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Comment by camillomiller | Hacker News Reader

I do not agree. These are photos posted publicly on Instagram or Facebook. Anyone could see them. This website just aggregates them, but there's technically a live link to these pictures. And no, the fact that someone uploads them to a service whose ToS they have accepted makes no difference. You're posting something publicly? To me that's explicit consent that you want people to see them. If those pics were behind even the slightest wall (like a private account) or taken from private messages of course that would be different.

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>You're posting something publicly? To me that's explicit consent that you want people to see them.

To see them where I posted them. Pictures are an intellectual property of the author, if a person wants other people to spread them, he/she needs to explicitly set the allowing license. Copyright, fair use and such is a hot and nuanced topic, but the bottom line here is that personal pictures getting shared is not what most people expect to happen, understandably so.

> Pictures are an intellectual property of the author, if a person wants other people to spread them, he/she needs to explicitly set the allowing license.

It's more complicated than that. What actions require a license? Nobody needs a license to create a hyperlink. The concept of a "link license" was a big subject of debate in the 1990s, but after much hand-wringing and heated discussion, we converged on a permissionless model for hyperlinking on the web. I think everyone here understands the high value of frictionless linking.

Now let's suppose for the sake of argument (and without loss of generality) that this foot fetish site were just a list of hyperlinks to publicly available foot pictures in their original context. I suspect the author of the article (and a lot of other people) would still be squicked out by the foot-fetishist link-aggregator site. But what could be done about it? Permissioneless linking is a huge boon for the web and humanity. Should we add friction to linking just because foot fetish sites exist?

Okay --- what if it's not linking, but actual photo embedding? Still, we'd need to examine the costs and benefits. Embedding public content in another context is great for commentary, synthesis, and other creative transformations. People love to showcase hard work and beauty. Should we add friction to photo embeds everywhere just because some squicky foot fetishists use embeds to aggregate images? Again, it doesn't seem worth it.

Ultimately, we have to learn to let things go. There will always be people in the world who use public things in a "wrong" way: a politician you don't like may use your favorite song in a campaign; a company might use your open source library to make a product you'd prefer not to exist; or public property records might let speculators arbitrage prices in a way that seems unfair. But whenever we're tempted to Do Something about people using the public thing in the wrong way, we have to think "is this Doing Something going to be net positive? What about the value of the commons itself? Am I willing to destroy that just to Do Something about this one thing?" Most of the time, the answer is "no".

> Let's suppose for the sake of argument (and without loss of generality) that this foot fetish site were just a list of hyperlinks to publicly available foot pictures in their original context.

Let's not suppose this. This site does not do this. It doesn't show photos in their original context (e.g. Instagram), nor does it even display the 'original' image (meaning IG hosted image) out of context - which would also be wrong.

It's primary use case is to literally re-host unlicensed images out of their original context without permission (even though it's 'rules' state otherwise).

> Now let's suppose for the sake of argument (and without loss of generality) that this foot fetish site were just a list of hyperlinks

That's a huge loss of generality.

> That's a huge loss of generality.

I don't think so. The author's core discomfort (to which I'm sympathetic) seems to not be about the image hosting, but about people enjoying pictures of her feet in a way that makes her uncomfortable. I don't think that wikiFeet moving to a hyperlink model would alleviate the author's discomfort with wikiFeet existing, so we need to talk about that core discomfort, not about the specific mechanics of image sharing.

Of course it would alleviate discomfort - it would allow the author to retain full control of their image. They could, with a couple of taps, delete the image and prevent its propagation on a fetish website.

Or, up until recently, block based on referrer; or block based on IP address (eg limit it to one ISP that all their family use).

> That's a huge loss of generality.

Not really. It's just a couple of innocent javascript lines away (on a browser extension) to the site with visible photos.

Well no, in the article the author mentions pictures posted to their Instagram story. These images are only publicly visible for 24 hours, and I imagine Instagram also does some manouevering to stop them being easily linkable.

Also the obvious massive difference that such a model would allow the original poster to delete the image.

>Now let's suppose for the sake of argument (and without loss of generality) that this foot fetish site were just a list of hyperlinks to publicly available foot pictures in their original context. I suspect the author of the article (and a lot of other people) would still be squicked out by the foot-fetishist link-aggregator site

Yep, what furyg3 said. I always think about cases like that from a creator perspective. If I'm a painter, I probably sell my work, so it's in my interest that every usage lead back to a canonical place where I expect to make sales/build following/communicate with fans. So reposting a picture and posting a link to a said place I chose are absolutely different things.

There's always fair use, which should cover things like education, citation, etc. That's a different topic.

And don't get me wrong, copyright system is broken and rotten to the core, but some of the concerns on which it builds are perfectly reasonable.

> There's always fair use, which should cover things like education, citation, etc. That's a different topic.

This is the weird part. If aliens showed up and started viewing the site in question, they'd probably mistake it for reference material, some kind of critical encyclopedia.

I agree with you, in theory. But the real world is messy. There are only two choices here - don’t participate in social media. Or if you do, don’t expect everyone to respect your privacy. It sucks, but that’s the world we live in.

Parents post pics of their babies all the time. It would be easy to make wikibabies, like wikifeet. Who is at fault in this case? At least this lady is an adult and posted her own pics.

Real world is messy...

> intellectual property of the author

Don't you assign this copyright to the social media service? Legally, if your Facebook photos get posted to another site, I think Facebook gets to complain, but not you - you signed those photos away, for Facebook to use for any purpose they like (even including a foot fetish website).

I don't disagree with you on what people expect, but it's worth reiterating that reality does not match their expectations. Facebook owns your Facebook photos, not you.

> Don't you assign this copyright to the social media service?

Most of the terms-of-service agreements I've seen state that the creator retains the copyright, but grants the site a non-exclusive license to display the content.

Assigning the copyright would be problematic. For example, a professional photographer who posted their photo to Facebook would lose their right to sell the photo or post it to another site if they didn't retain the copyright.

>Pictures are an intellectual property of the author

This just isn't true in practice on the internet. It never has been, and it never will be.

Plenty of argument about copyright law on my siblings, but if you've ever been anywhere near a community that posts porn for each other, you will know that copyright law is the last thing they care about. Consent a close second.

When I upload photos to Instagram, I am not explicitly consenting to my photos being used for people's fetishes, even privately. I can't stop people from doing what they want privately with my public photos, and I know that, but I still find it morally wrong and disturbing. But I'm not sure that it's legal to republish someone's public Instagram photos on another website either. I'm no legal expert, but I believe it's still a copyright violation to copy someone's Instagram photos and use them as content in your own creations.

But legal or not, I think it ought to be considered common decency not to post photos of someone on a fetish website without asking for their explicit permission to do so.

Totally, but its such a grey line. If you posted some pictures and certain groups use it as their "personal materials" privately (without sharing), I'm not sure how we can stop that

What if it was just text links to the instagram accounts? What if it was iframes?

Again, legal, but not a nice or decent thing to do.

So, OK basically? Indecent things are allowed. You can criticize them, of course, but they are still allowed.

People have the right to write non-nice things about you (as long as it's not libel). They can write that they don't like you for whatever reason, or they can write that they get off thinking about you. There's freedom of expression to do stupid, non-nice and indecent shit.

No one is saying it's not legal. Most people here understand what libel is and what freedom of expression is.

The point is that it's still a bit weird, creepy and unpleasant. This man can continue doing it, and I can continue thinking he's quite damaged.

> The point is that it's still a bit weird, creepy and unpleasant. This man can continue doing it, and I can continue thinking he's quite damaged.

That's alright. I'm pretty much indifferent to the whole thing, but I still enjoyed the interview. Notice that the man may be "quite damaged", but still the first thing that he does is ask the interviewer if she was offended by her public photos being there, and offering to delete them.

Enjoying the interview is utterly orthogonal to the point you originally made.

> "ask the interviewer if she was offended by her public photos being there, and offering to delete them."

You may see that as being polite, I see that as just another creepy power play, where he's now implying he has control over her pics.

He didn’t offer to delete them. He offered “not to do it again.” Which means she is stuck.

The fact that the asking bit comes after the pictures have already been repurposed is the entire point. If he would have asked beforehand and gotten permission no one would care.

What is that expression? Something like “if your best defence of something is that it isn’t against the law you have already lost”

If that is the case, it means that the people who attack you have already lost as well.

what?

I think this would be better because the person who owns the photograph still has control. They can delete the original post and have it disappear from wikifeet. Consent is best. The next best thing is control. A screenshot is neither.

1. bet iframing instagram content will lead to iframe busting and maybe site being cease and desisted.

2. text links sure, because it has a whole other behavior and then if someone wants they can take the picture down, make it private or whatever. same thing for iframe but I bet it won't happen there because instagram itself will shut down the iframing reeaaalll quick.

so in short, yes, if it was a bunch of other things that have some similarities but are not exactly the same it would probably be ok with people.

At least in EU - the platform is responsible for the content their users upload.

So based on that posting personal information like address, name, age etc. Without consent can put this site out of business after few fines.

> When I upload photos to Instagram, I am not explicitly consenting to my photos being used for people's fetishes, even privately.

Well, they're in facebooks domain now, so you really don't have a tell in whats okay and what not after you uploaded them[0].

> but I still find it morally wrong and disturbing.

that's okay of course, but it obviously won't stop anyone from doing anything they deem okay and acceptable. How are the supposed to know what you find morally wrong and disturbing, anyways? For all they know those pictures are public and you want to present yourself to the world.

> legal to republish someone's public Instagram photos

According to the link that's instagrams business, not yours. If facebook doesn't care then there's not much you can do about it since you don't have royalities over the pictures in which you appear.

> But legal or not, I think it ought to be considered common decency not to post photos of someone on a fetish website without asking for their explicit permission to do so

Some people would consider "not poisoning the public water supplies forever" common human decency, but that doesn't stop multiple actors from doing so. "human decency" is not worth a penny on the internet, which is in my opinion common knowledge that we try to teach kids in primary school here. It does not matter what you think, since it's out of your hands you made your data public.

[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2249952/Face...

> When I upload photos to Instagram, I am not explicitly consenting to my photos being used for people's fetishes, even privately.

I agree with you, morally. However, there is no hope of controlling what someone thinks when looking at your uploaded photos.

Strongly disagree, both from a legal and moral point of view. Posting something publicly absolutely does not imply that anyone is free to do whatever they want with it.

Case in point: the existence of copyright licenses.

> This website just aggregates them, but there's technically a live link to these pictures.

What you see as a technicality is actually a big difference. No one on wikiFeet would have seen the pictures of the interviewer if someone hadn't posted it.

Posting something is not explicit consent to do whatever with it. Would you say the same if these pictures were appearing on a shirt for example? Or if they were used in a movie, or in a newspaper article?

Is this much different from what Pinterest and Google images do?

Sorry, but no. First there is the question of licensing. The users are posting (and site is hosting) images that they (presumably) don't have licenses to use or permission to post to that site. A photograph being publicly available does not put it in the public domain, and certainly doesn't mean that a site is licensed to run ads on it (though even without financial gain it would still not be legally ok).

The very first site rule is "uploading copyrighted photos is forbidden unless you have permission from the copyright owner" which I presume is supposed to shield the site owner from this legal issue, but I think we can all agree that the vast majority of photos on this site do not meet this requirement.

And secondly there is the question of context. I may give my employer permission to put my photo on their "About Us" page, but I would not be amused if the later transferred it to a "Consultants who we will never work with again" page.

I don't think the original poster is talking about licensing. It is an issue, but not unique to sites like this and not relevant to the parent's concerns. What if this site just linked to the photos instead? I think that would still make people uncomfortable and is not illegal.

Context is the problem and it is unclear. In most countries you can't really prevent people from saying things about you. If someone wants to post online that they like you feet they are allowed to do so. I agree that when this is distilled to a database of people and their feet it feels a bit weird, but I struggle to find a point where it becomes not ok.

I don't get why this is so tough. It's ok for someone to talk about how they like your feet... until the point where they start posting images of your feet without 'permission' (permission in the legal sense refers to licensing).

The law is quite clear on this. You're granting Instagram a license to display the image, so they are allowed to do that. Other websites aren't, unless you grant them a license, too.

So the foot fetish website is infringing copyright. And the author of the image can sue them for damages.

They can also ask ISPs to blacklist the page if they don't comply.

Kind of all the stuff that the MPAA does when they find a movie rip on someone's server, the photographer could do here, too.

What you say is right, but is about copyright, not consent. No social media collect the consent of people in the actual pictures when the person in the picture is not the one who is posting it.

What damages? Were you selling those feet pics?

I think there are two dimensions. The personal consent one, where I do not agree with your opinion, but that's okay.

On the other hand, copying a picture to another website can also be a copyright infringement.

How would you feel if you walked by a porn shop, and in the window you saw a magazine cover with a photo of you taken from your public social media accounts printed on the cover with the headline, "Hottest people on Instagram to get off to in 2021". Some people may be flattered by that, but many, many people would feel that it was a violation and an assault to their dignity.

If you look at this hypothetical case without prejudice, the only difference with your photo appearing on a news site, in someone's post on social media, as a picture on some forum or just being uploaded to image sharing service is for-profit nature of the usage.

After checking the site I can tell it has quite a few tracking cookies enabled - so for sure it is profitting from the illegal content.

Ps. This also doesnt cover copyright claims.

No, this has nothing to do with profit at all.

No. Even nonprofits (see Wikipedia) have to follow strict rules about licensing images or face legal consequences. They also do a good job of policing this on-upload, something that a site like Wikifeed does not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Image_use_policy

Exactly, this is what I'm talking about! To be clear, I'm not saying the case in question is fine. If you condemn usage of your image in porn magazines, you should condemn it in other situations as well, as long as the for-profit nature of the usage is not the only thing that bothers you.

I don’t know if that’s illegal or not but it really should be

It does not work that way, not even legally. Just because a picture is online does not mean anyone is free to distribute it further.

The legality of it depends on copyright and on TOS of places where it was uploaded originally.

A lot of the responses to this comments are focusing on licensing which I think is missing the interesting point of this thought. I agree that many of the images here are likely copyright infringement but this is not a new, unique or interesting problem.

Imagine that instead of rehosting the images they just linked to the original source on social media. This is now legal, but is it "right" to aggregate images under this context?

Alright then, for the sake of argument then how would you feel if there was a website named "wikipedo" where people take the normal photos of children posted on social media and aggregate them thusly with a vastly different intent?

Getting off to feet is generally considered weird but okay, getting off to children is not. Your comparison is not applicable.

That would be confusing, what would we call enthusiastic wikipedia users then?

Getting off to feet is part of broader adult sexual freedom. You can’t compare it pedophilia, c’mon.

Let’s say you have a LinkedIn profile picture, and someone posts that picture to a site about people who look like they might be pedophiles. Would you be ok with that?

That is very different. That is implying that you may be a pedofile which is unpleasant whether or not there is a photo and whether or no anyone else even sees it.

This is saying that you have nice feet, which may make some people uncomfortable, and isn't necessary "right", but is completely different.

It's unwanted attention on the internet. I think it's fine to make fun of people who look like pedopohiles (not saying you are a pedophile, that would be libel probably). Some people have a problem with it, but I don't, so what's the big deal?

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