$5100 penalty for unintentionally using a copyrighted photo
afflante.com
afflante.com
I have very little sympathy. If you don't have permission to use a photograph the proper course of action is not to use it. To use it without permission is definitely not trying your best to give credit.
There is a wide spectrum between actively stealing photos and mistakenly using photos because they seemed to be in the public domain. The key questions are: was the intent malicious? And how soon was it rectified?
And I say this as someone whose photo was used by a highly read tech blog without attribution; and when I pointed this out, they quietly put a link to my original photo in there, but still did not attribute it to me.
There's no such thing as "seemed" to be in the public domain. Either they are or they aren't. If you don't know then you assume they're not. If you assume they are when they're not, or you assume the attribution attached is correct when it isn't, then the photographer is entirely within their rights to sue you for approximately $5100.
This is why running a website properly is actually quite a lot of work.
And I say this as someone who's been running websites for 20 years, and I've seen lots of my content reused without permission. It's really annoying. I used to be on the side of "if it's online then it's fair to reuse it", but as more and more sites have appeared that do nothing more than repost content from /r/<some subreddit> I've changed my mind.
Copyright in the US lasts for the life of the author + 70 years, or the shorter of 95 years after publication / 120 years after creation for works made for hire. Digital photography hasn't been around that long.
Copyright is automatic. There's no need to register it. Willful infringement can increase the penalties, but is not required for there to be penalties. Your key questions are not particularly important from a legal standpoint.
I put in tons of hours of work, money, networking, photographing, post production, marketing, etc. Only for someone to swoop in, repost my work with a tap of their finger, and profit off of it. Millions of eyeballs for doing nothing but theft.
I don’t get how people are ostentatiously intransigent to people that don’t do any harm. What is it? Frustration, general resentment, vindictiveness?
https://web.archive.org/web/20171225065956/http://afflante.c...
That may be true, but the site owner certainly tried to make money from it - https://web.archive.org/web/20171225065956/http://afflante.c... - Note the Donate button and sidebar advert. This is from 6 weeks ago.
Do you resent Pinterest and Tumblr then as well?
Yes, although less so. Those sites at least have a valid use case as personal curation tools.
A thousand foxholes with legal snipers each out to get one another.
All that, so one grumpy webdesigner can live from glueing together some 2nd tier stockfootage.
I licensend all my content under the GPL and similar Licenses.
I wish there was a way to seperate that hell of a internet you want to live in from the web i work to archieve every day.
I work hard on my hobby, but i do not feel entitled too money for it.
GPL requires copyright law to work. Without vigorous copyright law the GPL is worthless.
If you don't believe in copyright you should pick a different licence.
You may not send radiowaves. You may not distill your own alcohol, you may not do this, you may not do that. Let the professionals handle it. This is where some self-important case like the Taxi-drivers starts to enshrine a often trivial task to demand entry dutys and guild taxes.
I want you to clearly sign your content - so that is unreusable and nobody gets put out in the court to statuate a exemple, so that a useless caste of professinal may life from the fear of the comoners.
It's not that simple. What is just a hobby for you might be a source of income for someone else. You can't turn tables around and say they can't make money only because you don't expect a payment for your hobby.
I wish there was some way to mark such hostile silo-parts of the web against the allmende, original web.
Before using an image for anything, I always check its license. It's so easy nowadays! Filtering by license is now part of Google Image search, so you don't even have to visit specialized sites like in the old days. Everything someone created is copyrighted and you can't just use it as you want, unless the creator allows you to - and many people do. It's so simple. They should teach these things early at school so we wouldn't have problems like the owner of the website in question.
The creator has the right to license their work in any way they see fit. That work doesn't automatically become community property just because it's been published online.