
Japan top court tells Twitter to disclose retweeters' info - evanb
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/07/22/national/japan-top-court-tells-twitter-disclose-retweeters-info/
======
ladberg
I don't use Twitter so I could be wrong about what happened, but this seems
crazy. Three people retweeted a photo that included the photographer's name.
However, Twitter didn't show the name in the thumbnail because it cropped the
image (but was still visible when enlarged).

Somehow, this led to the government mandating Twitter to release the
identities of the retweeters? Does anyone know how a random image from 10
years ago that picked up nearly zero traction on Twitter made it to the top
court in Japan?

Another thought: what if a website displays the image lower down on the page
so someone has to scroll to see the bottom? Is that also an infringement?

~~~
fireattack
This reminds me of a question I asked before on Wikipedia [1].

Some of their pictures on Commons, such as
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Belgium_-
_Location_Map_(2...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Belgium_-
_Location_Map_\(2013\)_-_BEL_-_UNOCHA.svg) , are from UNOCHA (United Nations
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs).

UNOCHA specifically asks their work to be 'Credit as follows: "Credit: OCHA"',
but obviously Wikipedia don't do it on their article page if you just embed
the picture, you have to click on the picture to see the credit.

Actually, they even went further and removed the "OCHA" watermark from the
original image (see File History).

To be honest, I wasn't super satisfied with the answers I got there (see ref),
but then again I'm not familiar with this topic.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_\(policy\)/Archive_124#Isn%27t_the_way_we_use_these_UNOCHA_maps_directly_violate_the_Creative_Commons_license%3F)

~~~
stordoff
The linked CC licence states (and it appears to be confirmed that this is the
licence that applies[1]):

> If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or
> Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section
> 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable
> to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original
> Author [...]; (ii) the title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent
> reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be
> associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright
> notice or licensing information for the Work; and (iv) , consistent with
> Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of
> the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., "French translation of the Work by
> Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original
> Author"). The credit required by this Section 4 (b) may be implemented in
> any reasonable manner

As the licence states that attribution must be reasonable to the medium and in
any reasonable manner, having the attribution details on an information page
would appear to be acceptable - the CC wiki[2] and FAQ[3] seem to support
this:

> There is no one right way; just make sure your attribution is reasonable and
> suited to the medium you're working with. That being said, you still have to
> include attribution requirements somehow, even if it's just a link to an
> About page that has that info.[2]

> Additionally, you may satisfy the attribution requirement by providing a
> link to a place where the attribution information may be found.[3]

This is also made explicit in version 4.0 of the licence[4]:

> For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the conditions by providing a
> URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes the required information.

Regarding removing the watermark, it does not appear to be a copyright notice,
so the right to do so would seem to be implied by the right to make adaptions.

[1] "Wikimedia Foundation has received an e-mail confirming that the copyright
holder has approved publication under the terms mentioned on this page. This
correspondence has been reviewed by an OTRS member and stored in our
permission archive. The correspondence is available to trusted volunteers as
ticket #2014031410007248."

[2]
[https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/best_practices_for_att...](https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/best_practices_for_attribution)

[3]
[https://creativecommons.org/faq/#How_do_I_properly_attribute...](https://creativecommons.org/faq/#How_do_I_properly_attribute_a_Creative_Commons_licensed_work.3F)

[4]
[https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode)

~~~
fireattack
Thanks for the detailed reply.

I agree, Wikipedia indeed does enough to attribute, but I'm still a little bit
concerned about the specific "Attribution Requirements" listed on the File
page (second block under #Licensing).

Basically it states, modified or not, you need to keep the source "below the
map", which some Wikipedia article pages obviously don't.

What's your take about this "requirements" statement? Does it carry any
weight, legally speaking?

(By "concerned" i'm not saying UN would have an issue with Wikimedia, just the
technicality with such requirement).

~~~
stordoff
My take would be that the CC licence used does not allow you to add additional
attribution requirements, so either the image is not CC licenced (which seems
not to be the case), or the requirements don't carry any weight (so are
essentially a request/a guide to how they would like to be attributed). I will
admit I'm less certain on this than the broader terms of the CC licence
though.

------
whym
My understanding is:

    
    
      Photographer published a photo on their own website.
      Tweeter posted it on Twitter. Twitter trimmed it, removing the credit line.
      Retweeter retweeted it. Photo was still trimmed.
      Photographer sued Retweeter for distributing their work without proper credit.
    

An obvious question would be if Photographer asked them to delete the tweet(s)
first, and why they chose to sue Retweeter not Tweeter. I'm guessing it's
because the photographer is seeking financial compensation and the retweeter
looked someone financially capable. This disclosure is a preliminary step to
further lawsuits demanding remedies.

~~~
bscphil
> Twitter trimmed it, removing the credit line.

As far as I understand, Twitter does not crop photos, at least not without
user intervention, so I don't understand how this part of it could have
happened.

~~~
trashcan
Twitter does in thumbnail previews. If you've seen someone post a picture of
text, the thumbnail is basically unusable because a significant portion is
missing until you click through to the full-size version.

It's one of the main reasons I never use Twitter, as silly as that is. It is
annoying to see a picture that is cropped that sometimes obscures (or even
changes if an important part is missing) the actual point being made because
it isn't in the preview. It just seems like a really poor design.

~~~
gruez
>It's one of the main reasons I never use Twitter, as silly as that is. It is
annoying to see a picture that is cropped that sometimes obscures (or even
changes if an important part is missing) the actual point being made because
it isn't in the preview. It just seems like a really poor design.

Is it really that hard to click the picture before viewing it? It seems like a
necessary evil to me. If you don't do the thumbnail thing and the picture is
huge (or has odd dimensions), then it's going to make scrolling past the
picture a pain.

~~~
trashcan
It's just that the context is frequently misleading (combined with the
character limit to describe the images). If this part is designed so poorly,
it makes me less interested in the rest of the product which may have other
similar issues. I recognize it is a fairly silly (and trivial) opinion.

Is there a reason the whole image couldn't be scaled down? Or at least be done
proportionally. That's how thumbnails work in basically everything else.

~~~
hunter2_
To have the image fill the entire available width, you really do need to crop
from the top and bottom or else someone could put an image with a 1:1000
aspect ratio and scrolling through the tweet would take forever.

Not filling the available width would leave negative space -- similar to
"black bars" \-- on the sides of the image. You don't have to agree, but many
people dislike such negative space and cropping is the solution.

~~~
bscphil
Late replying to this, but even if negative space was a solution to "showing
the whole image in the thumbnail", it probably just reintroduces the problem,
which is frivolous lawsuits about image attribution not being visible -
because of the thumbnail is too small for anyone to be able to see the
attribution, they'll sue over that. I'm not sure there's any way around the
problem that allowing people to sue over attribution in a thumbnail that
clicks-through to the full version is bloody idiotic.

------
wsatb
Possibly unrelated, as this is a bit of a stretch in giving credit, but
Twitter has a _huge_ problem with people posting content as if its their own.
I've seen multiple things go viral on some random's Twitter account and they
have zero relation to the creators of the content, whether it be an image or
video, or even just a dumb joke. I feel like retweets died when the button was
actually added to the platform. That platform has eroded a ton over the past
decade.

~~~
malwarebytess
>That platform has eroded a ton over the past decade.

Maybe so but the re-posting of content with no attribution or knowledge of the
source was the norm before twitter existed. Arguably it's the natural state of
the internet.

------
akersten
Is there some special right for a photographer in Japan to have their name
shown on an image, that determines whether a reproduction of it is an
infringement? As far as I know, you acknowledge the service will transform
your work as part of the ToS for uploading an image to it.

Unless, of course, the photographer wasn't the one who uploaded the picture to
Twitter in the first place, but then why is the case hinged on whether the
photog's name was cut off in the re-tweet, versus just the picture being
copied by someone without permission?

And, going after the re-tweeters seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of
the service. They aren't really copying anything, that's all a mechanism of
the platform.

If I were Twitter I'd be counting my lucky stars that my largest userbase is
in the US where, as broken as our copyright system is, I can't imagine this
wacky judicial reasoning prevailing.

~~~
duffmancd
There is. Japan's "copyright" laws are different and include Moral rights
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_Japan#Moral_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_Japan#Moral_rights))
which are nontransferable and include the right to how your work is
attributed.

I'm not sure why it is the retweeters, rather than Twitter who are responsible
for the automatic cropping that occurs when you retweet. But I neither a
Lawyer nor a Japanese Copyright expert.

~~~
akersten
So, asking non-facetiously, as an artist I have the right to decide how my
work must be attributed, even if the platform I'm posting it to tells me in
their ToS that my work will be altered in a standard way in the course of
using the service?

If my understanding is correct (with the caveat that I am nowhere close to an
expert), that's frankly bonkers and I have no idea how Twitter can operate at
all in Japan.

~~~
duffmancd
I'm also not an expert: based only on my reading of Wikipedia, you are correct
and it is bonkers from a US perspective.

The photographer may be in breach of Twitter's ToS for enforcing their moral
rights, but that would not _stop_ them from enforcing their rights. In this
case, the initial post to twitter was not from the photographer, but someone
else. So Twitter likely has nothing to hold against the photographer.

~~~
talaketu
> So Twitter likely has nothing to hold against the photographer.

Nothing in the article suggests any agreement between the photographer and
Twitter.

------
Camillo
IIRC, one reason why there are so few images on the Japanese Wikipedia is that
it's almost impossible to avoid running into legal trouble with pictures
there.

~~~
em-bee
how is japans copyright different than the rest of the worlds? as far as i
know most countries either follow the european model with stronger moral
rights, or the US model.

unless japans courts take a stronger interpretation of the laws than most
other countries. or few people in japan release their images under suitable
licenses...

~~~
soraminazuki
For starters, Japanese copyright laws don't have a fair use exception.
Publishers lobby against any attempts to introduce one _hard_.

------
gruez
>In 2018, however, Intellectual Property High Court ruled that an act of
retweeting does not infringe copyright but breaches creators’ right to show
their names and their works as they are. The court ordered the disclosure of
the email addresses of the three retweeters.

So how would this work with sites that auto convert links to embeds? eg. you
post a _link_ to a photograph, but the site converts your link to an embedded
photograph, are you now liable? What if this was done retroactively (eg. links
to embed was added later as a feature)?

------
polm23
People are asking about Japanese law on this, so I'll write what I know. I am
not a lawyer, just a person who cares about copyright.

Japan does not have fair use, instead it has a number of specific exceptions
to copyright. For example, you can take photos of things semi-permanently
installed in an outdoor area and use those photos for non-commercial purposes,
even if you photographed a 2D artwork that might have copyright. You can read
the copyright law in English here:

[https://www.cric.or.jp/english/clj/cl2.html#art32](https://www.cric.or.jp/english/clj/cl2.html#art32)

The most generous exception in the law (except maybe the search engine one) is
for "quotation", Article 32. For quotation you must use only as much of the
work as is necessary for commentary, clearly separate it from your own
content, clearly attribute it, and the quoted content must be subordinate to
your own content. Regarding the last point, that means you can't just say
"this is a nice painting" and post the image, you have to provide some
commentary on it. (No, that's not clearly defined, so you'd need to work it
out in court if there was a dispute.)

In practice this doesn't matter much on social media, and things work out much
like places where you have fair use, but sometimes people try to enforce all
their rights. Usually the people they are upset at take down their posts, but
I guess in this case that didn't happen.

One really unfortunate side effect of this is that Japanese Wikpedia has very
few images compared to other Wikipedias. Things that would be fine in an
article, like book covers, are excluded because their Wikimedia file page
would not have commentary and, so the thinking goes, would be infringement. (I
remember reading the discussion that came to this conclusion on a Wikipedia
discussion page years ago, but haven't been able to find it since.) This is
why the Japanese article for Anpanman has a photo of a mural, for example,
while the English article has a book cover.

For moral rights (著作人格権), these actually also exist in many places besides the
United States. Practically speaking, if you license a work for use it's pretty
common to have a clause saying you will not exercise these rights, and if
you're in a mutually beneficial relationship any concerns over how you're
credited can usually be negotiated. In this particular case the use was
completely unauthorized so that didn't happen. (I am still confused about why
the poster didn't just remove the image when asked.)

~~~
anilakar
What's the legal status of retweets? From a technical point of view, the user
is not making any copies but only referring to another post, and it's Twitter
who creates the preview.

Furthermore, how has Twitter ever been able to operate in Japan in the first
place, if they have not made any concessions by disabling features that are
considered to be in violation of local legislation?

~~~
polm23
I have never really thought about this before or heard it discussed, because
usually only the behavior of the initial poster is at issue (since they can
just delete the tweet and fix the whole problem).

If you are unfamiliar with Twitter, you could consider a user's timeline like
their "home page", since they control it, and an RT could be considered a form
of "reposting", because you put it in places it had not been before.

I don't think that's a reasonable line of thought, but it is consistent.

~~~
Thorrez
But if the original tweeter deletes it, the retweet is deleted too. So I don't
consider a retweet to be a copy, but rather an alias to an image that exists
on someone else's account.

~~~
polm23
I agree but the court did not. _shrug_

------
jonny383
2020: Where pressing a single button on a website or app can get you into
trouble with the law.

------
waon
Japan _desperately_ needs a competent organization that can stand up for the
digital rights of its people now. They lack organizations like the EFF that
are willing to do this.

~~~
tasogare
In this article the rights of a photographer was successfully defended, so the
system is a least working in some cases. The bigger problems here are web
design and forms that impose specific characters in some fields.

~~~
waon
> In this article the rights of a photographer was successfully defended

The rights of the photographer was respected from the very beginning. The
attribution was still there for anyone to see. The “problem” was that it
wasn’t included in the _thumbnail_ , because it unsurprisingly didn’t fit in.

> so the system is a least working in some cases

No, this case represents a spectacular failure to protect people’s right to
privacy and fair use. Why this is the case is already explained throughout
this thread, so I don’t think we need to repeat this here.

~~~
polm23
Japan has no fair use, which is part of the problem here.

Usually people with their rights "infringed" by unauthorized posting on
Twitter don't care. If they do care, the poster usually takes the image down.
I guess that didn't happen in this case, which is why it went to court, but it
rarely gets that far.

------
sillysaurusx
_The original photo showed up if viewers of the retweets clicked on the
trimmed photo, but viewers was not able to see the photographer’s name unless
such action was taken, the ruling said._

Interesting. This is how Twitter works. On the other hand, it’s also true that
it’s technically copyright infringement, since the reproduction is trimmed. I
wonder if Twitter has a duty to enforce copyright in both trimmed and
untrimmed cases.

------
totetsu
don't we have algorithms that can smart crop an image to preserve points of
interest? Could that be used to keep text at the top or bottom of an image.
Ugly as that may be.

~~~
kd5bjo
Depending on the relevant law and contracts, that may be as bad or worse than
removing the attribution: the artist may consider the “uninteresting” parts of
the image to be vital to its overall composition and object to the tampering—
Even something as simple as traditional cropping can be controversial in this
regard.

------
lanius
What are they going to do with the email addresses of the retweeters? Send a
strongly worded email?

------
dang
Url changed from [https://thenextweb.com/insights/2020/07/22/twitter-
copyright...](https://thenextweb.com/insights/2020/07/22/twitter-copyright-
image-japan/), which points to [https://torrentfreak.com/warning-for-twitter-
users-in-japan-...](https://torrentfreak.com/warning-for-twitter-users-in-
japan-following-supreme-court-copyright-ruling-200722/), which points to this.
Submitters: the HN guidelines call for original sources
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)),
so it's best to follow the trail like this when submitting.

