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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
Not really. It's just a couple of innocent javascript lines away (on a browser extension) to the site with visible photos.
Also the obvious massive difference that such a model would allow the original poster to delete the image.
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.
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.