Another Day, Another Copyright Violation

Yesterday I wrote about the Lane Hartwell/Richter Scales copyright fight, and today there’s a new one to talk about: Fox took a picture of a dog from some random website without permission and used it in a football broadcast.

And we get some of the same mind-bogglingly weird reactions as yesterday, like this one from the Boing Boing discussion:

While I don’t side with you or Fox on this, you did put a picture on the internet. Personally, that seems about as close to public domain as actually printing the picture out and handing it to every person on the street. I suppose you could argue Fox used it for profit, but mehh…

And this is why very VERY few pictures exist of me on the intertubes.

And if they had printed it and handed it out to everyone on the street, that would have transferred the picture into the public domain? And posting it on the Internet is “close” to public domain, meaning… what? You get some random assortment of the rights that you would get if it was completely in the public domain? The hell? Some peoples’ notion of copyright is just really, really wonky.

Or like this one, who blames the photographer for posting it unprotected on the Internet. This is the kind of mentality that leads to crappy DRM:

Let me understand this, YOU post UNPROTECTED content on the internet, for the whole world to see, and bitch when someone grabs your image? If you want to protect your photos, put copyright symbols on the photos, put it in a flash gallery, or use javascript to disable the right click button. Flicker disables the right click, so obviously, someone did a screen capture, but really, if you dont want people grabbing your pictures, stop posting them.

Right, you could do stupid things like disable right-click and hope that the person who wants to use the picture is too stupid to get around that in any of the billions of possible ways (how is a screen capture the only obvious work-around). Or you could rely on the laws and the intellectual property protection that you have on that image and not subject innocent viewers to annoying — and useless — copy protection.

Interestingly, another commenter on BB says that this is the way Fox always handles things:

When I posted the Drunk Squirrel Video on my blog, hosted at Youtube, I got a lot of calls from various media outlets to license it for use.

Who used it the most? Fox. Who never called and asked? Fox.

They just let their legal dept handle it. There isn’t much you can do…they’ll throw a couple hundred bucks your way after the fact. The chance they get caught is pretty slim.

I wonder what we’ll get tomorrow. Maybe someone will steal something of mine and I’ll be Internet-famouos for a few hours. (Legal note: the preceding sentence is not an invitation to illegally copy content from this web site. Discontinue use if rash develops.)