Hacker News Reader

Comment by ladberg | Hacker News Reader

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?

View on HN

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... , 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...

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...

[3] https://creativecommons.org/faq/#How_do_I_properly_attribute...

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

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).

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.

> keep intact all copyright notices for the Work

Is the watermark itself not a copyright notice that needs to be kept intact?

Well, to be fair, the judge in the dissenting position (1/5) freed the 3 retweeters from blame because they did not cut off the photographer's name, but rather Twitter did in order to fit the aspect ratio displayed within the application.

I'm still confused though after reading the article.

>but rather Twitter did in order to fit the aspect ratio displayed within the application.

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?

Sounds more like the reputational damage is to the court system allowing this to occur.

> This is bonkers. The attribution is still there, you just have click it

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.

what's bonkers is wanting to punish users for something they didn't do. judges not understanding technology strikes again.

I believe this decision punishes Twitter - not the users.

to punish twitter they wouldn't need the identities of the retweeters. the only use for knowing the retweeters is to haul them into court.

To be fair, they could be asking for the identities in order to summon them as witnesses against twitter. I don't hold much faith that this is the intention though...

the thought crossed my mind, but wouldn't you do that after you sue in the discovery step?

>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.

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?

> 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?

Don't give EU lawmakers ideas...

What Twitter does likely violates (eg.) all cropped cc-by-nc-nd licensed images on twitter.

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.

This is a solved problem. Don't crop photos on your platform. If you want photos to be cropped to fit a square box, make it explicit for users to enable. Have an additional attribution field if that's not sufficient enough.

So I should be able to post a 400x1000000 photo on my feed and anyone that comes across it must scroll for at least a few minutes to see my attribution and get past the tweet.

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).

The only solution is to have the attribution in a separate field, presumably charging the poster with providing the correct information. "Not cropping" is not one because the alternative is resizing and it potentially has the same obscuring effect.

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.

> They had no input on how it is displayed

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.

> 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?

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...

>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.

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.

Most people don't watch the credits of a movie. That doesn't mean the actors didn't get attribution.

Interestingly enough, in japanese movie theaters most people do stay to watch the credits. From what I hear, specifically out of respect for creators.

...Well, I'd say it's because there's often additional short scenes after credits.

Regardless of the legal issue, I sure hate it when social media services like Facebook and Strava crop my photo thumbnails to fit a certain aspect ratio. They frequently end up cropping out important parts like someone's face. I wish there was an option to not crop, and instead add white space around the image to make it fit.

Does it matter how many people rights were borkend and how famous they were?

You're right, it doesn't really matter how known the incident was. However, I don't think it should have happened at all and if someone were to sue, I would have assumed they would only be entertained if it was a widespread case or they were famous (not something I agree with, just how the world works).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com