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Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

Imagine getting angry over someone saving an image from the public internet. How vain and stupid does one need to be, to get pissed over this?

Sometimes I feel I am the one out of touch. Or maybe we are living in a simulated (bad) parody of life?

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On 9/11 I was pitching website development at a large architect bureau in the Netherlands. As internet was pretty new for the "normies", the ceo insisted that visits to the site would cost money for the visitor so he could make back the money he spent on having it built and that all images cannot be saved (including by screenshot) in any way. We got interrupted when the first plane went into the trade center and the day ended there as it did for most people.

We got a call (guy didn't use email yet) that he talked to a few companies after us and he was having a custom Windows application (there was a company actually in NL that did not believe in the web and made website 'apps' and had a framework in Java swing to make them; you had to download the jar and sometimes pay to view the 'website' content) made which would act as his site which worked as he specified. I am guessing he sold (it was E1 per download) zero, but it is not that weird actually. I still encounter the request to make it impossible to download anything from a site at clients ceo/cfo or lawyers this day.

I worked for a price-comparison website and they wanted the data to be presented within a Java applet to prevent copy-pasting. That went nowhere and the functionality only survived in the vestigial power price comparison feature.

Internet was still new to most people in 2001, even computers were a novelty back then. So it is somewhat understandable that people had trouble understanding computers back then.

Today everyone is walking around with a mini computer in their pockets. It is less funny today than 2001, if someone doesn’t understand copying an image from the public internet

You only feel that way because only stupidity and anger is broadcast widely over all forms of media now. It’s what sells ads and clicks. Until that changes we are living in a rage world and it’s great for sales.

the person sending the dm is clearly trolling/joking. wild they wrote an article about it, but i guess the idea that people are angry gets clicks.

Prove it.

People get pissed off about downloading movies and books from the public internet. The precedent has been made.

The difference in this case being that the image was uploaded to the public Internet (IPFS), with no access controls, by the original artist (and presumably the copyright holder). Regardless of your stance on copyright, it's hard to see how anyone should be upset about someone downloading content the artist shared publicly of their own free will.

Copyright holders upload their music and videos on youtube, pictures on photo sharing sites, yet they get upset if those are used by someone else.

You could say that copying the data was not their intention, but can we say that copying was the intention of the copyright holder of the NFT data?

At most, this is only the next logical step from what we already have.

The problem is that the way the medium works is that the only way to post something for someone else to see utilizing the wildly adopted protocols (http(s)/html/etc) is to have the item downloaded and copied. The attitude is very much like if someone performed a song, and then got upset that people could remember the song in their heads ("You owe me everything you recall the tune from memory or sing it to yourself in the shower"). This is just how the brain works.

I agree, but that's no different than making songs/videos public on youtube. Pictures too, unless watermarking is used.

I'm not a fan of this, but this is where the copyright zeitgeist seems to be headed.

If you post a video publicly on YouTube then you expect that anyone can stream it. One could quibble over whether you intended for anyone to be able to save the video since the site places some minor technical obstacles in the way (plus the ToS visitors are supposed to agree to), though it's hard to argue that you weren't at least aware that it could be done easily given well-known tools like youtube-dl.

If you upload your content to IPFS there are no obstacles to downloading, and no ToS. It's like hosting the file on your own site with no restrictions, except that the system is explicitly designed such that you can't take down anything that's been published. That makes it hard to complain about people saving the content; you've basically given everyone an implied license to access and pin the files. Republishing outside of IPFS might be a problem, copyright-wise, but since anyone can get the files from IPFS directly that isn't a major issue.

> You could say that copying the data was not their intention

That seems strange since without copying, the data stored on YouTube etc. would be useless.

The issue was much more subtle and hilarious :)

In the whole digital world authors habe IP rights for digital content and have (sometimes) ability to enforce them (e.g. DMCA). Copying images without permission doesn't run afoul of IP rights but later using them commercially - does. But that is not what is interesting here.

Person we are discussing is promoting NFT as a technology to sell stuff, implying that it is also possible to transfer IP rights via NFTs (which is complete lie). Next he is social engineered (swindled) of 3 pictures which he voluntarily transfers via NFT blockchain to the scammer. And THEN he proceeds to claim that he is still the original owner (indeed he is, because no IP rights were transferred via NFT same because it is impossible), thereby completely devaluing the NFT tech he is promoting :) .

Lol and everyone is programmed to have their Karen moment at some point

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