Copyrights or Copywrongs

Whilst the majority of the social web is just ignoring the issue of personal IP (intellectual Property) creative commons have updated their licences. So what is Creative Commons about? Like its older (pre-net cousin Copyright the “All Rights Reserved” identity) to seeks to defined just how your intellectual property can be accessed and used. Un-like the copyright message it allows you to set the conditions under which your works (photographs, blogs, songs) can be share, reshared or reused. All in relatively easy to understandable English (or a lot of languages).

I have long championed using creative commons licencing when posting photos (and infact any content on the web).  Unfortunately it has not really helped me much in the two problems I have encountered, that’s more to do with the organizations involved, which are google & yahoo (via flickr). However I do see that creative commons is a very sound method. It is not time to throw the baby out with the bath water. So here for those that missed some earlier post is a short history of some bad behaviour on the net and lacl of action by those that should know better.

1. I received a take down notice via yahoo but supposedly from the DCMA to remove a photo mosaic of my own eye (shown above) claiming I had modified the original (owner was not identified) and reposted it. Well the photo mosaic was definitely my own (compare it to my buddy icon) and it was posted on flickr in my wallpaper set, back in 2007. It had also had over a few  thousand views and I did expect others to download it (for personal use on a screen saver) but even reposting it via flickr was fine as well, because the normal sharing process does embed a link back to your photo. Using Tineye I was able to find that there where a lot of repost of the image, several modified, infact one location was used as the background image for a notorious hacker cooperative. I was able to email them and have the image removed without any DCMA threat. Happy ending, seems there is honour in the Hacker community. However in trying to reply to Yahoo I got nowhere. If my emails where received they where ignored. Not such a happy ending, infact no ending.
2. For a while whole sections of my blog where being scrapped and reused in the faux camera review web sites (I won't give names as I don't want then to get any traffic from me). I tried tracking them down but it was a complex multi-national goose chase. So I embedded some "hidden links back to my stories". That was ok for a while but they soon wised up and deleted all my carefully crafted links. The actually acknowledge me by approximately the right name but with a link to what I presume where their sites. All these site were running ad-sense, so I tried to contact google, because they where presumable paying these guys for the traffic my content was attracting to these sites and that would definitely violate my non-commercial condition in my Creative Commons licence. Well despite approximately 9 months of trying a never got an answer, again I gave up getting no answer.
3. I’m very dissapointed that google+ photos no longer display the creative commons licence conditions for photos, although it is still possible to add such licence to an image in the underlying picasa web albums.

So why am I still recommending Creative Commons? I am actually convinced that over legalistic behaviour (particularly associated with publishers and record companies) has created the paranoia and misinformation about copyright, which has contributed to the general public just ignoring it and assuming anything on the net can be copied. I would prefer a world where I can share my creativity, knowledge and perhaps innovation, providing I am acknowledge as the original source and on the extra condition that my work is not sold by others for a profit. I like that others choose to do this too, we can share a better world. Luckily there is a way to notify the wider net community of these conditions using a creative commons licence (see below and on the right hand panel of this blog)

Wandering in the Light by imageo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Reverse image finders

With so many social networks flouting the copyright conventions and “claiming” anything posted on-line is “free” to share (aka steal) and a few like Pintrest  and Weheartit going even further, directly or indirectly encouraging their users to link to if not post things of interest (aka other peoples work). Ok Pinterest does mention you should credit your sources in their Pin Etiquette page, but a quick look at their site reveals this is a hollow request, my very superficial review suggested most pinned links (when they exist) are more likely to be for self-promotion or to a clearly non-original source.  Sigh!
The problem is acknowledgement and linking back to the original Intellectual Property creator/owner, Creative Commons is a nice framework to handle this on the internet but so few social network tools (including google+) even display the creative common licence or the linking tools provide the name/URL of the source (flickr is the one exception I can think of at the moment). I don’t mind is my work if reposted by other I just want some acknowledgement and I don’t want them to make a direct profit by selling my work so I mainly use the CC BY ND licence.  However it is beginning to looking a bit depressing.The current reality is, if you post on a social network, you must expect your work to be taken. Sigh!

 

How can you findout if your images is being “responsibly” used on-line?

If Google Images is a hand grenade, TinEye is a sniper rifle.

…wired magazine's how to wiki

The net is a wide open place these days and there are millions on millions of places to look. So just keeping your eyes open when you surf the net may yield very little success. The better strategy at the moment is to use a reverse image search tools. Luckily there are already two decent free and easy to use ones available. I didn’t bother to investigate the expanding number “ransomware” applications, (ie ones that promise the world, charge you a lot and probably just secretly use one of the options below).
Google Images, has been offering a reverse image search since June last year. Not too many folk realised this. All you have to do is drag an image onto the google image search box or paste the URL of a location you have posted your image and the search works exactly as you expected it present you with a matrix of near matching images. Unfortunately they may not be very exact matches and you might still have to do a fair bit of manual looking around but it is a great start.
TinEye is another free service that specifically addresses finding like images, using its own pixel based fingerprinting techniques to scan through its own databases (which are extensive and growing but way short of complete) of fingerprints obtained by crawling the web for images. This doesn’t guarantee your searches will find dark corners of the web or even well lit (popular) ones but it will find close matches and slightly modified versions (including adding text and overwriting visible watermarks). You can help TinEye to keep a watch on your images by submitting an application (its a XML sitemap of images, so a fair bit of Web tech savvy is required) for TinEye’s robots to crawl your site, but priority is given to legitimate stock photo collections and images carrying a clear creative commons licence.

As the wired post suggests these service are also very useful to locate the original source of an image so it can be correctly reposted with acknowledgement. Thus potentially avoiding a litigious band of lawyers trying to sue the pants off you, sending you nasty and threatening letters when a polite cease and desist was all that was necessary.

I must admit I was a little shocked that one of my images was being used by a hacker’s collective. However they did remove my image when I asked nicely. Another of my images appears in over 300 locations, most that I checked not acknowledging I was the creator. Sigh!
Yet there is a bright side and I wish to pat on the back all those that have contacted me (and I have in most case said yes to republishing my images) and those that correctly linked back to my blogger post or my flickr photostream. Well done you guys.