deskthority

There is no problem in linking to an existing original.
The owner retains the power of disposal over the work and can at any time suppress it (causing a dead link).
Or they can choose to replace it with another pic, which will then appear instead of the first one. That can be funny

kbdfr wrote: There is no problem in linking to an existing original.
The owner retains the power of disposal over the work and can at any time suppress it (causing a dead link).
Or they can choose to replace it with another pic, which will then appear instead of the first one. That can be funny

that's not what I mean. This is a nice example...

http://deskthority.net/off-topic-f10/st ... t8080.html

tons of images in there.

There's an additional problem with the wiki, which is that like wikipedia, it should be open source material, and be distributable as such. If someone makes a sites about the Model M, this person should be able to copy the wiki article. If deskthority stumbles and falls, someone should be able to install a copy of the wiki somewhere else. Now we not only have the discussion of using images on our own site, and whether that's not ok or ok (copyright vs fair use), but the additional problem of distributing such content. We cannot distribute images without an open license. This is already a problem with some images in the wiki.

kbdfr wrote: Or they can choose to replace it with another pic, which will then appear instead of the first one. That can be funny

I got banned from two forums in a week due to that.

(One image (ironically, a ban smiley) got automatically (based on referrer) replaced with goatse, another image that I had posted months prior got manually replaced with hai2u.)

I got all my posts removed from geekhack for that.

They didn't appreciate my joke to redirect requests from gh to webwit.nl/input/ to something else...

kbdfr wrote: Intellectual property entails, as material property does, the right of the owner to make (subject of course to applicable legal restrictions) whatever use of it they deem fit.

Yeah, this is the part that is wrong. “Intellectual property” is a fiction even more than all property is a fiction. It’s a society-made construct, not some kind of natural right. It’s actually a really bad umbrella term, because not only is “intellectual property” unlike other property, but also the various legal ideas that get grouped together – trademark and trade dress, trade secrets, copyright, patent, etc. – are extremely different from each other in both form and legal requirements and shouldn’t be jumbled together.

In any case though, copyright does not give owners the right to control everything anyone does with their work. If I buy a print of your photograph, spit on it, poor gasoline on top and light it on fire, and then throw the ashes down my latrine, there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop me.

More generally, there are many cases where my re-publishing your image fall under fair use provisions of copyright law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

I don't see anything reprehensible to that. After all, when I made photos of e.g. a guitar to sell it on eBay, I did my best to make them look great (they were by no means "shitty cellphone pics of shit", here again the typical argument of illegal users curiously depreciating others' work at the very moment they want to use it). If even years later I end finding them horrible and decide to delete them, anybody who has copied and published them prevents me from doing exactly that because I have no power of disposal over the copies.

So if someone used your guitar pic as an illustration in their guitars of the world wiki, would you sue them, or would you be flattered that they used your picture? If you wanted them to remove the photo, and you asked, and then they took it down, would you be unsatisfied?

Look, the moment you publish something, the public has it, and you have very little control over what people privately do with the images. On the internet, you can try to send cease and desist letters to everyone who re-hosts your image if you want, and in general people who aren’t assholes will take the stuff down. That’s about the best you can hope for, unless you’re Disney or Sony or somebody, in which case you can send armies of lawyers to threaten grannies with million dollar fines.

So they have ceased to be mine. They are now possessed (without being owned) by those who appropriated them for themselves. This is called "theft" when relating to material property.

Copying things is not theft. Theft is when I hit you and take your wallet, or cut the chain off your bike lock and ride it away.

Calling copying theft is utterly disingenuous.

jacobolus wrote: “Intellectual property” is a fiction even more than all property is a fiction.

Outside the philosophy class, intellectual property is very, very real. Do you use Windows? Great. That's intellectual property. The buckling spring design was patented by IBM and BS switches were produced by IBM exclusively until the patent expired because it was intellectual property. Big pharma companies patent their drugs because it is intellectual property. I'm not saying all the nuts and bolts of the legal process are great, it's just that it's the way things work in parts of the world that we smugly like to call 'civilized'.

In any case though, copyright does not give owners the right of owners to control everything anyone does with their work. If I buy a print of your photograph, spit on it, poor gasoline on top and light it on fire, and then throw the ashes down my latrine, there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop me.

Is this an argument? Seriously?

Copying things is not theft. Theft is when I hit you and take your wallet, or cut the chain off your bike lock and ride it away.

Calling copying theft is utterly disingenuous.

The terms you're arguing about are not defined clearly enough. What would you say about copying personal data? Copying, let's say, part of a top-secret police database? Copying user names, e-mails and passwords and publishing them on the internet?

LLRnR wrote: Outside the philosophy class, intellectual property is very, very real. Do you use Windows? Great. That's intellectual property. [...]

My point is merely that “intellectual property” is a stupid term. Windows is a software product. It is protected against someone against someone installing it on multiple computers by an end user license agreement (EULA), plus a number of technical measures which can’t be broken without contravening the US Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) even though breaking those technical safeguards doesn’t have to do with copyright per se. The windows name, logo, and similar are protected against someone slapping them on their own product and trying to sell it, because it would confuse consumers into thinking Microsoft had created the unrelated product, however there is no restriction against using the name or logo in other contexts. Several specific algorithms and ideas are protected against someone creating (by themselves, without even knowing about the original) something similar, by patents.

These separate legal mechanisms are not at all similar to each other, and grouping them under one umbrella term is harmful to discussion because it confuses people endlessly.

Is this an argument? Seriously?

I’m merely illustrating how creators of works don’t have total control over what happens to them after they’ve been published.

Calling copying theft is utterly disingenuous.

The terms you're arguing about are not defined clearly enough. What would you say about copying personal data? Copying, let's say, part of a top-secret police database? Copying user names, e-mails and passwords and publishing them on the internet?

First, copying and publishing a police database is not copyright infringement, as facts cannot be copyrighted.

Second, I wouldn’t call publishing a secret police database “theft”. I might call it a “data breach”, “hacking”, “espionage”, or even “treason”, depending on the circumstances. If someone got the data by breaking into the police station and stealing several hard drives, then that part would clearly be “theft”.

* * *

Listen, if some professional photographer had a personal website where they had created hundreds of beautiful high resolution photographs of keyboards, and was selling prints of those and licenses to use the images for commercial purposes, then sure, it would be unethical to rehost those. That’s absolutely not what we’re talking about when it comes to ebay images. Someone putting an image on ebay is just trying to make the sale go through, not create art.

jacobolus wrote: It’s a society-made construct, not some kind of natural right.

Your point being? Every human law is a society-made construct, natural rights don't exist unless you believe in imaginary sky people.

jacobolus wrote: It’s actually a really bad umbrella term, because not only is “intellectual property” unlike other property, but also the various legal ideas that get grouped together – trademark and trade dress, trade secrets, copyright, patent, etc. – are extremely different from each other in both form and legal requirements and shouldn’t be jumbled together.

However, it could absolutely make sense to have various forms of intellectual property regulation be designed into a coherent system, rather than multiple coexisting systems.

jacobolus wrote: In any case though, copyright does not give owners the right to control everything anyone does with their work. If I buy a print of your photograph, spit on it, poor gasoline on top and light it on fire, and then throw the ashes down my latrine, there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop me.

But, if you republish it...

jacobolus wrote: More generally, there are many cases where my re-publishing your image fall under fair use provisions of copyright law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Which is a very fuzzy area of copyright law, and is generally best to back away from, especially because fair use does not work the same across national borders the same way that copyright law in general does. And, the "fair use" terminology is US-specific, and Deskthority is not a US site. (For that matter, what jurisdiction does Deskthority lie under? Dutch law, in which (according to Wikipedia, anyway) the citation right is stricter than fair use in the US? German law, where there's apparently no concept of fair use?)

jacobolus wrote: Look, the moment you publish something, the public has it, and you have very little control over what people privately do with the images. On the internet, you can try to send cease and desist letters to everyone who re-hosts your image if you want, and in general people who aren’t assholes will take the stuff down. That’s about the best you can hope for, unless you’re Disney or Sony or somebody, in which case you can send armies of lawyers to threaten grannies with million dollar fines.

Streisand Effect is a powerful thing, but that doesn't mean that we should violate copyright law in what's essentially a reference document that Deskthority is publishing. Let's do this right, so there's no question about what we're doing.

LLRnR wrote: The buckling spring design was patented by IBM and BS switches were produced by IBM exclusively until the patent expired because it was intellectual property.

Minor nitpick: The USSR produced a(n unauthorized) capacitive buckling spring keyboard for some of their (unauthorized) PDP-11 clones: https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=70204.0

However, the USSR's stance towards international patent law was essentially to ignore it, so...

jacobolus wrote: […] In any case though, copyright does not give owners the right to control everything anyone does with their work. If I buy a print of your photograph, spit on it, poor gasoline on top and light it on fire, and then throw the ashes down my latrine, there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop me. […]

Curiously enough that's exactly my point.
If, as you say, you buy a print, i.e. a copy of my photograph, of course you can do anything you like with this one copy - you've bought it after all, which means you have acquired power of disposal over this one copy.
You could even buy an original Picasso and treat it the way you described - you've bought it after all

So if someone used your guitar pic as an illustration in their guitars of the world wiki, would you sue them, or would you be flattered that they used your picture? If you wanted them to remove the photo, and you asked, and then they took it down, would you be unsatisfied?

Nice world you're describing. I make a photo, they use it without even asking, but I'm the one who has to ask them if I want them to remove it (and obviously they can refuse). Oh wait… wasn't it my photo?

Look, the moment you publish something, the public has it, and you have very little control over what people privately do with the images.

"The public has it" doesn't mean that the public owns it, but just that it has access to it - which, by the way, is exactly the rationale behind publishing.
The rest of your sentence is again exactly my point. The magic world in it is "privately". Copying my photo on your computer is private and nothing I have to object to, while republishing it is not private, but inherently public, as you yourself say: "the moment you publish something, the public has it".

Copying things is not theft. Theft is when I hit you and take your wallet, or cut the chain off your bike lock and ride it away.

See above. Of course not copying itself is theft, but appropriating power of disposal over things is. Copy as you like, but do not republish. If you can reproduce my wallet or my bike, then copy them and use the copies for your private usage, but do not infringe upon my power of disposal over the originals, because that is theft.

Listen, if some professional photographer had a personal website where they had created hundreds of beautiful high resolution photographs of keyboards, and was selling prints of those and licenses to use the images for commercial purposes, then sure, it would be unethical to rehost those. That’s absolutely not what we’re talking about when it comes to ebay images. Someone putting an image on ebay is just trying to make the sale go through, not create art.

We are back to exactly my point quite at the beginning of this discussion: it cannot be for the illegal user to decide whether an image is art or just a "shitty cellphone pic[…] of shit"(your words).
Why should you, an not I, decide whether my guitar photo is art of crap?

The answer is obvious: because you want to appropriate it. That, in the end, is your whole point.

kbdfr wrote: Why should you, an not I, decide whether my guitar photo is art of crap?

Because I know that it would be more profitable for everyone that your photo is in a knowledge base than deleted by Ebay in one month. Sadly, copyright often forget the potential benefit of a work for the potential treat of publishing it without permission.

Though, I agree that I could ask for your authorization first, it's not difficult to send a message on Ebay, and it would make you happy to know that I want to use your crappy picture.

Anyway, this sum up everything: http://www.publiccounsel.org/tools/publ ... airuse.pdf

If the copyright owner disagrees with your fair use interpretation, the dispute will have to be resolved by
courts or arbitration. If it’s not a fair use, then you are infringing upon the rights of the copyright owner
and may be liable for damages. However, if you have good reason to believe that your use was fair, but
your use is being challenged by the copyright owner, you may be considered an “innocent infringer.”
Innocent infringers often don’t have to pay any damages to the copyright owner, but do have to cease
the infringing activity and sometimes must pay the owner for the reasonable commercial value of that
use.

ramnes wrote:

kbdfr wrote: Why should you, an not I, decide whether my guitar photo is art of crap?

Because I know that it would be more profitable for everyone that your photo is in a knowledge base than deleted by Ebay in one month.

The photo is not "deleted" by eBay, it is just no longer published by them, but still exists. It belongs to the power of disposition of its owner to choose to let it disappear (or, for that, to not bother at all). No painter (or owner) is obliged to grant (or to continue granting after having done so) public access to a painting.
Of course, I do agree with you that it is a shame to let unique documentation be taken from public access, but again, it is for the owner to decide.

Though, I agree that I could ask for your authorization first, it's not difficult to send a message on Ebay, and it would make you happy to know that I want to use your crappy picture.

You surely mean my artistic photo
Oh, and thank you for asking, of course you can use my photo. Are you also interested in the few ones I did not publish?

Anyway, this sum up everything: http://www.publiccounsel.org/tools/publ ... airuse.pdf

If the copyright owner disagrees with your fair use interpretation, the dispute will have to be resolved by
courts or arbitration. If it’s not a fair use, then you are infringing upon the rights of the copyright owner
and may be liable for damages. However, if you have good reason to believe that your use was fair, but
your use is being challenged by the copyright owner, you may be considered an “innocent infringer.”
Innocent infringers often don’t have to pay any damages to the copyright owner, but do have to cease
the infringing activity and sometimes must pay the owner for the reasonable commercial value of that
use.

US case-law (and "fair use" is not just a matter of a layman "finding it fair", but is subject to a substantiated legal appreciation - read all four criterions).
Things will be different elsewhere. In Germany the even "innocent" infringer normally will have to pay at least court fees and probably attorney costs incurred by the owner.

In any case, the risk is never zero that people will decide to enforce their rights.