Justice on a Link
I was perusing over at Uncommon Sense and saw this link to a funny yet frustrating blog post. This guy, Kyle Bennet, who’s trying to run an online supplemental business via eBay, has one of his pictures used and hotlinked from another eBay auctioneer in the same town. He of course does the smart thing, and changes the picture to a less flattering link. He could have gone very ‘bad’ with it, think ‘japanese pornography’, but he chose not to.
This is hilarious in that they got justice right away and the ‘thief’ was forced to take his auction down right away. But imagine if they thief had just copied the picture and hadn’t hotlinked it? What recourse would they have had? Like Rich said at UC, calling the authorities would have probably created more headaches than done any good. And notifying eBay would probably have proven just as fruitless. I don’t pretend to have the answers, but it is an interesting quandry. In this day an age of almost ubiquitous internet access and usage, content is becoming the new ‘inventory’ and that content is easily snagged and used by persons other than the ones that created it. I can’t say I’ve never been guilty of this either. I’ve used a few images off Google Image Searches to put in posts, mainly for comedic effect. Although I’ve never hotlinked, or tried to use someone else’s work to try and make a profit.
Little consolation really. Stealing is stealing… although some shades of gray do seem quite a bit darker than others.
[tags]commentary, humor, ebay, ecommerce, copyright, theft, funny[/tags]
I use Google Image Searches all the time for my posts as well, for pure comedic effect.
My thinking is that I’m not profiting in anyway from using these pictures, my blog is pure entertainment.
There are methods of protecting online pictures, and if you greatly desire that no one use your pictures, you could employ those techniques.
pheonix: That’s about my feeling on the subject. If anything has a ‘copyright by (URL)’ label on the picture that’s an automatic no-no for me too…
I use google images on my blog.. but only for effect.
I never link directly to someone’s photo, I download it.
I feel that if it’s out there on google, it’s free to use if I’m not trying to profit from it, or claim that it’s my own work or whatever.
Is that bad?
Laurie: Technically, just because it’s listed on Google, doesn’t mean the person who ‘owns’ the picture has given permission for it to be displayed anywhere else. It just means Google has indexed the picture and applied search criteria to it’s ‘alt’ text.
Of course there are all types of things web admins can do to protect their content like that, so its pretty hard to find a reason why its “illegal” to use a picture with no copyright and no DRM if all you’re doing is commenting on it and not using it for personal financial gain.
But of course, I’m no lawyer… so if it ever comes back to bite me in the ass, I’m gonna play dumb as a rock.