
Facebook’s “I F*cking Love Science” does not love artists - tokenadult
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/compound-eye/2013/04/23/facebooks-i-fcking-love-science-does-not-fcking-love-artists/
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drakaal
Nor do they love science. Most of the things they post are not accurate. The
picture of the universe and a synapse for example springs to mind.

They are just a "Like" farm. They use their tracking of likes to mine
relationships so you can get personalized spam that appears that it came from
your friends.

~~~
sillysaurus
I think we should relax about the idea that most people post inaccurate facts
when they're cheering science.

What they're doing is cheering for the idea of science. It's similar to people
cheering at a basketball game. They're not basketball players, so most of what
they have to say about the topic is going to be wrong. But they're still
rooting for you, and this is a good and powerful thing.

~~~
jacoblyles
>this is a good and powerful thing.

... until they have a gross misunderstanding of an issue relevant to public
policy and spread that misunderstanding to others.

There is no "good ignorance".

~~~
janardanyri
We're all ignorant of the vast majority of facts relevant to almost anything.
Comprehension is expensive and scarce. That being the case, simple extensions
of good faith count for a lot.

~~~
jckt
Ignorance is fine -- it is an unfortunate fact that nobody can learn it all.
But to think that one is "engaging" in science -- I suppose most fans of the
Page think they're somehow engaging in it (anecdotal) -- is, well, wrong.

As much as I'd like it to be true, looking at a bunch of .gifs about quantum
mechanics and astrophysics plastered with white majuscules does little for
one's understanding of science. In other words, IFLS is to the scientific
community as r/atheism is to the religious-sceptics community (not the best
analogy...).

~~~
illuminate
The problem here is willful ignorance, what a person does when confronted by
fact. There's probably a lot of antivaxers new-age woo believers and
homeopaths who enjoy the fashionable "quantum" quips but have zero interest in
doing anything but republishing the images. They ape the language, but don't
understand the mindset.

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veb
I run a popular fan page on Facebook, and _if_ I know who the artist/author
is, I will credit them. If I don't know who they are I say "artist: ?" and
someone will _always_ send a message to let me know who the artist/author is.

I too, sell t-shirts (through TeeSpring) and my latest experiment was quite
successful - I found some designs on another t-shirt site that I quite liked
the look of, emailed the artist and said I'd pay them $1.50 for every t-shirt
I sold. They agreed, and sent me the images. I sold heaps, the artist made
extra money and my fans were happy.

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dvt
The bottom line is this:

1\. Elise Andrew is making money off IFLS. (Whether or not she's giving it out
to charities is non-relevant.)

2\. IFLS' success rests largely on the high quality content created by
artists, scientists, photographers

3\. A small part of IFLS' success rests on Andrews' eye for picking out
good/funny/clever quotes/cartoons/photographs/artwork

Given (1) and (2), I'd say not only is IFLS largely indebted to the
artist/photographer/science community at large, but not attributing work is an
incredibly selfish thing to do. Whether she didn't attribute the work out of
laziness, negligence or malice is non-relevant. My only point is that IFLS is
a very good target for the blog post.

If someone stole my code and used it without attribution and to make money off
of it, I would be pissed. If someone that's received the major media attention
IFLS has stole my code and used it without attribution to make money, I'd be
even more pissed.

Also note that artwork can have varying licenses, as well - similar to MIT,
GPL, etc. licenses we see in source code. Some licenses preclude _all_ non-
endorsed distribution. She's had a ton of media coverage in the past 6 months
(especially after the whole Twitter thing), so the "small corner of the
internet" argument won't fly.

Neither will the "Reddit/9gag/etc. does it" argument. Reddit, for example, is
a mass-user-driven aggregate. Reddit can't possibly police all posts and
ensure that attribution is given. Conversely, the IFLS page is _not_ an
aggregate. Andrews picks the images very carefully and in a conscious manner;
in the latter case, there is clearly room for attribution.

However, I think that IFLS has garnered the same type of militant defenders as
/r/atheism/ or fans of Carl Sagan (or, more recently, NDGT). Ironically, this
type of blind following is exactly what the aforementioned groups are trying
to dissolve. Andrews screwed up. Badly. This is not a rookie mistake; it's
something she could get sued for. Lets leave it at that.. enough with the
apologists.

Edit: I would just like to re-iterate that the burden does _NOT_ lie on the
artists to scour the internet looking for mis-attributed pieces of artwork.
But rather, on the _distributor_ of the work. Just about every judge in
existence would agree with this.

~~~
markdown
> 3\. A small part of IFLS' success rests on Andrews' eye for picking out
> good/funny/clever quotes/cartoons/photographs/artwork

This isn't hard, and can be automated... it's the 9gag model. Just view the
cream of the crop that bubbles to the top of reddit and randomly pick out a
few every day.

~~~
scotty79
Small part of Shakespeare was picking the right words and phrases and putting
them in right order.

Small part of every DJ is picking the righ music to remix.

~~~
dvt
I'm sorry, are you seriously comparing Elise Andrew with Shakespeare?

"Picking the right words and phrases and putting them in the right order" is
not even in the same plane of existence as "looking at a picture and deciding
if it's remotely funny or interesting."

~~~
scotty79
Nope. Not seriously. I just feel that belittling her work on finding the right
content is very wrong.

More serious analogy would be photography. How you do make good photos? Do you
create them? No. You just make hundreds of photos (adhering to some technical
limitations) and the you pick and crop the right ones from all the photos you
made. That's what Bresson did.

Picking content is the creative part. The rest is just pointing the camera,
turning the knobs and pushing the button.

On the internet artists create respective images. But she's also the artist
who picks and crops creating her feed which many people apreciate the value
of.

~~~
dvt
Bresson was a pioneer of the French New Wave. Again, the comparison is just
completely off-base, I'm afraid. What Andrews is doing is just plain theft.
(Especially given the fact that she's making money off of IFLS.)

~~~
scotty79
I'm not comparing her to Bresson. I'm comparing her to a photographer. Bresson
is just an example. My friend who photographs does exactly the same. I just
invoked Bresson to show that even masters in the field do that. Also it's a
keyword for google so you can see what his creative process consisted of.

You just completely missed my point that picking content and reframing it is
valuable creative activity.

Theft would be to resell those images as stock photos.

Besides seems your broad definitions of theft would classify half on the
internet as such. That's not a very pleasent view of the biggest cultural
invention since printing press.

~~~
stan_rogers
If you truly believe that photography is nothing more than framing, then you
have a very limited understanding of the medium. Given the same camera, same
subject and same point of view (let's take a still life setup and a camera
with a prime lens anchored firmly to a locked studio camera stand) I can make
any number of completely different photographs that convey very different
meanings and emotions. And that's _before_ making any darkroom/post-processing
decisions.

~~~
scotty79
Yes you can intentionally take different photos of the same thing by varying
lightning. You may even learn what type of lightning invokes what emotions in
your viewers. I'm just saying thats not how photography is usually done. You
set up the set, the lightning and the camera to the best of your knowledge but
you don't take one picture. You take loads of them varying your setup slightly
and then you pick the right ones. Of course photography is very varied field
and there are guys who get their highs from taking one picture with shoebox
but they are not that common among photographers.

------
gkoberger
I don't know if it's necessarily fair to call out "I F*cking Love Science".
The same could be said about Reddit/9gag/thousands of other Facebook
groups/etc.

It's an Internet-wide problem, not just one FB group.

~~~
raganwald
A fellow robs my house. I catch him and hold him for the police. He complains,
"No fair! Most robberies are unsolved because we lack the manpower to chase
every lead!!"

Lie is indeed "unfair" to him in some statistical sense, but I am absolutely
not being "unfair" to him in a moral sense.

Or to put it another way, the reality of the Internet as you describe it is
that a certain %age of copyright violations go unpurusued. It's a statistical
model, just as it's a statistical model that a certain number of robberies are
unsolved and a certain number of people are killed by lightening.

Is that unfair? It may seem so when you're being struck by lightening, but
someone has to be struck by lightening.

Likewise, given enough copyright violations, someone is going to be called
out. Today the blow falls on Elise.

~~~
scotty79
Your analogy to reposting is a robbery? Really?

Mine is, telling your friends a joke without bothering to establish who
originally invented it.

~~~
cf
It's not like many of the original artists want a payout. They just want
attribution.

~~~
illuminate
These things usually have passed around the internet several times before it
gets to the meme aggregators, I wish there was a better solution than
watermarking. Tineye/GIS would theoretically work, but it'd find every
instance where the meme was passed around, not its origin!

Do you have a suggesting for finding each "owner"?

Such requirements would shut down all these sites (not that we'd have a huge
loss by doing so, but I'd like to think that a social/technological solution
would be possible.)

------
dobbsbob
Jacking everybody else's internet subculture for your mainstream, bland and
toned down for-profit site is nothing new. I remember ebaumsworld stamping
everything on earth with their logo that they didn't create, same with I Can
Haz Cheeseburger? blatently ripping off all the caturday user content uploaded
to 4chan.

If it exist on the internet and is hilarious somebody will steal it and milk
it to the masses for money.

------
polemic
Would've been great if the author had contacted Elise to discuss the article.

Of course content should be used legally, but IFLS has grown so quickly that I
think it's fair to defend Elise as having made an honest mistake, or simply
not considering the issue until now.

Instead, Alex comes off as overly bitter, utterly failing to advance the cause
of a _"mutually beneficial relationship"_. Presumably in the pursuit of blog
impressions.

~~~
jamespo
Yes, terrible not contacting someone about something posted on the internet...

------
simoneau
Here's a slightly different question.

If I've posted a picture to my personal timeline, can someone post that
picture on their own Facebook pages without giving me credit? Can they even
modify the picture (add a slogan or whatever) and do the same? I think the
Facebook TOS allows both of these:

<https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms>

Is that how you read it?

~~~
stan_rogers
It is indeed the case. The sharing mechanism depends on cascading assignment
of license of publication rights, and the thumbnailing/cropping for
timeline/feed entries requires rights to create derivative works (which,
unfortunately, has the side-effect of permitting almost any sort of derivative
work that wouldn't be covered by libel). Although you still retain copyright
(and can separately license works outside of Facebook under other terms), you
are granting extremely broad and transferable rights (the "friends" chain can
get to be pretty long once sharing is allowed) to a work by posting it to
Facebook. If you don't want to relinquish control of a work, don't post it on
FB. Never post images of value in a valuable size, and watermark the hell out
of anything that is low-res and commercial.

------
minimaxir
Would this be a situation where the artist could justify filing a DMCA notice?

~~~
jrochkind1
In theory, yeah.

It's never occured to me to wonder about how you file a DMCA notice against
facebook though, or if that's something that happens and how effective it is
for the filer.

Is this something that one can do on facebook? Facebook appears to say yes:
<http://www.facebook.com/help/190268144407210/>

But it would be interesting to hear from someone with personal experience, on
either end of a DMCA takedown notice on facebook.

------
hkmurakami
I feel like it's a little bit unfair to Facebook Inc. to have their name as
the first word of the title since a glance at the title makes it seems as if
Facebook yet again overstepped their boundaries (though it speaks volumes to
FB's past behavior that I have that reaction right away)

~~~
drakaal
Facebook has the power to take down posts. They take down pictures of breast
feeding mothers. I would think it is no more difficult to take down
copyrighted works. Google image search finds duplicates quite well. FB should
do something similar.

------
jrochkind1
I'm confused by the implication that running an image without permission but
with credit is legal, but without permission but without credit is illegal.
Copyright, in the US anyway, so far as I know has no such relationship to
whether proper attribution/credit is given.

(If the given work was publicly licensed CC-BY, that's another story. Then you
HAVE permission, under that license only if you credit. But that's something
the CC-BY license does, not some built-in part of copyright law).

It's certainly _good manners_ regardless of the law. But, while you may or may
not be illegally 'pirating' an image to use it in a facebook post without
permission, whether or not you give proper attribution is unlikely to be
determining factor of whether you are or not.

------
slammdunc23
I 100% agree that IFLS should be crediting the artists who make great work and
direct traffic to IFLS's page. What I am having trouble understanding is why
the general thrust of comments on this page seems to be "This is
UNACCEPTABLE!!" when (and please correct me if I'm wrong) the general thrust
of comments on pages about, e.g., The Pirate Bay seems to be "There's
absolutely nothing wrong with The Pirate Bay!" Aren't both of these sites
making money by hawking stolen wares? Why is The Pirate Bay so fiercely
defended and IFLS so roundly condemned?

~~~
scotty79
IFLS is not a government target. It's loved by every one. So haters gonna
hate.

------
mcintyre1994
In addition to the main point of this article, it's interesting to see that
people are building a career out of Facebook pages in a similar way to we saw
with prominent Youtubers taking off.

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rckrd
Yes, I agree. But why call out something like this page? Surely there are more
successful and profitable content farms.

Not justifying the behavior, just saying that this example is the 'little
guy'.

~~~
homosaur
Considering she's working on a TV deal, I bet not many. Plus it doesn't matter
who is larger, wrong is wrong.

~~~
scotty79
Except it's not wrong. Unless you'd like to shut down half of the internet
because it's wrong until it streightens up.

~~~
jamespo
Cool, let's just rsync the whole internet to itself and enjoy the race to the
bottom

~~~
scotty79
Aleady in progress. An you know what? It spawns lots of very imaginative
stuff.

