I realize that just because Mighty Mouse (or whoever) appears on a zillion other sites with no mention of the artist’s permission, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it can appear here- but still, how can I know for sure before I post an image that is sure to be deleted?
If you’re linking from another person’s website, copyrighted or public domain, I would say be ready to have it be deleted, due to bandwidth issues.
If you’re linking an image you’ve created yourself from your own webspace, you should be safe (but check the Terms of Service of your webspace provider to make sure they allow images to be linked like that).
If you want to download an image from someone else’s website to put on your webspace–check with the owner of the website to get their permission if they are the copyright owner (or get contact information for the person who holds the copyright). The only exception might be a page of images that explicitly states that (a) the website owner holds copyright and (b) the images can be used anywhere on the net or on any message boards. (This would not apply to the flowerkitty site, because it doesn’t indicate whether the person who runs that page holds the copyright to the images.)
and if you don’t have explicit permission from the owner to use it;
and if the image is not obviously in the public domain (IOW, if there’s any doubt whether it is public domain or not),
THEN…
You don’t use it at all. Period.
These issues are irrelevant:
I really, really want to use it! – And I really, really want to take all the money in a local bank.
I don’t see any copyright notice. – I don’t see people’s names on the money in the bank, therefore, I can take it! Or, this family failed to put on the outside of their house “Our property: trespass and breaking is prohibited and will be prosecuted,” therefore, I can trespass, break in, and take their stuff!
Everyone else does it! – No, not everyone does it. And those who do are doing it illegally. Just because there are a bunch of thieves who are taking things that don’t belong to them, doesn’t mean you can.
(Although, if truly indeed everyone did break a copyright on a piece of work, and the owner knew about it and did nothing, then the law treats this as implicit permission to let the work slip into public domain. However, all those people who stole the copyrighted work for their own use did so illegally. They’re just lucky that the owner was too lax to prosecute and now it’s too late.)
I’m not making money off of it! – Well then, let me steal your bike and put it in my garage and leave it there. Is that OK? Because, after all, I’m not making money off of it!
Copyright means that a person has all the rights to all copies of a work, not necessarily the right to make money off of them. If I write love letters without ever intending to make money off of them, I would still want to prevent others from copying them, even though neither they nor I ever intended to make a profit off of them. Copyright does protect ability to profit, but, more importantly, it protects ownership. I own it. I have the right to dictate who may make whatever number of copies when. If you do so without my permission, you took something from me without my permission. You stole. It is illegal and immoral to do so.
Remember, if there is any doubt whether a work is truly in the public domain, then you don’t use it. You can only use other people’s art with explicit permission or when you are very sure, without a doubt, that the work is in public domain.
(Yes, there are exceptions to the rule – parodies, and excerpting for free speech commentary and justifiable research. But personal use is not allowed, even if not for profit.)
It is your duty and responsibility to show that whenever you are using someone else’s work, that you have explicit permission from the owner of the copyright to do so; or that the work is truly and explicitly in the public domain.
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Don’t get this confused with the issue of stealing bandwidth. I can put up on my webpage lots of public domain art, or, my own art which I give permission for anyone to use. You can download this art, put it up on your webpage, and then link to it from this message board.
What you can’t do is link to my webpage from this message board. When you do so, you are stealing my server’s service. That is… stealing.
There are a few things there I’d like to pick at, but it’s past my bedtime so I’ll just pick one for the moment:
Clearly not, because I no longer have use of my property. For the same reason you can’t take my left arm or my kidneys. Feel free to take a picture of my left arm, as long as it’s only a copy you can plaster it up on Times Square for all I care.
The bank analogy faulters for the same reason- help yourself to all the pictures of my money that you want, as long as my actual money is still there when I want it. Hell, the bank routinely takes my actual money and does all sorts of perverted things with it without my permission.
In Ed Zotti’s very own thread on this subject, there is an image of a Honda motorcycle had been posted twice. I’m sure this must be copyrighted or in some way a restricted or trademarked image, and I’m sure that the Honda Corporation is much more concerned about their products being defamed than the WB is concerned about their little green frog getting exposure on a message board, yet this image was allowed to remain.
I’ve been wading through the law all evening, and now I feel the need to bathe, but I digress. After visiting many sites where site owners at least seemed to care about the possibility of copyright infringement, I came to the realization that nobody much cares about it. This doesn’t make it right; it’s just an observation.
Then I stumbled upon The Copyright Act of 1976, and found the following reasons why I think there are no real grounds for copyright holders to take action against certain limited instances of the use of their property (and consequently, no reason for the owners & operators of this message board to be terribly concerned):
(Emphasis mine)
One at a time:
1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
Is this site is completely nonprofit?. I have the impression it is, but I know that new banners have been popping up recently. Still, I am not the one collecting revenue from the advertizers. I could see a problem if Pat Robertson was paying me $50 a month to post images of Fred Flintstone in my topics, but that’s not happening. Membership & admission to TSDMB is free, and I will never earn a profit from this site. The purpose and character of this site are recreation, research/education & mental-floss even.
2. The nature of the copyrighted work.
Let’s say, for the sake of example, that we’re talking about Fred Flintstone. The Flintstones is an internationally successful show which ran for more than six seasons, not counting more than thirty assorted lousy spinoffs. It continues to run in syndication across the world and spawned books, t-shirts, stuffed animals, and even a cereal. What’s more, The Flintstones has become a rather large chunk of our shared history, a facet of pop culture. 3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
One small image of Fred posted herein amounts to a microscopic fraction of a small percentage of the world of The Flintstones. For me to even come close to copying a substantial portion of the copyrighted work as a whole, I’d have to post the dialoge from an entire episode, including pictures & audio snippets. In this case, I could see how Hanna Barbara might become annoyed.
4. - The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
To be honest, I could post images of Fred & Barney once a week for the rest of my life and never come close to matching the whole of The Flintstones.
This is a site that (mainly) caters to the reasonably educated. Even if it were being put onto the web-market in anything other than a free form, it’s not the sort of thing that will ever become popular with the masses due to an occasional appearance by Mr. Flintstone, because the references are too fleeting.
As a result, The Straight Dope stands absolutely no chance of ever damaging the potential market and value of Thed Flintstones. If at least one person looks at this site and has the sudden urge to go back and watch The Flintstones, so much the better!
• • • • • • • •
I’m only half way through The Copyright Act of 1976, and I will keep reading until I find something that makes the above allowances conditional, or until I go insane. I also realize that it may just be easier for the board management to issue a blanket policy forbidding the posting of any copyrighted image rather than carefully sift every instance they encounter through the sieve I have attampted to provide. The moderators work hard enough as it is, and asking them to recognize the fine lines of copyright infringement may be one straw too many.
Opus, while tearing apart moriah’s post, you fail to grasp the meaning. We are talking about property rights, specifically intellectual property rights. The issue is not as easy to model with physical property right analogies, because as you so astutely point out, physical property differs from intellectual property. Nonetheless, it is property. Copyright laws are how we protect that property.
Unfortunately, it is very easy to take copies of pictures or text and repost, repeat, display, etc without getting permission, paying for them if necessary. That does not mean we yield property rights just because it is easy to take it. If you leave your car unlocked and someone steals it, can they argue you gave permission by leaving the doors unlocked? Similarly, can they argue you gave permission to use your picture just because you post it on the net? No. Now you may give permission, you may put a blanket note on the page that it is free to use, you may not care. But you may care if it is some artwork you spent time and effort creating. Or a song you wrote and performed. Or a cool piece of software you wrote. Copyright laws protect people from taking your work.
They may do a poor job of protecting your work - only works after the fact, and you have to be aware of it, and then you have to file a suit. But that is the purpose, to protect your property.
Respect other people’s property by not stealing it. That was the point of moriah’s post. Don’t be a thief. Don’t be a copyright thief, don’t be a bandwidth thief.
Unfortunately, opus, copyright law generally goes against your interpretations of what fair use is. Going through the factors:
1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes.
This board is a commercial enterprise. It is an advertiser-supported (if barely) activity of a for-profit newspaper. Though it’s free to us (thank the IPU) that doesn’t change its commercial character. Though Cecil and the Teeming Millions are waging the good fight against ignorance, that doesn’t mean this is an educational activity.
2. The nature of the copyrighted work.
You said:
All of that means that the Flinstones have a strong interest in protecting their commercially valuable properties. All of the Flintstones products out there are licensed. That means the company producing Flintstone vitamins and the other junk are paying royalties to the producers of the show. If we were able to freely approprate the images we could harm the value of the properties. 3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole.
You’re right that we could probably fairly use a small quote or perhaps a single image or audio to illustrate a point. However, the threshhold is most likely much lower than you make it out to be.
4. - The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
As above, a single, limited use would probably not hurt the market, but multiple uses or the posting of a large portion of the work would. And note that where a copyrighted work is the graphic itself (as most graphics are) posting the work here can put you close to the edge.
That’s all I’m hoping for, and from what I see around these boards, that’s all anybody is hoping for. I went overboard with points A through Z in the hopes that somebody would say “woah- that’s a little extreem, but points G and W appear to be doable”.
By educational or for purposes of reference I was alluding to the use of small isolated (and probably copyrighted) images borrowed to clarify or explain something, for example:
Billdo: Who in the heck is Gazoo?
opus: Oh, he’s a character on the Flintstones.
Billdo: Really? I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before. I wonder what he looks like.
opus: He looks like this: [opus links to an image of The Great Gazoo from his own personal site, so let’s not even talk about the bandwidth stealing thing okay?]
Billdo: Oh, yeah I think I saw him before… what an awful character.
What is the purpose of our exchange there? I’m calling up the image simply for purposes of reference & clarification. What’s the difference if ABC News (a profitable company, no?) flashed a picture of Gazoo on national television to millions of viewers and said something like “this was one of the least popular characters from The Flintstones tv show…” In fact, they have gone a big step further & cast a sour note upon the copyrighted image and (indirectly) the show itself. I don’t think we ever do that here.
I guess my point is, as long as we use copyrighted images sparingly for innocent purposes and don’t link to them from 3rd party sites, the copyright holders seem to (historically) have no real issues with this.
I still realize that granting this allowance puts a burden on the mods, who have enough to do already without interpreting each use of a graphic and deciding whether or not it’s commercial or defamatory. Even if it’s OK, they may decide that it’s just easier not to go there.