Japan top court tells Twitter to disclose retweeters' info
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
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?
Some of their pictures on Commons, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Belgium_-_Location_Map_(2... , 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...
> 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...
[3] https://creativecommons.org/faq/#How_do_I_properly_attribute...
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).
Is the watermark itself not a copyright notice that needs to be kept intact?
I'm still confused though after reading the article.
This is bonkers. The attribution is still there, you just have click it. Besides, I doubt anyone who cared about the image is going to be content looking at the low-res thumbnail. The reputational damage done to the photographer is negligible.
Punishing the retweeters is also problematic because they themselves didn't crop the picture, twitter did. What does this mean for cropping that's done by the user-agent, or is otherwise device specific? eg. you post on the desktop site, where nothing is cropped, so you think everything is okay. Little do you know on the mobile site, all the images get cropped. Are you now liable as well?
This means, almost by definition, that the most viewed versions of these photos on twitter, probably by a very high margin, have no attribution.
Why is this bonkers? The right to attribution is clear, and it’s not your place to judge whether or not the artist should be exercising it.
The latter question comes down to how feasible it is for a person tweeting to know how their tweets are going to look on the main timeline w/regard to attribution, which seems like something it’s reasonable for a court to decide.
>Why is this bonkers? The right to attribution is clear, and it’s not your place to judge whether or not the artist should be exercising it.
Does it mean that any sort of action needed to see the attribution constitutes "hiding" it, opening you to liability? What if the image was too big and I have to scroll down to see the attribution? What's the difference between having to click on a thumbnail to see an attribution, and having to scroll down? What if the attribution is too small to see at normal zoom levels, and you have to zoom in? Unless his name was plastered all over the picture (thereby ruining it), I doubt anyone on a phone is going to be able to read the authorship information. Do we need modals in front of every image with the attribution, so we know for sure that the viewer knows who created the image?
Scrolling is a way to navigate a single, continuous document. The publisher has published a document in which the image is displayed properly, with attribution, i.e. the publisher has done everything right. The user's device has decided to change how that document is displayed but it's still clear and obvious that the attribution is part of the document.
A cropped thumbnail is something entirely different. This is a copy of the image, something new that the publisher created and inserted into a document, without attribution. It has a link to a document that does have attribution but the document, in isolation, lacks attribution.
The issue here is that a new copy of the image was created and displayed, specifically, a copy without attribution information. This is also illegal in the US under DMCA [0], though DMCA requires that it's intentional.
> What if the attribution is too small to see at normal zoom levels, and you have to zoom in?
Same deal.
[0]: https://www.photoattorney.com/2007/07/watermarks-can-be-musi...
No matter what the solution is, the people who retweeted are definitely not the ones to hold responsible in any sane justice system. They retweeted a picture but had no input on how it is displayed, and have no control over whether this changes in time.
To rephrase that, they had no control over whether the result of their action is legal or illegal.
They did it anyway.
In this scenario, one should verify the result of one's action.
In any case, this is bonkers! But it probably feels that way because social media has conditioned us to take other people's work and do whatever we want to it and with it.
Of course, this also means the "hide this tweet" functionality must be removed for images since, otherwise, you could hide the tweet after seeing only the top part of the image that doesn't have the attribution and thus Twitter would be aiding in people not seeing the image's attribution (as they are doing in this court case).
Don't give EU lawmakers ideas...
I'm certainly not in favour of allowing one of the big tech companies to systematically undermine such Creative Commons licenses just because it's more convenient for them.
If we're going to allow anyone to ignore license terms, let's not start with corporations.
Why not? It's precisely our place as citizens to criticize laws we deem absurd/unfair/bad, including people who chose to exercize them in hamrful ways.
Human law != some divine dictum everybody should not criticize and uphold at all times. Seggregation was a law too.
...Well, I'd say it's because there's often additional short scenes after credits.
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.
* Photographer published a photo on their own website
* Tweeter posted it on Twitter, the credit line is preserved.
* Retweeter retweeted it. The photo thumbnail in the reweets are trimmed in the timeline. Tapping on the photo to view it in full, you can see the credit line.
* Photographer sued Retweeter for distributing their work without proper credit.
I'd be pretty pissed if my chance at exposure was blown because the one time it got spread virally it got spread without visible attribution. With visual attribution 10s of thousands or even millions of people see my name. Without visible attribution (having to click through to a larger version) I've effectively been robbed of $$$$$$ PR
I work on lots of open source and of course all my attribution requirements (BSD, MIT) don't require things to be upfront but I posted a photo online with my name in the corner and someone cropped it out I'd be pretty pissed.
I suspect for photos it's even worse. I have 7k photos CC-BY on Flickr. If people post them to twitter I doubt they add the required attribution. Maybe CC should start requiring or at least recommending attribution to be embedded in EXIF for images so that Twitter etc can automatic provide visible attribution AND include the same EXIF text that in any scaled versions they generate so that if someone reposts the scaled versions the attribution continues. Of course people can remove the EXIF or replace but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about some photographer getting unintentionally cheated out of PR.
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.
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.
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.
At that point the attribution may no longer be visible, in all cases, because of the reduction in the number of pixels. Which would hit the same problem again.
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.
For example: https://imgur.com/pP0HrhG https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1286456314701307906/photo/1
The same thing applies to retweets.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Being absurdly protective of the person who did the work is at least erring on the side of protection.
It's not impossible to imagine a world where the internet could have social media platforms with some attempt at media attribution functionality...
...instead we have the wild west where the vast majority of content is shared without acknowledgement, let alone attribution or permission. Even EXIF attribution data is stripped whether you like it or not. You have incredibly successful artists trying to protect their work with watermarks and JS-disabled right-clicks. Seems silly.
Uploader stole a pic and posted it, which normally constitute a consent to ToS, or something like that. Others unknowingly retweeted the stolen pic and the photographer wants their identity disclosed to proceed with lawsuits.
Twitter argued that retweets don’t count as distributing and requiring a click to show full photo isn’t cropping, but the court determined it does/it is.
Counterintuitive way to draw a line but I’m not sure if it’s terrible that court find cropping the photo with CSS require user consent. Maybe not as bonkers as Coinhive case.
Note that usually people are reasonable about it, and that it's also extremely common to have contracts state the right will not be exercised. This case is unusual because the use of the photo is completely non-consensual.
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.
Nothing in the article suggests any agreement between the photographer and Twitter.
For example, if you have piles of proof of someone committing a crime like sexual assault and the cops refuse to take it seriously, you can reliably post it on Twitter these days and people will take it seriously. In Japan, the person who committed the crime can reliably sue you for ruining their reputation and win. Stating actual plain facts about a person that harms their image on any public platform will land you in trouble, unless it’s something that’s clearly in the public interest to know (like if a company is putting arsenic in their baby food). It’s likely one reason why incidents of work harassment and abuse only become public after someone kills themselves.
> In Japan, the person who committed the (sexual) crime can reliably sue you for ruining their reputation and win
Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon thing outside of Japan [1]. And to be fair, you can’t just put a blanket ban on defamation lawsuits because it’s not wrong to sue for defamation if the allegation of sexual misconduct is in fact false. I don’t believe the majority of them to be the case, but ultimately, it’s for the courts to decide.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/12/arts/defamation-me-too.ht...
> Stating actual plain facts about a person that harms their image on any public platform will land you in trouble, unless it’s something that’s clearly in the public interest to know
Whoa. This the whole point of having defamation laws. Would you rather live in a world where every embarrassing details about your life can be published online?
Defamation laws normally deal with disseminating false information, not embarrassing information. True statements cannot be defamatory in many/most legal systems, no matter how much they harm someone's reputation.
Also note that facts that “harm someone's reputation” isn’t indicative of illegal or even immoral conduct. For example, having caught the COVID19 disease might harm one’s reputation, but it doesn’t make one a bad person however true it is.
[0]: https://www.photoattorney.com/2007/07/watermarks-can-be-musi...
You know that the Japan userbase of Twitter is huge, right? Not that far behind that of the US, in fact.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-...
The amount of attention (resources, staffing, features) Twitter gives to the Japan market because of this is significant.
In the case that the original tweeter wasn't the photographer, I see that infringement as the (only) problem here. And the only information Twitter should be compelled to provide is of the original poster.
It was not the photographer who originally tweeted it. At first I thought the original tweeter was the one at fault, but if it was OK to tweet it with the attribution in the image then it was after that when the violation occurred.
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...
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)?
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
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.)
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20200721/k10012526381000.ht...
The photographer wants to email the retweeters. The reason isn't stated but he could send them a bill for use of his image and threaten to take them to court if they don't pay it.
This is not something a reasonable person would do, but it is technically within his rights under the law. There are occasionally people online in Japan who send bills to people (mainly magazines) who quote them or use images on Twitter in ways they don't like.
Where would the violation occur if the Japanese article also showed the book cover? We've stipulated that the article poses no problem. But the Wikimedia file page already exists. Does that page violate Japanese law? Would it violate Japanese law more if a Japanese article legally displayed the same image?
> Practically speaking, if you license a work for use it's pretty common to have a clause saying you will not exercise these [moral] rights
Huh. I thought the idea of moral rights was that they were inalienable. If you can contractually waive them... that seems like a conceptual contradiction?
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?
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.
I guess we can agree that this seems to apply to Japan in general :)
> 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.
Strongly disagree with this. I'm a seasoned user and I feel that I'm completely out of control regarding what I and others see. This might also be a cultural (wrt. internet and mobile computing) difference, but I don't consider a Twitter-like timeline to be human-generated content at all, apart from the content that the users have explicitly created themselves. I believe this is also why most of HN seems to have a backlash at the moment.
FWIW, attribution rights are common everywhere, but they're an integral part of copyright, not something that can be applied separately as a secondary measure if ordinary copyright enforcement fails. I also believe that most users here are aware of the issues with the Japanese court system and face.
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.
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.
Isn't that the name given to anonymous males in Japanese court cases? I wonder how many Americans are named John Doe.
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.