Tangible vs. intangible wasn't the point, it was a metaphor to illustrate how people behave with locks vs. no locks and if you want even more fun I can send you to YouTube where the surveillance video of my daughters back porch shows someone from the neighborhood stealing her bike from her fenced in yard that just fell off her porch but again, it's obviously not digital and images probably wouldn't feed a crack habit.

The fact that it 'falls' into people's hands is the point that it can be made harder by changing what the browser does when you drag, drop, right mouse save-as or upload an image with some DRM stuff.

Start there and people will figure out it's not free real quick.

Everything is easier than what came before. That's about as close to tautology as you're going to get.

Public photocopiers killed the publishing industry. Why buy a book when you can copy it?

Or, wait, maybe it was the libraries. No sense in paying money for something you're only going to read once.

And I can clearly remember when stereo tape recorders played the death knell of the recording industry. That was, mmm, around the mid '70's wasn't it?

We won't even talk about software...

It has to do with determining damages which is the whole point of starting a lawsuit over copyright infringement in the first place.

I was in fact correct, there is no requirement to prove willful infringement. You can get reasonable amounts for damages without going into "willful" infringement arguments in court. This stuff rarely gets to court anyway, it's pretty much an auto-loss for the defendant, they have to pay the plaintiff's legal fees so any time spent on arguing that their infringement is willful is coming out of their own pocket.

While bouncing Copyright around, don't forget about search engines and site scrapers. For example the BigResource site has little original content and publishes everybody else's content to display ads and Google ranks them better than the owners of the content which will no doubt be protected by Copyright.

Over the years I have seen lots of new services emerging that track images, register and monitor pages and content and so on. Lot's of people have tried them and in the end realised that it's all a waste of time. I think that the original developers of image tracking faded away after only a couple of years. That was back in 2000.

Prosecuting offenders is also a waste of time and the majority of them will more often than not turn out to be backyarders and suing them wouldn't even get your solicitor paid. That's if they stay in one place long enough to be served.

Solicitors want to be guaranteed payment and will want to be paid up front, especially for a Copyright case. How do you get your money back when they serve a fictitious address or find out that the site owner was a minor?

People wanting to protect their craft and their livelihood will always be a minority and they will always have formidable opposition.

People wanting to protect their craft and their livelihood will always be a minority and they will always have formidable opposition.

Until they band together, organize and lobby like the RIAA and MPAA.

Both masses of people and/or big money gets attention when they talk while fringe element whining gets largely ignored. Since the people trying to protect their craft don't tend to have money the only option they have is to organize and present a bigger voice.

If you don't have money, then masses of people is the next recourse hence the phrase "Power to the People" and an example would be the NRA where a mere 5 million members somehow manage to get their way when 300+ million other citizens mostly disagree with them but they are organized with a collective voice which makes all the difference.

Power to the People

But this is where the problem lies. There are only a few people with original content or intellectual property. The rest is comprised of a sea on content thieves who believe that it is their god given right to help themselves to everything for free.

Ok, so let's do something about it... and you will soon see it undermined just like SOFA was by the likes of Wikipedia and Google who have built their businesses on the IP of others.

If you don't have money, then masses of people is the next recourse hence the phrase "Power to the People" and an example would be the NRA where a mere 5 million members and huge amounts of "lobbying" money from their backers the gun manufacturers and weapons industry somehow manage to get their way when 300+ million other citizens mostly disagree with them but they are organized with a collective voice and huge amounts of money for "lobbying" and media, which makes all the difference.

There ya go incrediBill..fixed it for ya :)

And now you people are comparing sharing intellectual property to the NRA. This thread just gets worse and worse.

You people just don't get it: the internet is about communication and sharing. That is the direction is has always gone, even from the beginning. It wasn't until someone figured out they could sell their product online that intellectual property "thieving" became a "problem". All you people would be out of a job in the first place if it weren't for the internet, no? Oh, you wouldn't? Then go sell your stuff exclusively offline and stop sharing it with some TOS or copyright label attached to it thinking it'll make a difference cuz everyone is going to continue to ignore those and keep sharing your stuff the longer you keep your copyrighted material online.

Making money from your website only happens when you drive traffic to it. There is no way anyone can "steal traffic" from you. You have to learn how to drive the traffic yourself through advertising, that is how it works. People don't go to your site because they aren't interested in going to your site, not because someone else shared your image with a link to theirs. If you don't learn how to advertise, then you won't make money, simple as that. But all this talk about "stealing content" is anti-internet at a base level.

What all of you really mean to say is "I'm upset that everyone else knows how to drive traffic to their sites better than me but I don't want to admit that so I'm going to blame copyright infringement." Copyright infringement as a law will phase out and most likely very soon, mark my words.

I'm officially done with this thread. Thanks for the laughs :D

There is no way anyone can "steal traffic" from you.

They can "steal traffic" from me when pinners have pinned the entirety of my website X 10 all over Pinterest.

They're forcing me to compete... with my own content.

I realize that's it's really funny and droll for some that I'm some kind of dinosaur, haha.

It kind of amazes me that there has been so little comment on this:
Bing Integrates Pinterest Sharing Into Image Search [webmasterworld.com]

I haven't seen this in Canada.

The Bing pin-it button OVERRIDES the nopin metatag on the source website, this was tried by several people and found to be consistent.

There's also this photographer:
[tarabradford.com...]

Some company used her image that someone put on Pinterest - for printed promotional materials, and the company is telling the photographer, basically, to suck it up and take it with the pinner who granted Pinterest rights to the photographer's image by pinning it.

The Bing pin-it button OVERRIDES the nopin metatag on the source website, this was tried by several people and found to be consistent.

Thanks for the info. That's what I feared!

Building a new site, apparently best to disallow the image directories in robots.txt, etc.

You people just don't get it: the internet is about communication and sharing.

What's your website URL? If we "shared" a few dozen copies of it and killed your source of income perhaps you would "get it".

Some company used her image that someone put on Pinterest - for printed promotional materials, and the company is telling the photographer, basically, to suck it up and take it with the pinner who granted Pinterest rights to the photographer's image by pinning it.

Someone pinning something can't reassign the rights of the original author, that doesn't hold water and ignorance is no excuse on the part of the company using images that don't belong to them in the first place. I would simply send them a bill for the legitimate usage for the image, with a date that says legal action will be taken if they fail to pay before the due date.

If it has a registered copyright, they're toast.

If she has a common copyright, limited recourse.

Bottom line I'd talk to a copyright attorney and see what you could do perhaps naming Pinterest, the pinner and the company that used it in a printed piece but I'm not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV, so talk to a lawyer for sure.

Finally, I must ask the simple question, why in the heck is this photographer putting up images online with enough resolution to be used in a printed piece in the first place?

That's the first mistake, learn from it and move on.

why in the heck is this photographer...

Depressingly likely answer: Because she doesn't know any better. How many times have you got an e-mail with attached photograph, and when you open the thing it's three megabytes and measures several thousand pixels each way? Dear sender: your baby is cute but I'm not going to use its picture as wallpaper ... of my living room.

DRM

actually there's no need: all images are copyrighted from the moment they are created unless the author donates it to the public domain - even you holiday pictures of your family are protected - although they most likely aren't very "artsy".
So, all that's needed is a tag in the image format that indicates the year the copyright is likely to expire (set to 0 for those that are so inclined).

nopin metatag

Same goes for the nopin meta: it's the reverse way, all is protected by default. If pinterest want those of us that are so inclined to enable their users to pin our content: then it's time to take action and add a "pin ok" header. The burden is on those that want to be allowed to do things, not the other way around.

I'm half inclined to actually go a and steal one image myself (would not know how to get a model to let me take what I want for myself -at least not willingly-) of the most horrendous rape in the most graphical way I can think of and add some text around it explaining that what they are doing is making me feel exactly what the image shows...
Next rewrite rules so that's what pinterest gets when a pinner tries to pin it. Sure they can work around it, but they first get to see this.

What's stopping me: image theft and the risk of accidentally showing it to somebody else.

Maybe some real hardcore p*rn site would be willing to donate a standard image for this ?
(Oh, that's right most of those get scraped to no end too - just not pinterest I guess)

you should take a look at the official statement from the Copyright Office

This may apply to content within the US, but even then it won't be reliable. For example if I can prove originality and date of creation then nothing registered anywhere else will help you at all.

Likewise with patents... so what if you registered a patent based on my product?

DRM
actually there's no need: all images are copyrighted

I think you missed the point I was trying to create a sale opportunity and a way to monetize the images from within the browser, or if free let it go as many do put things up for free. Problem is the masses are ignorant of copyright in general and would probably pay for images just like they pay for MP3s and APPs all the time if it were easy to do and was automatic.

Doesn't matter as Bing seems to be OK with allowing everyone to PIN everything which is crazy as Bill Gates owns or did own Corbis so they, of all people, should know better.

IF I want to sell images, there are specialized sites for that, much more efficient than trying to sell them for < 1USD myself. But there are plenty of images I use that I absolutely do not want to sell.

Still missing the point that people at the time of pinning something are clueless if its free or not, and where its sold its irrelevant as the technology could map the image to the Sellers choice of reselling outlet. The point its, until something its in place till bridge this gap people will continue to pin things that don't belong to then, and thanks to bing even things flagged as NOPIN freely in image search. Doing nothing solves nothing gotta start somewhere and sitting around filing DMCA isn't fruitful either.

They'll just work around your DRM, pinterest (and Microsoft - for what they are aiding them with bing) just needs to be sent to court, preferably by their US based victims to keep things simple. They must have pinned by now an image that belongs to a lawyer or two ...

DRM sucks. I really don't mind somebody doing a save image as ... - as long as they don't start to plaster it all over the web.

It's too late for me mow, but if I had the choice over gain, I would come back as a patent/copyright lawyer. Prior to 2000 they were virtually non existent in Australia and the laws hadn't yet matured. Even if a lawyer wanted to proceed with a case the magistrate would not have had a clue.... a sure recipe for disaster and wasted expenses.

So how do you find a good lawyer for Copyright? If they are any good then they will already be too busy, too expensive and preying on naive clients.

They'll just work around your DRM

They could, but that's willful theft leaving them no leg to stand on if they ignore documented standards and files with protection. Like I said previously, locks only keep honest people honest, and there's money to be made there by pointing honest people to places to make micropayments. I see millions of revenue just sitting there waiting to go KACHING! by simply prodding people to click PAY instead of steal.

I could be wrong, but I doubt it ;)

No one wants to pay. If you look at the traffic stats of the leading developer of drm and copy protection solutions you will see more keyword searches for evading protection than employing it and the queries vary from how to drag-n-drop protected image, how to copy protected images and video, how to remove drm and of course, how to disable right-click disabling.

They'll just work around your DRM

If they can work around it, then it was not very good in the first place. How superficial methods can ever be referred to as being protective is beyond me. Good DRM can never be exploited.

They'll just work around your DRM

If they can work around it, then it was not very good in the first place. How superficial methods can ever be referred to as being protective is beyond me. Good DRM can never be exploited.

By that definition there is no good DRM.

If it can be decoded/decrypted/... to be shown on a screen, played on a speaker, ... , then it CAN be saved in it's decoded form. End of story. Even if the OS supports this, the OS can still be running in a debugger. Not easy, but DRM cannot win from determined, skilled attackers.

And this is the internet age: you don't need to be determined nor skilled, all you need is somebody somewhere to show others how to do it. Look e.g. at the jailbreaking of iPhones if you want an example of how individuals defeat a proprietary system made by the biggest company on earth. Not just once, but again and again. Sure it's hard, but not "can never be exploited".

Look e.g. at the jailbreaking of iPhones if you want an example of how individuals defeat a proprietary system made by the biggest company on earth.

Probably not a sound analogy, since interfering with the iOS doesn't need to be impossible or even difficult. It only needs to be detectable after the fact.

But the fundamental difference of course is "If you do such-and-such, some other person will be adversely affected" vs. "If you do such-and-such, you yourself may be adversely affected".

By that definition there is no good DRM.

But there is. I can show you documents, images and video that can be displayed online or distributed on disk that cannot be decrypted and the DRM cannot be removed.

Just because psuedo protection* may have been exploited, it does not mean that everything can. A lot of DRM and copy protection that has been out there if anything, has been designed by scammers or designed to be too user friendly or to be supported on too many different OS and devices, including devices and OS incapable of being properly secured thus undermining security policy and providing weaknesses for exploit.

I fact I can send you a file that only you can open on one computer (or 3 if I allow it) that you can send to 1,000s of friends and not one of them will be able to open it. And that file cannot be decrypted. The only way that you can copy its contents is by photographing your computer screen while it is open on you computer, the only computer approved for access.

* protection is related to experience and while some solutions cannot be cracked even by the most experienced, the effectiveness of protection can be awe inspiring to the naive as I once discovered when discussing right mouse click scripts online. One user was so impressed by this new knowledge that they ran off with what they thought was the most amazing and most effective copy protection idea to market it is a product (of their own design).

Of course this person was naive, but the example may server to explain why there is so much useless DRM and non-protective copy protection out there.

By that definition there is no good DRM.

But there is. I can show you documents, images and video that can be displayed online or distributed on disk that cannot be decrypted and the DRM cannot be removed.

If you really believe that:
Post one of your imaginary files online that you guarantee to pay 100.000,- USD to the first one to send you an unprotected copy.

I'd suggest you not do it though, you'll loose the money within hours.

Ok. I can post a document or a video. But who really wants this challenge when they will be required to ante up and pay out when they fail? Sure it's really easy to make claims and I am so bored with all the false claims about everything being so impenetrable that I would like to see someone take the challenge.

How much are you prepared to lose?

"The first issue is that you are sharing your image on your own website"

Urgh.

It's not SHARING it's DISTRIBUTING from my own website. Who cares about the temp folders? They are completely irrelevent.

When someone posts MY image on stupid Pinterest, and Pinterest begins to DISTRIBUTE MY image on its website, that is copyright infringement and right now, it's unlawful.