
The Oatmeal vs. FunnyJunk: webcomic copyright fight gets personal - ignifero
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/06/funnyjunk-vs-the-oatmeal.ars
======
protomyth
I hate the RIAA / MPAA way of doing things, and I think deep linking is fine,
but this outright content coping is getting out of hand. It poisons the search
results by having people who have no creative spark doing SEO and getting
their content elsewhere.

The incentives all point to content coping as the best business model for a
whole group of people. Why bother to create when Google will pay you anyway
and often put you above the original content owner.

It doesn't seem to be worth the time to send DMCA requests to the site. It
seems like sending DMCA requests to Google might help, but really, some method
of cutting off the funding of these sites would be best. Remove the profit
motive. Ideally (not practically) it would be nice if Google gave the ad sense
money to the original content creator if a DMCA request is filed on that pages
search results. Won't work, but somehow this Search -> Ad model creates the
problem, the same companies need to step up and fix it, because it seems like
there is going to be no search alternatives because of advertising mass.

~~~
cageface
As much as I dislike Apple's walled garden approach in principle, I have to
admit that in practice it protects creators, to some extent, from the selfish
unwashed masses that think nothing of taking the hard work of others for free.
Here at HN we understand the more nuanced philosophical issues of information
sharing but its not hard to imagine the net reduced to a wasteland of
amateurish trash without _some_ protection for creators. Steve Jobs' vision is
an elitist vision but I find myself more sympathetic lately. Only a tiny
fraction of the population has the talent, drive _and_ inspiration to create
work of quality.

Here in Vietnam you can buy a DVD of any recent Hollywood movie for 50 cents.
Is it a coincidence that the domestic film industry is junk? In the physical
world the only way to preempt a "tragedy of the commons" is to restrict the
commons. I'd like to think the net is different but current trends suggest
otherwise.

~~~
intended
Here in India, I can pirate any movie for free and for 2.0$ if I want to buy a
DVD. Its not stopped our film industry from producing new and high quality
material.

Counter anecdote to your anecdote.

EDIT: Actually theres a small phenomena going on that I've recently noticed in
the Indian cinema/piracy scene which is worth letting other people know.

Quick background first: Bhojpuri Cinema -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhojpuri_cinema>

Bhojpuri is a dialect of Hindi, spoken mostly in the north easter states of
India. Bhojpuri cinema was a relatively dead creature, with a small audience
and it paled in financial/audience significance compared to your typical
bollywood fare.

Now a lot of labor such as security guards, house help, cooks, are immigrants
from those states, and of course they speak bhojpuri. They've had to watch
hindi cinema when outside of their states though; the opportunity cost of
putting up a bhojpuri movie, instead of a bollywood flop, is too high. The
choices of bhojpuri speakers were basically Hindi movies or, Hindi movies.

Of late though, cheap color mobile phones, about Rs.1,500 to Rs.3,000 ($25 -
$50), coupled with rampant piracy, are allowing that gap to be bridged. Often
when I come in late at night, I can catch security watching a movie on a cheap
phone.

I wish I had numbers to know how much is being consumed (how much bhojpuri vs
regular hindi cinema for example), but I do know that bhojpuri cinema is going
to be able to keep and build a stronger network of viewers. The viewers
themselves are able to identify and patronize the art form, something which
wouldn't have happened otherwise.

TLDR: Piracy and cheap mobile phones are letting niche hindi dialect speakers
consume and watch movies which would have been drowned out against bollywood.
Considering the size of the populations, its interesting to see how this plays
out.

~~~
cageface
How does the Indian film industry make money? DVD sales? Theater tickets?
Something else? I've heard that the Indian film industry is pretty deeply
infiltrated by organized crime but I don't know if that's really true.

~~~
intended
Used to be infiltrated by crime - around 1990s iirc. The Mumbai police
brutally cleaned up a lot of the mob out here, and things have become a lot
cleaner since.

The key driver for film would would have to be box office ticket sales, (i'm
going to ignore food, product placements and the like). DVD/Video sales will
be a much lower portion of it. Let me see if i can get any numbers... ah found
it. -

Numbers are for 2010 and in INR bn (1 USD = 45.0 INR)

Domestic Theatrical: 62.0 Overseas Theatrical: 6.6 Home Video: 2.3 Cable &
Satellite Rights: 8.3 Ancillary Revenue Streams: 4.1

I got this from a KPMG report on the Indian media industry for 2011 -
[http://www.kpmg.com/IN/en/IssuesAndInsights/ThoughtLeadershi...](http://www.kpmg.com/IN/en/IssuesAndInsights/ThoughtLeadership/FICCI-
KPMG-Report-2011.pdf)

The relevant info is on page 61

------
latch
What's interesting is that Inman just wants attribution - which appears to be
the one thing he can't get, and the one thing that seems the most reasonable.

~~~
paraschopra
Isn't it hard for Funny Junk to automatically give attribution if users upload
images (say from their hard disk)? I'm wondering what would be ideal solution
for proper attribution.

~~~
mikek
There is attribution in the images themselves, but someone is cropping them
out. Someone is going out of their way to make sure he is not attributed.

~~~
zalew
let's take a guess who and why.. follow the money

~~~
jtheory
Are you suggesting that FJ itself is doing the work of clipping out
attribution from content their users upload? Huh.

I haven't visited FunnyJunk before, but from what I read the users gain
reputation/karma or something similar (but not money) by posting _original_
content that gets lots of upvotes/views.

So honest users are motivated to create something high-quality to upload.
Dishonest users are motivated to remove attribution from someone else's high-
quality work.

I don't think you can pin this part of the problem directly onto FJ (though
that's where the site revenue goes).

"Follow the money" assumes there aren't other motivating factors.

~~~
zalew
actually 'follow the money' is a strategy based on finding the one who gained
the most from the certain action, it doesn't have to be 'money' literally.

but yes, I was suggesting that FJ could also generate content by himself,
because: 1) why not? 2) he didn't remove all oatmeal material 3) he got all
agressive about the idea, I mean, what's the problem, if it was his user's
work he could just remove it, take down the karma and that's it.

------
ansy
Perhaps there is a business model here? Create a Tineye style crawler that
digs the web for matching images and is smart enough to serve up DMCA notices
for a small monthly fee to content makers. It will track compliance and put it
all in a nice dashboard so creators don't get overwhelmed reining in the copy
cats.

~~~
retree
Correct me with I'm wrong - but I think all DMCA notices have to be
electronically signed by a human under penalty of perjury.

Whilst I think only one or two people have been convicted of sending false
DMCA notices, the penalties are stiff enough to not let a program sign DMCA
notices on my behalf.

~~~
ansy
So just pile up the infringing sites and put a "SEND" button next to them? Log
in once a week, hit the "SEND ALL under penalty of perjury" button?

~~~
owenmarshall
I wouldn't adopt this business model without an _insanely_ good team of
programmers... or an _insanely_ good team of lawyers. Maybe even both.

~~~
eftpotrm
The difficult bit is the finding though, not the verifying; use the code to do
the finding and identifying, present both to the human who clicks the 'yes on
penalty of perjury' button and you're done.

------
carussell
> Here's how FunnyJunk.com's business operates:

> \- Gather funny pictures from around the internet

> \- Host them on FunnyJunk.com

> \- Slather them in advertising

> \- If someone claims copyright infringement, throw your hands up in the air
> and exclaim "It was our users who uploaded your photos! We had nothing to do
> with it! We're innocent!"

Oh, hey, it's the same as Grooveshark's model two years ago.

~~~
crikli
And ebaums since...forever.

~~~
anigbrowl
For that matter it's similar to what TV stations do. Now a key difference is
that TV usually pays for the original content, but from the consumer's point
of view it's the same: find OC, slap your station logo in the corner, and
surround it with advertising. All those clip shows like 'craziest police
chases' and 'worst TV moments' rely on this model. Hell, there's whole
channels that rely on it...I saw one recently called True TV or similar that
seemed to consist of nothing but recycled news footage (mostly crime/emergency
drama', library sound effects, and some 're-actors' - industry-linked
professionals who sit there making pithy or occasionally witty comments in
hopes of leaving whatever line of work they are in and becoming z-list
celebrities instead.

This seems to be endemic in American screen culture, slightly less so in the
print world. In contrast, European copyright has a side feature called 'moral
rights' 'droite d'auteur' - even if you sell the copyright, the original
author _always_ retains the right to be identified as the author. There's no
financial obligation associated with this for the copyright owner, but it
ensures the creator remains associated with the work. My _limited_ recall is
that in commercial copyright infringement disputes, courts take a strict
approach to evaluating lost profits, but in cases where someone has stripped
out the identity of the creator there are often additional sanctions, since
it's considered an attack upon the creator's ability to earn a living in the
future by being identifiable from their existing work. I'd need time to dig up
citations for that, so don't rely on it. but I do think the basic concept is a
good one.

~~~
carussell
Not quite the same.

> 'craziest police chases'

Footage recorded from police cruisers and obtained as part of the public
record? Unlikely to run into a need for copyright clearance.

> 'worst TV moments'

Limited parts of a whole broadcast in a non-market-destroying way for the
purposes of commentary? Fair use.

Which isn't to say those shows don't suck.

My mention of Grooveshark had to do with the way Grooveshark was/is
encouraging users to upload infringing material with a nudge and a wink.

------
mechanical_fish
I didn't think I had anything to say about this.

But, for unrelated reasons, I just went looking for a link to the hilarious
24-hour webcomic, _Blotchmen_. And I found lots of pages that link to it, like
this MeFi page:

[http://www.metafilter.com/76009/Blotchmen-and-other-
comics-b...](http://www.metafilter.com/76009/Blotchmen-and-other-comics-by-
Kevin-Cannon)

and MeFi, just like all of the other top hits on Google, is very careful and
very virtuous -- rather than reproduce the comic, they send everyone to the
original artist's blog so that Kevin Cannon can get full credit for his work:

<http://freshmanforlife.com/>

... but _the blog is down_. It displays nothing but a wordpress.com error
page, and now I'm _really depressed_ because (a) I won't get to read the comic
today and (b) I won't get to send it to my friends and (c) I've got visions of
it disappearing forever because, hey, that happens, and if poor Kevin Cannon
gets hit by a bus his online presence could just disappear, or maybe he'll
pull a _why and have a fit of creative destruction and set all of his work on
fire one day and then _I will be totally screwed_ , I will never see his work
again...

...except, of course, that his work has probably been copied. I guess, if
worst comes to worst, I'll have to look for it on some site like FunnyJunk and
hope it's there.

What is the moral of this story? People copy the work of artists rather than
linking because they can make money from sleazy ads, and that is not good. But
there is another reason to copy: _Links suck_. They _really really_ suck. They
don't just suck in the long term: They suck in real time. ( _Blotchmen_ is
only three years old.) Links are unreliable on a technical level (blogs break,
poorly cached sites fall over with every slight breeze), on a commercial level
(licenses change, DRM becomes obsolete, what was once free is now behind a
paywall, what was once purchasable is now off the market and the copyright
will last until after I'm dead) and legally nebulous (one DMCA takedown notice
can remove a link forever, sometimes even if the notice is fraudulent or
invalid). There are a hundred things that can go wrong with a link, and one of
them usually does, generally within five years or less.

~~~
tomkarlo
_"Links suck."_

I hope the irony of posting this on a web site that mostly links to other
sites is not lost on anyone.

All forms of communication entail compromises - who has control, how
persistent they are, how easy they are to access. If you own a book, you know
it won't disappear - but you also have to move it around with you, and it's
never going to get updated unless you buy a new one.

The alternative to linking is to have a hugely denormalized web where owners
don't control their own content, have no way to update it and little incentive
to publish it. (I believe we called those "CD ROMs" back in the day.) Yes,
some web sites disappear if there is so little interest in their content that
it's not worth maintaining them. But it's still better than books, where if
interest was limited, it probably never got published in the first place.

~~~
mechanical_fish
The irony is certainly not lost on me.

I don't think the CD-ROM metaphor is useful. CD-ROMs are dead as a medium.
Arguing against them is a straw man. It's not going to be 1990 again no matter
how much anyone might wish it.

The actual modern alternative to links is: Copying everything. Just cache it
all. Every time you follow a link, you copy whatever you read or view at the
other end and store it forever. Keeping the link as well is fine -- it's very
useful metadata -- but what you really want is the content, and you'll keep
that forever. Lend it to your friends by bumping iPhones with them, or
something.

This is astonishingly practical:

[http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2007/05/shaping_...](http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
static/2007/05/shaping_the_future.html)

I already own the storage devices that would hold every written word I have
ever read or will ever read in my life. [1] Within another decade or two I'll
be able to buy a storage device that would hold a video stream of everything
I'll ever see.

And once we all start archiving everything in our pockets we will almost
certainly end up with a "hugely denormalized" system. I like that. We call
that "individuality". I don't really want to live in a hive mind. I like my
mind, and I don't always like other people's minds. It's an advantage to have
a mind of your own. How else would I be able to conduct whimsical flights of
fancy like this one?

\---

[1] Let's see:

Claimed world record for speed reading: Anne Jones with 4,700 words per minute
with 67% comprehension.

average length of an English word: about 5 letters. Five bytes.

24 hours of reading at 4700 wpm: 1.9 GB, uncompressed; one year of reading, no
sleep: 691 GB; one hundred years of reading 12 hours per day at maximum speed:
34TB; compression ratio of roughly 7 to 1 (see
<http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/text.php>): 4.9TB.

I've got that sitting on the desk in front of me.

------
ChuckMcM
It would be interesting if Google came out with an Adsense for Content policy
which said "We won't pay share advertising revenue on sites which host
duplicated or scraped content."

That would put a huge dent in this sort of thing.

~~~
tropin
I think the problem is it would be really hard for the Google web spiders to
tell which is the real content and which the copy without human interaction.

~~~
ChuckMcM
No, it would not be hard. As someone who operates the backend of a web search
company[1] I can tell you that if you crawl a site you can tell when the
original went up and when the copies went up. At Blekko, we let you go an view
it.[2] Now if you add to that the understanding that Google has to index your
page in order to serve page relevant content (no sense putting ads for nipple
piercing on a Christian advocacy site for example), they _know_ they are
serving an advertisement on duplicated content. (where 'know' here is defined
to be they have all the data they need, at the time of serving up the ad, to
algorithmically identify duplicate content.) When I worked there I got a
pretty thorough look at how that part of the business worked.

They _could_ flag the account and they _could_ cut them off (its in their
terms of service they can cut you off for any reason, and have done so to
people in the past) but they _don't_. Given recent updates in their search
ranking [3] they clearly can "identify" sites where this check would be
implemented, but they choose not to. I speculate they don't for the same
reason Apple doesn't look too hard or deeply at the working conditions at
FoxConn, willfull blindness is a wonderful thing.

[1] I run operations at <http://blekko.com>

[2]
[http://blekko.com/ws/http:%2F%2Ftheoatmeal.com%2F+/domaindup...](http://blekko.com/ws/http:%2F%2Ftheoatmeal.com%2F+/domainduptext)

[3] [http://jeffmills.com/2011/01/29/duplicate-content-is-now-
a-p...](http://jeffmills.com/2011/01/29/duplicate-content-is-now-a-penalty-
according-to-google.htm)

~~~
tropin
How do you know which is the oldest content? Are you polling web pages often
enough that your spider can tell the time difference between the real content
and the seconds old RSS scraped copy?

Just kidding, Blekko is great, althought I'm more of a DDG and Google user.

~~~
lurker19
Sites can feed new content to Googlebot before publishing to a broader
audience. This is commonly done in Google News... you will sometimes click on
a link to an article that claims to be not yet published. It is annoying
usually, but helpful in this case.

------
Quarrelsome
If he just wants attribution why doesn't he become a member of funnyjunk and
post his own stuff himself WITH attribution? As he owns the content he can
beat the others to it. I appreciate its far from a perfect solution but
perhaps one with less conflict.

~~~
mishmash

      > why doesn't he become a member of funnyjunk and post his own stuff
    

Not agreeing with his current plan, but keeping up with all the new sites that
do this would probably be more work than trying to attack them.

    
    
      > I know that if FunnyJunk disappeared, 50 other clones would pop up to take its place overnight..

~~~
mikhuang
Then there's a startup idea? One that maintains your content across a bunch of
sites?

~~~
dspillett
Actually, I thought of a site that scanned FJ and similar, copied the content,
scanned services like Google and TinEye for the original content and then
rehosted it all with attribution to the original source (and not FJ et al).

The effort required to filter out duplicates, locate correct attribution and
links to the site holding the original content could be crowdsourced. Give
users points of reputation for updating content with correct attribution and
links, or adding something in the first place with the same or for adding
genuinely original content, take away point when "original" content gets found
as copied (this could be applied instantly if a user uploads something that is
detected as a duplicate of an item already listed with correct attribution),
and so forth.

Some meta-moderation (like slashdot) might be needed though, as well as a
conflict resolution process that would need human intervention at some point,
and some effort would need to go into creating and maintaining good
relationships with the original content creators, so for from a complete walk
in the park to do properly. Part of the "sell" to the original author like The
Oatmeal could be providing a list of places where the same content is found
with no attribution and back-links, keeping this site free of "bad" ads (adult
and/or disturbing content, pop-ups/unders, irritating flash, or just too much
advertising) and showing only thumbnails/segments with links to the full
content on their site if they prefer.

If it wasn't for the fact I once again completely failed to win the lottery
this week so still have to work to pay the mortgage, I'd be tempted to give
such a project a go...

------
JoachimSchipper
It really is time for copyright reform. It's stupid that a site like this (or
like the YouTube of old) is essentially untouchable (under the DMCA) despite
not even trying to prevent people from uploading copyrighted material; it's
_also_ stupid that some random pirate can get ordered to pay millions of
dollars. Maybe a standard penalty of ~$10/infringement (scaled by cost of
original), with minimal hassle, would be the way to go.

~~~
sorbus
And, while we're legislating copyright reform, let's throw in a requirement to
store the hashes (or other identifying features) of any content that has a
DMCA filed against it and check all new content against that list of hashes to
prevent infringing content from being uploaded again.

Of course, then there's the problem of people using fake DMCAs to get content
removed (which does happen). Allowing profit for that would be a horrible
idea, especially on a scale low enough that it would be cheaper to pay than to
verify that the person who filed the DMCA does indeed own the copyright.

~~~
protomyth
Wouldn't a cropped image have different hash then the original. Cropping an
extra or one less pixel line changes the hash again.

~~~
sorbus
Yeah. Other identifying features, then - I'm sure that someone has come up
with a way to identify images which ignores such basic changes to them,
especially considering what TinEye does.

------
S_A_P
Im all for content aggregation(I mean look at the site we are all using here
:P) but attribution is the key, and really it would seem that linking to the
content generators would really help both parties out. Im not sure why they
_wouldnt_ want to do so?

~~~
jonprins
Because then you could bypass them for each subsequent The Oatmeal comic by
just going to The Oatmeal.

I'm wondering why someone hasn't done a tineye-dmca-sending mashup to help
control these issues..

An example search from tineye of oatmeal images (almost two pages worth):
[http://www.tineye.com/search/657460f93292f13484a028f4828b838...](http://www.tineye.com/search/657460f93292f13484a028f4828b838a9a5aa281/)

~~~
andrewparker
The TinEye search didn't succeed in capturing FunnyJunk. Assuming The
Oatmeal's artwork is still up on FunnyJunk, this implementation wouldn't work,
but it's a clever idea.

------
lysol
He flat out states he won't sue, which means funnyjunk will keep the content
up. If he wants it to stop he needs to bare his teeth a little.

~~~
teach
I really does seem like the admin of FunnyJunk is doing everything possibly
(albeit unintentionally) to goad Inman into suing the site. He's complying in
the most asinine ways (for example, removing all "The Oatmeal" comics... but
only the ones with attribution).

~~~
eropple
He didn't remove them. He did a search and replace to rename any attributions
of "The Oatmeal" to "the fag".

Pleasant individual.

~~~
crikli
What an a-wipe. I wish I was an attorney so I could offer Matthew my services
pro bono.

But IANAL, I'm a hacker, so I guess I'll just launch a DDoS attack.

(I'm kidding. I write in PHP so I barely know how to turn on a computer; DDoS
is way over my head).

~~~
anigbrowl
I'd be surprised if he couldn't find an attorney to take it on contingency.
The site's been around for a decade and scores OK on traffic rank; Ben Huh was
able to get ~$30m for the cheezburger/lolcats operation so it's probably worth
something...and that would be discoverable.

Amusingly enough, funnyjunk.com has a very assertive list of terms and
conditions, and looks ready to stoutly defend its own brand against
infringement.

------
jcr
The more interesting question is why doesn't one side, or the other, use a
tool like <http://tineye.com> to deal with identifying the images?

~~~
eggbrain
There are a ton of images that Tineye still doesn't reach. I tried his latest
comic, for example, and got zero results
([http://www.tineye.com/search/70c1fd774b0bf7bdb500c19e59a98e6...](http://www.tineye.com/search/70c1fd774b0bf7bdb500c19e59a98e6ce7d0fd69/)).
I doubt his comic isn't hosted other places on the internet!

------
fooey
FunnyJunk's been handed just about enough rope now I do believe

------
usedtolurk
What a pity this has got so personal. They could really help each other.

Why doesn't Oatmeal could just upload his own (fully attributed) work to
FunnyJunk himself? It's clear they have an enthusiastic audience and he would
like the exposure. If he doesn't then somebody else will take credit for it.

FunnyJunk should have a mechanism that encourages voting up of original /
properly attributed content and downvotes copies - that would benefit their
users too.

------
vessenes
And...Mission accomplished. The best PR the Oatmeal, (and FJ, I suppose) could
want. I'll hope for his sake he can keep the feud going through 2012.

------
jemka
I was expecting to read about the owners of each site getting personal, but
it's just their respective users offending each other.

~~~
masklinn
Read the update.

------
earl
Oatmeal should sue. It's just not that complex to build image similarity
algorithms that are robust to minor changes like photoshopping the link back
to the outmeal's site out or resolution changes or image degradation from
compression. At this point there's no real reason for FunnyJunk not to be
permanently banning oatmeal's images from being displayed on their site after
the first dmca except they don't want to and it makes them money not to do so.

Hell, I can build that for under $30K. Email in the profile.

------
fluidcruft
Mostly, I'm peeved that the oatmeal's stuff has been reposted somewhere called
"funnyjunk".

The oatmeal is not funny.

~~~
yalurker
I down-modded this comment, but since the user probably made it in good-faith
I'm going to explain why.

This would be a good comment on reddit - short, opinionated and easy for
people who share the sentiment to upvote to show their agreement.

However, it doesn't add anything to the discussion. It's not insightful or
relevant, it just adds noise to the discussion. The community here generally
tends to try to keep the discussion more thoughtful with less short, funny
quips, and following that ideal this comment does not belong.

~~~
jedberg
> This would be a good comment on reddit

No, actually it would be a shitty comment on reddit too. Sadly, it is the kind
of comment that is now tolerated in some of the bigger subreddits.

~~~
fluidcruft
I don't know why you would expect more than shitty comments in response to
GiantBatFart's shitty content and reddit spamming. GIGO

------
akozak
What I would do: Raise the stakes by putting a CC BY license (or CC BY-NC) on
the comics. That way he can clearly spell out the rights associated with the
works but require attribution (and retain commercial rights if desired). Then
when they start appearing on other sites, all he needs to ask for is
attribution and the larger copyright issue goes away.

~~~
icegreentea
But his problem right now is that he's not getting attribution while asking
for it. Even if he did put it under a CC license, if his content is being
reposted with the license and attribution stripped out, and the other party
isn't playing nice when being asked nicely, then he's forced into the same
situation as he is now, except with a stronger case if he attempts to sue
(which he doesn't want to do anyways).

~~~
akozak
See my comment above. Applying the CC BY license would add legal certainty
that attribution is the ONLY thing needed for compliance. He could say, "look
I've proven I want you to be able to distribute it with very minimal barriers.
please comply with my attribution requirement."

