from the thumbnail. In favor of Kelly, it found that Arriba Soft's display of the framed, deep linked full sized image, was not fair use. Further, it found that Kelly suffered harm as a result of the Arriba Soft's display of full sized images, deep linked and framed at the Arriba Vista Image Searcher. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals remanded the issue back to Judge Taylor for determination of damages. The decision clearly determined that image search engines cannot display full sized images out of context of the website on which they were originally displayed; image search engines can only link from the thumbnail to the website!"
This reference is from the NetCopyrightLaw Web site. It seems incontrovertible that the thief violated the law and quite possibly that the admin's response indicates that he is a contributor to the violation (refusal to take down the reference).
I've since modified my files to make this sort of thing more difficult but I was just stunned by his response. Basically, blaming the victim of the theft. I suppose it happens all the time - and has happened to me before. Were this a photoblog, I imagine that I would have seen this much more often.
In the end, I wouldn't have been so pissed off if the guy had just (1) served the content up from his own site, (2) asked permission, and (3) gave me full credit for the photo rather than pretending he didn't know where it came from (I speak of the bboard user, not the admin).
My uncle and I have been discussing this for a while and I'm coming around to his point of view because of this whole issue.
Posted by artandscience at April 24, 2007 02:29 PM