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Comment by imh | Hacker News Reader

Lawyers are funny:

>Today, we introduce Open Images, a dataset consisting of ~9 million URLs ... having a Creative Commons Attribution license* .

Then the footnote below:

>* While we tried to identify images that are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license, we make no representations or warranties regarding the license status of each image and you should verify the license for each image yourself.

I think this might be the most blatant instance I've ever seen of, "We have to write this even though it's essentially impossible for you to actually follow our directions."

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Lawyers aren't so funny when they sue you for trivial things.

There are so many instances where people try to take advantage of things. This is just protection. And it's not like they're providing nine images. It's nine million.

The funny part is the suggestion that you go through each and every one of the 9 million images and verify their licenses. It's basically impossible. It's funny that, by suggesting we do the impossible, their butts are covered.

Any image where it is impossible to find the originating source, already used thousands of times on tumbler, blogs, and websites, and is under a certain resolution and size (thumbnail for example) falls into the category of fair use.

Nope. Everything is copyrighted by default, and if you don’t have permission (“license”) to copy it, it’s illegal for you to copy it. There are the “fair use” exceptions, but those have nothing to do with what you wrote.

I clearly misunderstood what is meant by "Would it be considered impossible to obtain permission from the original source?" as criteria for fair use.[0] I've seen numerous images on Wikipedia that use this as reason for fair use. Someone uploads an image to 4chan as anonymous, for example, without a path to ask permission it might be fair use to use that image.This is different from someone posting an image to facebook where there is a way to ask the author for permission. Please, explain my misunderstanding here.

[0]: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/qxptplnxqt...

> Would it be considered impossible to obtain permission from the original source?

That question assumes that you know who the original source is. If you don’t know that, you can’t consider it impossible.

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