Hacker News Reader

Comment by whym | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Worse. According to the article;

* 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.

Why is that worse?

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.

> 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.

When you make a post with an image, the twitter timeline will show a cropped viewport of the image. Depending on the size and shape of the image, some parts may be cut off until you expand it.

For example: https://imgur.com/pP0HrhG https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1286456314701307906/photo/1

The same thing applies to retweets.

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com