The Oatmeal vs. FunnyJunk: webcomic copyright fight gets personal | Hacker News Reader

The Oatmeal vs. FunnyJunk: webcomic copyright fight gets personal

arstechnica.com

205 pointsignifero119 comments

I hate the RIAA / MPAA way of doing things, and I think deep linking is fine, but this outright content coping is getting out of hand. It poisons the search results by having people who have no creative spark doing SEO and getting their content elsewhere.

The incentives all point to content coping as the best business model for a whole group of people. Why bother to create when Google will pay you anyway and often put you above the original content owner.

It doesn't seem to be worth the time to send DMCA requests to the site. It seems like sending DMCA requests to Google might help, but really, some method of cutting off the funding of these sites would be best. Remove the profit motive. Ideally (not practically) it would be nice if Google gave the ad sense money to the original content creator if a DMCA request is filed on that pages search results. Won't work, but somehow this Search -> Ad model creates the problem, the same companies need to step up and fix it, because it seems like there is going to be no search alternatives because of advertising mass.

I don't understand why Google doesn't sort results by distance from original author? Is there no technological way to do that? In my head it'd work like this:

Original: 100 points

Someone who the original links to: 10 points

Someone else completely unrelated to the original, but housing their content: 1 point

They're constantly crawling. Is there no way for their crawlers to determine the originating source of content?

To help The Oatmeal, in particular, it would have to analyze a ton of large images. Basically, it would have to analyze every image on every page and compare to all its other images. That would be pretty hard.

I do think you might be on to something. If anyone is in a position to help with this issue, it's Google. Wouldn't it be awesome if they did something to help this problem in a big way?

Google developed and has been hugely successful with the business model (Ad Words) that makes profitable this bad behavior. It would seem a technical, automated means is extremely difficult to impossible. The mechanism under the law of the US is the DMCA notice. Removing a site from search and adwords that continually gets such notices would fix the problem. I have had searches where such notices were mentioned, so Google would seem to have the means. Cut off the money and the behavior will stop.

Actually, I don't know now how hard it would be. Check out this thread going on now: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2614797>http://news.....

And the "Original" is? Don't forget, computers are smart but dumb.

In theory, the original is the one that appears first.

In practice, this won't work, because a targeted spider of, say, the Oatmeal website will be able to grab new material and post it elsewhere (with modified headers a bit earlier than the original...) long before any generalized search engine swings back around again to check for new content.

As much as I dislike Apple's walled garden approach in principle, I have to admit that in practice it protects creators, to some extent, from the selfish unwashed masses that think nothing of taking the hard work of others for free. Here at HN we understand the more nuanced philosophical issues of information sharing but its not hard to imagine the net reduced to a wasteland of amateurish trash without some protection for creators. Steve Jobs' vision is an elitist vision but I find myself more sympathetic lately. Only a tiny fraction of the population has the talent, drive and inspiration to create work of quality.

Here in Vietnam you can buy a DVD of any recent Hollywood movie for 50 cents. Is it a coincidence that the domestic film industry is junk? In the physical world the only way to preempt a "tragedy of the commons" is to restrict the commons. I'd like to think the net is different but current trends suggest otherwise.

"Here in Vietnam you can buy a DVD of any recent Hollywood movie for 50 cents. Is it a coincidence that the domestic film industry is junk?"

Well I live in Sweden where DVDs/Blue Rays are quite expensive, but still the domestic film industry is still mostly junk. I don't think one factor has much relevance to the other ;)

I don't know about the average quality of Swedish films, but the Swedish film industry has done plenty of brilliant work over the years. Swedish films may not have the budget or production values of Hollywood films, but they are, in my opinion, still skillfully made.

Here in India, I can pirate any movie for free and for 2.0$ if I want to buy a DVD. Its not stopped our film industry from producing new and high quality material.

Counter anecdote to your anecdote.

EDIT: Actually theres a small phenomena going on that I've recently noticed in the Indian cinema/piracy scene which is worth letting other people know.

Quick background first: Bhojpuri Cinema - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhojpuri_cinema

Bhojpuri is a dialect of Hindi, spoken mostly in the north easter states of India. Bhojpuri cinema was a relatively dead creature, with a small audience and it paled in financial/audience significance compared to your typical bollywood fare.

Now a lot of labor such as security guards, house help, cooks, are immigrants from those states, and of course they speak bhojpuri. They've had to watch hindi cinema when outside of their states though; the opportunity cost of putting up a bhojpuri movie, instead of a bollywood flop, is too high. The choices of bhojpuri speakers were basically Hindi movies or, Hindi movies.

Of late though, cheap color mobile phones, about Rs.1,500 to Rs.3,000 ($25 - $50), coupled with rampant piracy, are allowing that gap to be bridged. Often when I come in late at night, I can catch security watching a movie on a cheap phone.

I wish I had numbers to know how much is being consumed (how much bhojpuri vs regular hindi cinema for example), but I do know that bhojpuri cinema is going to be able to keep and build a stronger network of viewers. The viewers themselves are able to identify and patronize the art form, something which wouldn't have happened otherwise.

TLDR: Piracy and cheap mobile phones are letting niche hindi dialect speakers consume and watch movies which would have been drowned out against bollywood. Considering the size of the populations, its interesting to see how this plays out.

How does the Indian film industry make money? DVD sales? Theater tickets? Something else? I've heard that the Indian film industry is pretty deeply infiltrated by organized crime but I don't know if that's really true.

Used to be infiltrated by crime - around 1990s iirc. The Mumbai police brutally cleaned up a lot of the mob out here, and things have become a lot cleaner since.

The key driver for film would would have to be box office ticket sales, (i'm going to ignore food, product placements and the like). DVD/Video sales will be a much lower portion of it. Let me see if i can get any numbers... ah found it. -

Numbers are for 2010 and in INR bn (1 USD = 45.0 INR)

Domestic Theatrical: 62.0 Overseas Theatrical: 6.6 Home Video: 2.3 Cable & Satellite Rights: 8.3 Ancillary Revenue Streams: 4.1

I got this from a KPMG report on the Indian media industry for 2011 - http://www.kpmg.com/IN/en/IssuesAndInsights/ThoughtLeadershi...

The relevant info is on page 61

What's interesting is that Inman just wants attribution - which appears to be the one thing he can't get, and the one thing that seems the most reasonable.

Isn't it hard for Funny Junk to automatically give attribution if users upload images (say from their hard disk)? I'm wondering what would be ideal solution for proper attribution.

Maybe they could use Tineye, somehow?

On one level, FJ doesn't need any 'technical' means for enforcing attribution. But they do need to expend the manpower to investigate reports of misattributed content, and to actually correct them (either changing the attribution or removal). I mean, this mechanism should exist anyways for dealing with 'internal' attribution disputes (some user reuploads another user's actual original content from FJ). Other user generated content sites (like deviantArt) have proecsses and mechanisms set up for this.

hadn't thought of that.

Although, seeing as they are able to delete/ban all his content, you think they have a way of identifying it.

They deleted all content attributed to him - which is as simple as just searching for "The Oatmeal" - and then threw in a word filter to replace "The Oatmeal" with "The Fag". Not really the same thing as deleting or banning all his content, especially as he gave them a list of content which was still present (without attribution) which they did nothing about.

There is attribution in the images themselves, but someone is cropping them out. Someone is going out of their way to make sure he is not attributed.

let's take a guess who and why.. follow the money

Are you suggesting that FJ itself is doing the work of clipping out attribution from content their users upload? Huh.

I haven't visited FunnyJunk before, but from what I read the users gain reputation/karma or something similar (but not money) by posting original content that gets lots of upvotes/views.

So honest users are motivated to create something high-quality to upload. Dishonest users are motivated to remove attribution from someone else's high-quality work.

I don't think you can pin this part of the problem directly onto FJ (though that's where the site revenue goes).

"Follow the money" assumes there aren't other motivating factors.

actually 'follow the money' is a strategy based on finding the one who gained the most from the certain action, it doesn't have to be 'money' literally.

but yes, I was suggesting that FJ could also generate content by himself, because: 1) why not? 2) he didn't remove all oatmeal material 3) he got all agressive about the idea, I mean, what's the problem, if it was his user's work he could just remove it, take down the karma and that's it.

Perhaps there's a legal snag with giving attribution, being that, by giving attribution, they're also admitting they don't have any right to show the content and question, and shooting themselves in the foot legally down the road.

Perhaps there is a business model here? Create a Tineye style crawler that digs the web for matching images and is smart enough to serve up DMCA notices for a small monthly fee to content makers. It will track compliance and put it all in a nice dashboard so creators don't get overwhelmed reining in the copy cats.

Correct me with I'm wrong - but I think all DMCA notices have to be electronically signed by a human under penalty of perjury.

Whilst I think only one or two people have been convicted of sending false DMCA notices, the penalties are stiff enough to not let a program sign DMCA notices on my behalf.

So just pile up the infringing sites and put a "SEND" button next to them? Log in once a week, hit the "SEND ALL under penalty of perjury" button?

Sorta like mortgages -- click 'we claim ownership' and call it done <g>.

I wouldn't adopt this business model without an insanely good team of programmers... or an insanely good team of lawyers. Maybe even both.

The difficult bit is the finding though, not the verifying; use the code to do the finding and identifying, present both to the human who clicks the 'yes on penalty of perjury' button and you're done.

Which works out great until you screw up and mis-identify something, and then you've committed perjury...

GettyImages does this, or something very similar. They buy the rights to photos on Flickr, and they have a crawler out looking for instances of those photos. The order in which they do these things is unknown to me.

> Here's how FunnyJunk.com's business operates:

> - Gather funny pictures from around the internet

> - Host them on FunnyJunk.com

> - Slather them in advertising

> - If someone claims copyright infringement, throw your hands up in the air and exclaim "It was our users who uploaded your photos! We had nothing to do with it! We're innocent!"

Oh, hey, it's the same as Grooveshark's model two years ago.

And ebaums since...forever.

For that matter it's similar to what TV stations do. Now a key difference is that TV usually pays for the original content, but from the consumer's point of view it's the same: find OC, slap your station logo in the corner, and surround it with advertising. All those clip shows like 'craziest police chases' and 'worst TV moments' rely on this model. Hell, there's whole channels that rely on it...I saw one recently called True TV or similar that seemed to consist of nothing but recycled news footage (mostly crime/emergency drama', library sound effects, and some 're-actors' - industry-linked professionals who sit there making pithy or occasionally witty comments in hopes of leaving whatever line of work they are in and becoming z-list celebrities instead.

This seems to be endemic in American screen culture, slightly less so in the print world. In contrast, European copyright has a side feature called 'moral rights' 'droite d'auteur' - even if you sell the copyright, the original author always retains the right to be identified as the author. There's no financial obligation associated with this for the copyright owner, but it ensures the creator remains associated with the work. My limited recall is that in commercial copyright infringement disputes, courts take a strict approach to evaluating lost profits, but in cases where someone has stripped out the identity of the creator there are often additional sanctions, since it's considered an attack upon the creator's ability to earn a living in the future by being identifiable from their existing work. I'd need time to dig up citations for that, so don't rely on it. but I do think the basic concept is a good one.

Not quite the same.

> 'craziest police chases'

Footage recorded from police cruisers and obtained as part of the public record? Unlikely to run into a need for copyright clearance.

> 'worst TV moments'

Limited parts of a whole broadcast in a non-market-destroying way for the purposes of commentary? Fair use.

Which isn't to say those shows don't suck.

My mention of Grooveshark had to do with the way Grooveshark was/is encouraging users to upload infringing material with a nudge and a wink.

but but but grooveshark is okay they're "disrupting the music industry"!!!!!!!!!!!

On Grooveshark though, attribution to the artist is actually unavoidable.

No, two years ago, Grooveshark existed ostensibly to allow artists to upload their own work. So what really happened was that the majority of the content there was major-label music being attributed to "kubraffle622" and the like.

Though you had to put the title, and often the artist name in the filename/title because that's what people were looking for. It's a bit different at FJ because the Oatmeal isn't mainstream, it just sort of appears in someone's vision and is then discarded. Music searching is a different sort of experience.

We're not talking about user experiences, we're talking about the tactics used by the hosting party to disclaim any responsibility while being complicit in what the users are doing.

I didn't think I had anything to say about this.

But, for unrelated reasons, I just went looking for a link to the hilarious 24-hour webcomic, Blotchmen. And I found lots of pages that link to it, like this MeFi page:

http://www.metafilter.com/76009/Blotchmen-and-other-comics-b...

and MeFi, just like all of the other top hits on Google, is very careful and very virtuous -- rather than reproduce the comic, they send everyone to the original artist's blog so that Kevin Cannon can get full credit for his work:

http://freshmanforlife.com/

... but the blog is down. It displays nothing but a wordpress.com error page, and now I'm really depressed because (a) I won't get to read the comic today and (b) I won't get to send it to my friends and (c) I've got visions of it disappearing forever because, hey, that happens, and if poor Kevin Cannon gets hit by a bus his online presence could just disappear, or maybe he'll pull a _why and have a fit of creative destruction and set all of his work on fire one day and then I will be totally screwed, I will never see his work again...

...except, of course, that his work has probably been copied. I guess, if worst comes to worst, I'll have to look for it on some site like FunnyJunk and hope it's there.

What is the moral of this story? People copy the work of artists rather than linking because they can make money from sleazy ads, and that is not good. But there is another reason to copy: Links suck. They really really suck. They don't just suck in the long term: They suck in real time. (Blotchmen is only three years old.) Links are unreliable on a technical level (blogs break, poorly cached sites fall over with every slight breeze), on a commercial level (licenses change, DRM becomes obsolete, what was once free is now behind a paywall, what was once purchasable is now off the market and the copyright will last until after I'm dead) and legally nebulous (one DMCA takedown notice can remove a link forever, sometimes even if the notice is fraudulent or invalid). There are a hundred things that can go wrong with a link, and one of them usually does, generally within five years or less.

Dude's mostly asking for attribution. So post a copy along with a link to the source and he isn't gonna complain.

This is true, of course, and quite mature of him.

However, he is also wise enough to have noticed the extreme irony: The copies with links to the original source are now gone. This doesn't even seem to be anyone's fault -- the management misinterpreted the artist's complaint and killed all the linked copies in an excess of zeal. Still, whether anyone wanted it to happen or not, the unattributed copies are the surviving copies, because it's not easy for a simple algorithm to find them.

When we ask ourselves why so many people are rude enough to post unattributed copies, perhaps we should remember this lesson. It's not necessarily that people don't understand attribution. Maybe they understand it all too well, after years of watching their favorite videos disappear overnight from YouTube. Perhaps the lay public has learned that clear, unambiguous metadata is what you attach to something when you want lawyers to come and take it away.

Attribution is not linking. Attribution is giving proper credit to the artist who created the work. A link back to a homepage is a courtesy typically given today when someone gives credit.

On a site like FJ, when the correct attribution is missing it essentially means that the user submitting it is taking credit for someone else's work, i.e. plagiarism (since the premise is to submit your original work).

Also, from the update it looks like the "extreme irony" you mention is actually that the copies that attributed the comic to "The Oatmeal" now attribute it to "The Fag." So they are still there! You can go review back issues all you want, just now the artist doesn't even get credit for those.

> the unattributed copies are the surviving copies, because > it's not easy for a simple algorithm to find them.

Pie in the sky idea: Someone

like google, who indexes everything, would conceivably be able to work out 'original' content vs 'copies', and do something: Offer original link in search results, or notify author of copies, etc.

Management didn't "misinterpret" anything. Management changed all items that said "The Oatmeal" to "the fag".

Your comments assume a lack of malice where malice is clearly evident. ;)

Not only malice, but a kindergarten level of maturity. Overall, it's stupidity (on FJ) because their attitude is hurting them in particular.

"Links suck."

I hope the irony of posting this on a web site that mostly links to other sites is not lost on anyone.

All forms of communication entail compromises - who has control, how persistent they are, how easy they are to access. If you own a book, you know it won't disappear - but you also have to move it around with you, and it's never going to get updated unless you buy a new one.

The alternative to linking is to have a hugely denormalized web where owners don't control their own content, have no way to update it and little incentive to publish it. (I believe we called those "CD ROMs" back in the day.) Yes, some web sites disappear if there is so little interest in their content that it's not worth maintaining them. But it's still better than books, where if interest was limited, it probably never got published in the first place.

The irony is certainly not lost on me.

I don't think the CD-ROM metaphor is useful. CD-ROMs are dead as a medium. Arguing against them is a straw man. It's not going to be 1990 again no matter how much anyone might wish it.

The actual modern alternative to links is: Copying everything. Just cache it all. Every time you follow a link, you copy whatever you read or view at the other end and store it forever. Keeping the link as well is fine -- it's very useful metadata -- but what you really want is the content, and you'll keep that forever. Lend it to your friends by bumping iPhones with them, or something.

This is astonishingly practical:

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/05/shaping_...

I already own the storage devices that would hold every written word I have ever read or will ever read in my life. [1] Within another decade or two I'll be able to buy a storage device that would hold a video stream of everything I'll ever see.

And once we all start archiving everything in our pockets we will almost certainly end up with a "hugely denormalized" system. I like that. We call that "individuality". I don't really want to live in a hive mind. I like my mind, and I don't always like other people's minds. It's an advantage to have a mind of your own. How else would I be able to conduct whimsical flights of fancy like this one?

---

[1] Let's see:

Claimed world record for speed reading: Anne Jones with 4,700 words per minute with 67% comprehension.

average length of an English word: about 5 letters. Five bytes.

24 hours of reading at 4700 wpm: 1.9 GB, uncompressed; one year of reading, no sleep: 691 GB; one hundred years of reading 12 hours per day at maximum speed: 34TB; compression ratio of roughly 7 to 1 (see http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/text.php): 4.9TB.

I've got that sitting on the desk in front of me.

I'm not sure where it falls into the whole debate, but there's always the Wayback Machine at archive.org. It doesn't have everything, but it does have this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20090502231940/http://www.freshma...

http://web.archive.org/web/20090430053741/http://www.freshma...

True, links suck, but there are more options than just "search crappy joke sites for ripped-off illegal copies".

Thanks for taking the trouble to look that up! Archive.org is indeed awesome.

And I think I can make archive.org fit into the pocket universe of my rant quite easily: Archive.org doesn't suck because it makes copies. It copies everything, along with the links. It's the content that makes it great. The links are just metadata, which is fine as far as it goes, so long as it continues to lead to the actual data which is what I want.

There are organizations who simply publish their stuff directly to archive.org. This is perhaps unstylish but it strikes me as eminently sensible. It's going to end up there anyway, or it's probably going to be lost to history, so why not cut out the middleman?

It would be interesting if Google came out with an Adsense for Content policy which said "We won't pay share advertising revenue on sites which host duplicated or scraped content."

That would put a huge dent in this sort of thing.

It would, and I think their lack of action in this area makes it clear that google must not want to combat duplicate/scraped content. It's in their best interest (short-term, I don't know if it will be long term) to let people do whatever unsavory stuff they want to, as long as it helps sell ads.

I remember noticing on Google's Q4 2010 earnings report that the revenue they got from Adsense for Content happened to be almost exactly the same amount of 'free cash' flow they had that quarter. So clearly its not something they would be interested in jeopardizing.

I think the problem is it would be really hard for the Google web spiders to tell which is the real content and which the copy without human interaction.

I don't know about that. for one-offs yes, but if you noticed serial content appearing on sites a, b, c, and d, then you can just poll them as a set periodically until you see which sites consistently originates it.

Why not take the oldest as the original and leave a little form for authors to tell google when they move their content?

Because you don't know which one is the oldest, but which was the first retrieved by the spider.

Also, I can return whatever I want in the http header.

No, it would not be hard. As someone who operates the backend of a web search company[1] I can tell you that if you crawl a site you can tell when the original went up and when the copies went up. At Blekko, we let you go an view it.[2] Now if you add to that the understanding that Google has to index your page in order to serve page relevant content (no sense putting ads for nipple piercing on a Christian advocacy site for example), they know they are serving an advertisement on duplicated content. (where 'know' here is defined to be they have all the data they need, at the time of serving up the ad, to algorithmically identify duplicate content.) When I worked there I got a pretty thorough look at how that part of the business worked.

They could flag the account and they could cut them off (its in their terms of service they can cut you off for any reason, and have done so to people in the past) but they don't. Given recent updates in their search ranking [3] they clearly can "identify" sites where this check would be implemented, but they choose not to. I speculate they don't for the same reason Apple doesn't look too hard or deeply at the working conditions at FoxConn, willfull blindness is a wonderful thing.

[1] I run operations at http://blekko.com

[2] http://blekko.com/ws/http:%2F%2Ftheoatmeal.com%2F+/domaindup...

[3] http://jeffmills.com/2011/01/29/duplicate-content-is-now-a-p...

OT: Trying to close jeffmills.com resulted in some annoying results.

How do you know which is the oldest content? Are you polling web pages often enough that your spider can tell the time difference between the real content and the seconds old RSS scraped copy?

Just kidding, Blekko is great, althought I'm more of a DDG and Google user.

Sites can feed new content to Googlebot before publishing to a broader audience. This is commonly done in Google News... you will sometimes click on a link to an article that claims to be not yet published. It is annoying usually, but helpful in this case.

Sigh, I can't edit it, but yes the jeffmills pop underish thing is really annoying. Skip [3] and refer to this article from SearchEngineLand on the impact of their duplicate content detection:

http://searchengineland.com/your-sites-traffic-has-plummeted...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2541853

This seems to be about exactly this problem.

That would put an end to a /lot/ of sites.

good.

Doubt it will ever happen, but I'd love to see the big G banhammer sites that do nothing but aggregate other peoples work. Throw them in the same pile as guys running "free" proxy servers that inject adsense.

1) You can report stolen content here:

http://www.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=ts.cs&t...

2) You can report the policy violation here:

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contac...

(including copyrighted content)

3) You can report copyright infringement here:

http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=lr...

That'd be kind of hypocritical on their part. Google makes more advertising revenue off duplicated or scraped content than anyone. Just look at YouTube or Google News.

Google News links back to the original source and only duplicates the title, subtitle and a few words of the first paragraph.

If he just wants attribution why doesn't he become a member of funnyjunk and post his own stuff himself WITH attribution? As he owns the content he can beat the others to it. I appreciate its far from a perfect solution but perhaps one with less conflict.

That's what I was thinking. He could even have FJ host it for him. win-win.

Except for that part where FJ makes money off of him.

  > why doesn't he become a member of funnyjunk and post his own stuff

Not agreeing with his current plan, but keeping up with all the new sites that do this would probably be more work than trying to attack them.

  > I know that if FunnyJunk disappeared, 50 other clones would pop up to take its place overnight..

Then there's a startup idea? One that maintains your content across a bunch of sites?

Actually, I thought of a site that scanned FJ and similar, copied the content, scanned services like Google and TinEye for the original content and then rehosted it all with attribution to the original source (and not FJ et al).

The effort required to filter out duplicates, locate correct attribution and links to the site holding the original content could be crowdsourced. Give users points of reputation for updating content with correct attribution and links, or adding something in the first place with the same or for adding genuinely original content, take away point when "original" content gets found as copied (this could be applied instantly if a user uploads something that is detected as a duplicate of an item already listed with correct attribution), and so forth.

Some meta-moderation (like slashdot) might be needed though, as well as a conflict resolution process that would need human intervention at some point, and some effort would need to go into creating and maintaining good relationships with the original content creators, so for from a complete walk in the park to do properly. Part of the "sell" to the original author like The Oatmeal could be providing a list of places where the same content is found with no attribution and back-links, keeping this site free of "bad" ads (adult and/or disturbing content, pop-ups/unders, irritating flash, or just too much advertising) and showing only thumbnails/segments with links to the full content on their site if they prefer.

If it wasn't for the fact I once again completely failed to win the lottery this week so still have to work to pay the mortgage, I'd be tempted to give such a project a go...

My argument is more that attacking the sites directly doesn't necessarily herald results nor positive PR. Joining them and posting would herald a form of result (if attribution is your only aim). The number of sites is an issue with either choice of action.

>(if attribution is your only aim)

There is a difference between the minimum you tolerate and what you want to actively participate in. You're just suggesting that The Oatmeal drag himself down to their level.

Why should he work to make funnyjunk money and simultaneously make himself harder to find for his fans?

And what does he do about the 50 other content copiers.

Personally I think that the funnyjunk admin has demonstrated himself to be a big enough jerk that he deserves to be sued.

It really is time for copyright reform. It's stupid that a site like this (or like the YouTube of old) is essentially untouchable (under the DMCA) despite not even trying to prevent people from uploading copyrighted material; it's also stupid that some random pirate can get ordered to pay millions of dollars. Maybe a standard penalty of ~$10/infringement (scaled by cost of original), with minimal hassle, would be the way to go.

And, while we're legislating copyright reform, let's throw in a requirement to store the hashes (or other identifying features) of any content that has a DMCA filed against it and check all new content against that list of hashes to prevent infringing content from being uploaded again.

Of course, then there's the problem of people using fake DMCAs to get content removed (which does happen). Allowing profit for that would be a horrible idea, especially on a scale low enough that it would be cheaper to pay than to verify that the person who filed the DMCA does indeed own the copyright.

Wouldn't a cropped image have different hash then the original. Cropping an extra or one less pixel line changes the hash again.

Yeah. Other identifying features, then - I'm sure that someone has come up with a way to identify images which ignores such basic changes to them, especially considering what TinEye does.

Im all for content aggregation(I mean look at the site we are all using here :P) but attribution is the key, and really it would seem that linking to the content generators would really help both parties out. Im not sure why they wouldnt want to do so?

Because then you could bypass them for each subsequent The Oatmeal comic by just going to The Oatmeal.

I'm wondering why someone hasn't done a tineye-dmca-sending mashup to help control these issues..

An example search from tineye of oatmeal images (almost two pages worth): http://www.tineye.com/search/657460f93292f13484a028f4828b838...

The TinEye search didn't succeed in capturing FunnyJunk. Assuming The Oatmeal's artwork is still up on FunnyJunk, this implementation wouldn't work, but it's a clever idea.

But Hacker News is not coping the content, it is linking. You need to go to the creator's site to actually read the article. This example is if HN was coping the whole article and removing all author / source names and links.

That's pretty much what viewtext.org does on my Android HN app.

You remove the author attributions and where it came from?

No.

He flat out states he won't sue, which means funnyjunk will keep the content up. If he wants it to stop he needs to bare his teeth a little.

I really does seem like the admin of FunnyJunk is doing everything possibly (albeit unintentionally) to goad Inman into suing the site. He's complying in the most asinine ways (for example, removing all "The Oatmeal" comics... but only the ones with attribution).

He didn't remove them. He did a search and replace to rename any attributions of "The Oatmeal" to "the fag".

Pleasant individual.

What an a-wipe. I wish I was an attorney so I could offer Matthew my services pro bono.

But IANAL, I'm a hacker, so I guess I'll just launch a DDoS attack.

(I'm kidding. I write in PHP so I barely know how to turn on a computer; DDoS is way over my head).

There are ready-made scripts for that, like slowloris.

I'd be surprised if he couldn't find an attorney to take it on contingency. The site's been around for a decade and scores OK on traffic rank; Ben Huh was able to get ~$30m for the cheezburger/lolcats operation so it's probably worth something...and that would be discoverable.

Amusingly enough, funnyjunk.com has a very assertive list of terms and conditions, and looks ready to stoutly defend its own brand against infringement.

Your self-effacing "PHP programmer" comment surprised me and made me chuckle. Thank you for that!

My reaction as well. I find myself in the unfamiliar situation of wishing I could help. And all I can think to do is upvote every comment on this page that mentions the f__ search-replace. That last bit is the most poignant part of the story. The operators of that site should go to hell (even though I don't believe in it).

The more interesting question is why doesn't one side, or the other, use a tool like http://tineye.com to deal with identifying the images?

There are a ton of images that Tineye still doesn't reach. I tried his latest comic, for example, and got zero results (http://www.tineye.com/search/70c1fd774b0bf7bdb500c19e59a98e6...). I doubt his comic isn't hosted other places on the internet!

FunnyJunk's been handed just about enough rope now I do believe

What a pity this has got so personal. They could really help each other.

Why doesn't Oatmeal could just upload his own (fully attributed) work to FunnyJunk himself? It's clear they have an enthusiastic audience and he would like the exposure. If he doesn't then somebody else will take credit for it.

FunnyJunk should have a mechanism that encourages voting up of original / properly attributed content and downvotes copies - that would benefit their users too.

And...Mission accomplished. The best PR the Oatmeal, (and FJ, I suppose) could want. I'll hope for his sake he can keep the feud going through 2012.

I was expecting to read about the owners of each site getting personal, but it's just their respective users offending each other.

Read the update.

The oatmeal has been extremely tame and polite in his response. It's funny how an anonymous crowd can make it seem as if he was in some way attacking or offending them. Here's the story:

http://theoatmeal.com/blog/funnyjunk

http://theoatmeal.com/blog/funnyjunk2

http://s3.amazonaws.com/theoatmeal-img/blog/fj_letter.jpg

Personally, i 'd be much more furious about it.

Oatmeal should sue. It's just not that complex to build image similarity algorithms that are robust to minor changes like photoshopping the link back to the outmeal's site out or resolution changes or image degradation from compression. At this point there's no real reason for FunnyJunk not to be permanently banning oatmeal's images from being displayed on their site after the first dmca except they don't want to and it makes them money not to do so.

Hell, I can build that for under $30K. Email in the profile.

Mostly, I'm peeved that the oatmeal's stuff has been reposted somewhere called "funnyjunk".

The oatmeal is not funny.

I down-modded this comment, but since the user probably made it in good-faith I'm going to explain why.

This would be a good comment on reddit - short, opinionated and easy for people who share the sentiment to upvote to show their agreement.

However, it doesn't add anything to the discussion. It's not insightful or relevant, it just adds noise to the discussion. The community here generally tends to try to keep the discussion more thoughtful with less short, funny quips, and following that ideal this comment does not belong.

For my own sanity i'm going to assume that you are joking and that you are not this elitist or rude usually.

> This would be a good comment on reddit

No, actually it would be a shitty comment on reddit too. Sadly, it is the kind of comment that is now tolerated in some of the bigger subreddits.

I don't know why you would expect more than shitty comments in response to GiantBatFart's shitty content and reddit spamming. GIGO

What I would do: Raise the stakes by putting a CC BY license (or CC BY-NC) on the comics. That way he can clearly spell out the rights associated with the works but require attribution (and retain commercial rights if desired). Then when they start appearing on other sites, all he needs to ask for is attribution and the larger copyright issue goes away.

But his problem right now is that he's not getting attribution while asking for it. Even if he did put it under a CC license, if his content is being reposted with the license and attribution stripped out, and the other party isn't playing nice when being asked nicely, then he's forced into the same situation as he is now, except with a stronger case if he attempts to sue (which he doesn't want to do anyways).

See my comment above. Applying the CC BY license would add legal certainty that attribution is the ONLY thing needed for compliance. He could say, "look I've proven I want you to be able to distribute it with very minimal barriers. please comply with my attribution requirement."

> Raise the stakes by putting a CC BY license (or CC BY-NC) on the comics.

This lowers the stakes. His work is automatically under copyright, and FunnyJunk has zero rights (outside of exceptions like fair use, which clearly isn't the case here) to the content by default.

By raising the stakes, I mean it lowers the things FJ needs to do in order to comply. He could say, look I've ALREADY licensed it for you to use and all you need to to is attribute.

Why should he make it easier for FJ?

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