By your logic if I created the pop Coke, I and everyone else should be able to just take it out of the grocery stores because it is just sitting there doing no one any good. It would be better if we all took the pop, didn’t pay for it.

The mentality that what is good for the masses is more important than seeing the creator paid for their work is a communist ideology.

Join the fun and enter the “Piss Off Lane Hartwell” video contest:
http://willvideoforfood.com/20.....o-contest/

Let’s face facts. Even if it were possible, in an ideal world, that such use could be considered okay and would not hurt photographers, musicians or other creative artists; the way the law is interpreted by courts and lawyers have made it impossible to live in such place. They have made the laws, and interpreting those laws, so strict and pharisaical that to not protect ones rights is tatamount to saying they have no rights.

If photographers don’t act like Hartwell, then future egregious infringement of their rights will be ignored by the courts. Courts and lawyers don’t allow discretion. If you let one person slide, you have to let them all slide.

So photographers, artists, movie makers are all stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they be reasonable, they lose ever right to protect everything. If they are hard nosed, the the whiny “I want it all for free” crybabies call them bullies.

Sorry, babe, but this world ain’t a Star Trek utopia yet. Money still greases the wheels of this economy. And as long as it does, and laws are interpreted in absolute terms by courts that despise subtlety and an ability to determine ones own destiny as one would like to, photographers have to be hard-nosed about protecting their livelihoods.

So stop blaming artists for protecting themselves. Blame the real culprits here. Courts, lawyers and the lawmakers who write shoddy legislation, and interpret laws in ways that do not serve all people.

This was a highly imitative, read unoriginal, attempt to gain attention for the purpose of self promotion. It stole the original work of many people. The “creator” of this “art” contributed next to nothing other than imitation of the truly creative video that preceded it.

Yeah, for this group, that’s the essence of art: dumb imitation. You folks need to get out of your cubicles every month or so. You have no notion of how illiterate you are.

Who but a bunch of illiterates could find this art or creative?

I hope the thief gets hammered in the courts. unimaginative little self promoters need to be restrained. They make very stupid decisions that harm others.

From Above:

Section 107 also sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair:

1: the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

It was a commercial use for promotion.

2: the nature of the copyrighted work;

A Photograph was used

3: amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

The complete photo was used

4: the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The photo was seen by many. It most likely lowered the value of the photo

Look at the fair use page on the copyright website mentioned above. How was the use fair?

It does not matter how small the use was in relation to the video. That only matters in the amount of damages. The amount of use is asked in relation to the photo not the video.

Before I would initiate a DMCA claim, I would want to contact the infringer and attempt to resolve the problem. That might include billing for the use, asking that the content be removed, credit for continued use, or some other methiod. Copyright does not require credit or a specific payment. It does require permission of the owner unless the use meets the fair use exceptions.

BUT

You guys saying that fair use requires attribution/giving credit are just spreading some wrongness.

If it is fair use it doesn’t matter whether you give credit.
Conversely, it is polite to credit but that does not make it fair use.

From the copyright notice at the bottom of this page, it is also copyright infringment. Each post to the blog is a creative work and protectted by copyright law. The website copyright has a few aspects. It is a Collective Work which means that it contains contributions from many authors. The website copyright also covers the layout and design of the site.

As a photographer, I watermark images on my site. This does not stop theft and does make the images less appealing. I do this to have control of where my images are used and to earn a living from their use. If you are using a photo, words, song, etc created after 1989 it is protected by copyright:

http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain/

Now if someone releases the work to the public domain through a creative commons or other tool, you can use it.

Lets look at fair use and the DMCA. Many have mentioned the threat of a lawsuit and why it was not filed. DMCA is the tool that resolves disputes about copyright theft with out lawsuits in almost all cases and protects website owners from claims.

A DMCA notice does not automaticly become a lawsuit. If the person who receives the notice files a counter notice, the content is replaced and a lawsuit can result. Only when you state under penalties of purgery that the content does not infringe is there a posiblity of a lawsuit.

The use was not in my estimation a fair use. Only if the issue went to trial would an abolute decision be possible. The other issue is damages. The damages would most likely be low. The potential value of damages has no bearing on the DMCA takedown.

I’m glad the DMCA exists to protect my work and the work of other creative people in the viral world we live in.

I don’t support all current copyright laws. The “Micky Mouse” provisions enacted that increased the term of copyright to corporations to 95 years is a mistake. The goal of copyright is to compensate creators for thier works has been part of English and Anerican since 1518. The first Copyrights were only to specific individuals for very short terms. I would support changes to copyright law to a much shorter term. I could live with an Author’s Life + 20 Years and 40 years for Corporate (work for Hire) works. The current law has terms too long. Watch out, sometime before November 18th 2023, there will be atempts to increase the Corporate Copyright term. Hopefully it fails and Mickey Mouse becomes Public Domain.

Why do you expect a photographer to do so?

© Lou Lesko
In a recent post on Tech Crunch, Michael Arrington takes issue with photographer Lane Hartwell because she enforced her copyright of a photograph that was used on a video parodying the latest silicon valley bubble. The result of her actio…

If I cut and paste, without payment and credit, the full and complete posts on this blog and use it on my blog that is plagiarism. Well, taking another persons photograph and using it, without payment and credit is the same thing. You are after all using the complete and total image after all.

Or, is it because the size of the image is smaller that its fair use… so, does that mean if I lower the font size on the writing it makes it fair use?

I’m sure the writer of this blog wouldn’t like it if someone took every post they made here and put them on another blog with no reference to the original author. And I’m sure they would be even more upset if that other blog were running advertisements and making a lot of money off their work.

Do you think for a second these “fair use” people would stand for that? Not a chance. But for some reason photographers are just supposed to be happy their work is being used.

Joe

No, the issue is that her property was stolen. It seems to me that too many people are getting their education about intellectual property from reading how Huckleberry Finn was always “borrowing” things. And while a lot of people seem pretty jaded today about what they consider corporate intellectual property, and maybe corporations shouldn’t be allowed to own lifetime copyrights the same as people, I don’t see why anyone is so eager to support someone stealing from an independent artist. If Richter Scales considered the photo of no value, maybe they should’ve gone out and taken their own photo for the video.

I had the same thing happen recently with some poetry I posted on one of my blogs. I got an email one day notifying me that eight of my poems were seen on a band’s fan site, posted there by a user without my permission or attribution. In my case I was lucky that the site owner removed them as soon as I notified him. But I didn’t just have my feelings hurt because my name wasn’t mentioned. I’ve worked for 20 years attempting to profit from my creative writing, which is a lot of work and which I take seriously. My work represents my life force, my life’s breath infused into something I care about. I provided those poems and an entire novel to read for free, with my name attached, so at least someone would get some enjoyment out of them. But that didn’t mean I relinquished my rights to them. In fact they were marked very clearly with a copyright notice, which the law doesn’t require me to do in order for my work to be protected. As I understand the current law, intellectual property is protected by copyright whether it’s registered or not, and whether it’s marked or not. The trouble with not marking and not registering only arises if you have to go to court and prove a case. As for taking someone else’s work, whether it’s marked or not, YOU know what’s your work and what isn’t. No one should need to tell you something isn’t yours.

Whether publishers think my work is of value to them has no bearing on the value it has to me, or to someone who reads it on the web. And clearly it had some value to the person who stole my poems, or they wouldn’t have bothered to copy eight of them and claim them as theirs.

If the use of the photo in the Richter Scales video qualifies as fair use, then that requires crediting Ms. Hartwell, at the very least. But it’s always best to get the artist’s permission. Many magazine and book publishers require that writers who quote others get permission, even if the quote is small enough to qualify as fair use. I’m not a lawyer, but I believe fair use has to be determined in court, if the originator doesn’t approve and fights its use, because the law doesn’t state what specific amount constitutes fair use.

People who copy material off the internet should first educate themselves about copyright law. The best source in the US is the US Copyright Office, which is part of the Library of Congress. There’s a lot of information on the government’s website, and it can be found with a simple search. Most of the copyright laws are written in fairly simple language. It doesn’t take that much effort to get a handle on what’s okay and what isn’t.

Also, after contacting and demanding payment from those who use my work without permission or license, not only pay me but become clients as well (rather than resenting me, which I thought would be the case).

The higher I push my rates within reason, the more work I get.

Work is stolen because it has value, work is not assigned value as the result of theft.

Apparently the blog author needs not only an education on copyright law, but the workings of the free market as well.

My original image at flickr: http://tinyurl.com/22kkcx

It’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever have to do. But you’re doing the right thing. Believe me, I know.

The video shows TechCrunch and Arrington pretty prominently. So, it’s essentially free advertising for TechCrunch.

I thought the whole point of a takedown notice was to threaten a lawsuit? Are we supposed to be impressed with you that you haven’t filed a lawsuit yet?