

Who Owns Your Pictures? - gvb
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2013/04/29/Picture-Rights

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hobbes
<quote>I haven’t read the British legislation, but what it apparently does
is...</quote>

I wonder if this admission might suggest both the cause of this controversy
and a way to resolve it?

~~~
SEMW
To be fair, it's not been put up on legislation.gov.uk yet (though should be
in the next few days).

For HN's convenience, the section is:

 _116A Power to provide for licensing of orphan works

(1) The Secretary of State may by regulations provide for the grant of
licences in respect of works that qualify as orphan works under the
regulations.

(2) The regulations may—

↳ (a) specify a person or a description of persons authorised to grant
licences, or

↳ (b) provide for a person designated in the regulations to specify a person
or a description of persons authorised to grant licences.

(3) The regulations must provide that, for a work to qualify as an orphan
work, it is a requirement that the owner of copyright in it has not been found
after a diligent search made in accordance with the regulations.

(4) The regulations may provide for the granting of licences to do, or
authorise the doing of, any act restricted by copyright that would otherwise
require the consent of the missing owner.

(5) The regulations must provide for any licence—

↳ (a) to have effect as if granted by the missing owner;

↳ (b) not to give exclusive rights;

↳ (c) not to be granted to a person authorised to grant licences.

(6) The regulations may apply to a work although it is not known whether
copyright subsists in it, and references to a missing owner and a right or
interest of a missing owner are to be read as including references to a
supposed owner and a supposed right or interest._

------
nicholassmith
I've not had chance to properly read all the relevant data, but essentially
this clarifies in law the basic mode of operation most picture desks have been
running in for a while. Attempt to find author for a bit, give up, publish and
wait, pay on prompt, however they might get to skip that last part which isn't
great.

Now, if you're embedding the EXIF data you're a step up, because the image
desks _are_ aware of the EXIF data. They'll look to see if there's anything in
there and away they go, however if they're being reused online most people
won't bother with that so you're probably out of luck, and you've probably got
little to no come back.

There's many services that try be good guys with the EXIF info, so if you're a
photographer and you give a crap about your rights of ownership, use those
instead. I stopped using Facebook a while back for photography as I'd noticed
it stripping the EXIF data (as well as butchering the compression on a number
of shots), same for Twitter. Flickr I was surprised about, but 500px seem to
preserve a lot of the EXIF data on upload.

This could either be really dramatic or not very dramatic at all, it depends
on how it ends up getting used in court, which will take a while to shake out.

~~~
robotmay
I'm actually trying to build a somewhat alternative to 500px/Flickr at the
moment, and one area I'm really concentrating on is the EXIF data. I'm
actually thinking of giving users more control over what data is kept inside
their photos after they upload them, and allowing data added via the web UI to
be written back into the images.

It'd be nice just to have standard locations for the sodding data in the EXIF
though, if I'm honest :)

~~~
nicholassmith
EXIF has always seemed a crappy solution to a crappy problem, but it's what
we've got and it's what we have to work with.

Interesting you're going after Flickr/500px though, there's a definite market
there but I'd have thought a lot of people were either stuck in their ways or
transitioning to 500px from Flickr.

~~~
robotmay
Aye, I'm not sure how big a market I'll have at the moment. The goal is
actually to build a community somewhere between the two, as there are parts of
both I don't like. I'd like to promote constructive criticism rather than
fanboy comments, and do away with ratings (which are my main problem with
500px). I also find that none of these sites have yet figured out how to help
you discover great photos, which I'm hoping to find a better solution for.

I'm trying to get the basics up in the next couple of weeks so that I can
start working on more specific features :)

~~~
nicholassmith
As long as it's easy to get photos into it, I imagine there's plenty of
photographers who'll use multiple services.

Post it up when you're ready to launch, I'd be interested.

~~~
robotmay
I'll have multiple file drag & drop in for the very first release, but after
that I'm hoping to implement the ability to import from other services. And
further down the line I'd love to be able to offer Lightroom/Aperture plugins
for exporting photos directly to the site.

HN will be one of my first stops when I launch it, as I'd like knowledgeable
beta testers!

------
beedogs
In general, if you have a metric shitload of money, you own them.

If you're a normal person, you're on your own. Copyright really only seems to
be effective if you've got a team of lawyers.

~~~
igouy

        "Register the work with the Copyright Office" $35/batch
    
        "With registration before infringement, you can seek 
        statutory damages ($750-$30,000) and attorneys’ fees
        and statutory damages can be enhanced up to $150,000 if
        the infringement was willful." 
    
        "Section 1202 Damages for Removal of Copyright
        Management Information (CMI)Elements-Remove or alter
        CMI (watermark/copyright information) intent to induce,
        facilitate or conceal infringement Statutory damages
        $2,500 to $25,000"
    

see <http://www.pacaoffice.org/library.shtml>

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jmillikin
To a casual reader, this new legislation appears obviously beneficial. The
number of orphaned creative works is large and constantly growing,
particularly with the Internet's cultural emphasis on anonymity.

Articles opposing the change seem to assume that "diligent search" is code for
"give up unless the EXIF contains full contact info", which is not at all a
reasonable interpretation.

------
new299
In general this law appears to be a force for good, and should throw a bunch
of images that the authors don't really care about into the public domain.
Should make for an interesting dataset in the future.

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pornel
He basically said himself why it's like this:

 _It's a good idea to remove some metadata and/or re-encode images that users
upload, but it's not so easy to selectively preserve metadata._

Re-encoding (with side-effect of removal of all metadata) stops several
attacks that are based on embedding executable code in specially crafted
images (browser filetype sniffing leading to XSS, unsanitized filenames
causing execution of PHP-in-GIF, etc.)

It helps performance: some users will have images that are encoded incredibly
poorly, have massive ICC profiles embedded (which are also a compatibility
problem) and almost never have the specific pixel size you want.

And most common tools make it incredibly easy to lose _all_ metadata, but to
preserve only specific bits you need to go extra mile.

So the default is drop creator information.

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greggman
I don't understand why this law is needed. If the work is truly orphaned then
no one will come after you. Therefore the law is only about the case where
it's not really orphaned.

That seems like it completely removes any incentive to obey any kind of
copyright on photographs. Just use any photograph you want. When asked, claim
you did a diligent search and nothing came up. Take the picture down. No
punishment.

How is that not a recipe for massively screwing photographers?

Without the law orphaned works are still orphaned and safe to use. If you do a
truly diligent search and figure out the work is truly orphaned. But, if your
search wasn't diligent enough and the owner finds out you get sued as seems
proper.

Why is this law needed?

~~~
SEMW
> If the work is truly orphaned then no one will come after you.

Of course. But it's almost impossible to know that for _sure_. The point of
orphan works legislation is it lets people use works that they're pretty
damned sure are orphaned (and which the licensing body agrees) because they've
done a diligent search, in the confidence that they can't be sued for
copyright infringement if the author pops up later. (Though they may be asked
to stop using the work, depends on how the regs end up being written).

Point is: copyright infringement is strict liability. This sort of legislation
is the closest we're going to get to a true 'due diligence' defence.

> Just use any photograph you want. When asked, claim you did a diligent
> search and nothing came up.

Er, and then be successfully sued by the copyright holder for using the work
without a licence? The law provides for the SoS to (by regulations) create
licensing bodies, it doesn't let people give themselves licences.

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ZeroGravitas
So who exactly started this Exif meme? The legislation doesn't mention exif
and I wouldn't consider only looking at exif and not finding any as the end of
a diligent search.

It's a lovely bit of framing though, so who came up with it?

------
chiph
Finally, a practical need for steganography.

~~~
mark-r
What you're looking for is digital watermarking:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_watermarking>

------
mark-r
The bigger problem will be with pictures that are copied without your
knowledge and discovered on someone else's site. Chances are the EXIF will be
stripped and there will be no way to trace it back to you.

~~~
jmillikin
TinEye and Google Images solve this problem nicely. You upload an image, and
they search the web for similar images. I'm often surprised by how well they
can find the original source from even a low-res fragment.

~~~
greggman
They almost never find the images I'm looking for unless they are an exact
match. In fact I've had some hilarious mis-matches.

------
pasbesoin
A few years ago -- and, continuing into today -- there were numerous security
concerns around EXIF data. This included not just GPS data and personal
security (and/or privacy), but also other identifiers including device serial
number (and manufacturer/model) and the ability to cross-reference same
between pictures, picture sources, and potentially purchase history.
(Depending where and how you purchased, the serial number may be correlated
with your credit card or other payment account.)

Now, for the latter: If you are publishing controversial photography, the last
thing you may want is to have said photos traced back to your identity. For
the sake of this argument, I'm going to assume you are one of the forces for
good. Omniscient data sourcing is not always desirable.

In this specific UK case, and with a rather light and superficial reading of
some news accounts combined with past reporting and experience, what I see are
organizations who have been called out both publicly (bad publicity) and
financially for blatantly copying and publishing photographs for which they
made no effort to acquire rights. (There _is_ an existing system for this,
which they simply ignored and refused to respect until dragged into court --
formal, and that of public opinion.)

I speculate that these entities know that many major distribution platforms
now strip metadata. And, that they are working to take advantage of this
through the current legislation and sought definition of "orphan works".

I think those distribution platforms themselves may also be complicit. We've
seen how Facebook has repeatedly attempted to use its users' photographs
wholesale and without individual notification/approval for its own gain. (E.g.
The "we can and will use your photographs in advertising" controversy, amended
after much vocal blowback to include a (difficult to find) opt-out setting.)

Personally, I think that the pragmatic route people may find themselves taking
in the face of such legislation passing is to watermark with copyright
notification anything and everything they may care about, _before_ uploading
it to any public source. If it is subsequently reused and this is of
sufficient concern, the original upload including date/time can be cited in
demonstrating that subsequent, ungranted reuse that is missing said
notification must result from deliberate (and illegal) editing to remove said
notification.

This will be ugly and doesn't fix anonymity issue, but so be it. (And
deliberately publishing without copyright information has always weakened the
stand of a creator subsequently defending copyright. In many of these cases,
public communication of the photographic content (or other imagery) may
continue to be more important to the creator than maintenance of copyright
privileges.)

TL;DR: Meta-data (EXIF, et al.) used to be more commonly retained. This causes
numerous issues particularly around security and privacy. Stripping it became
de facto policy amongst many major distribution platforms.

Numerous, influential agencies seek to make a buck any way they can _and_ to
leverage or compete with near real-time peer-to-peer sharing and "news". Also
to leverage and/or compete with peer-to-peer interests (i.e. inject noteworthy
advertising). They see an avenue to using these materials without legal and
financial repercussions.

