Maybe the underlying pattern simply is supporting David against Goliath?
Edit: For those who downvote me, please take the time to write a reply.
* extending beyond the life of the creator
* extending beyond the original 14 years or wherever it began
* held by non-human legal entities
* not requiring donation to Library of Congress
* not requiring some sort of property tax
* retroactively extended
and a few other issues with copyright. I've seen no more than a tiny minority objecting to copyright completely. I've observed this community supporting copyright in some form quite a bit. The GPL and other Free licenses are based in copyright, for example.
Respectfully, the red-herring of who is David and who is Goliath implies you don't understand the issues. I didn't downvote you, but I can understand why someone would. If I have a principled stand on an important issue and someone implies I blindly support the little guy -- I can see someone feeling that's what downvoting is for.
This is a perfect example of why copyright exists in the first place - the original creator wishes to be compensated for the use of work that he created recently.
The problem is when copyright is owned by someone other than the creator, owned indefinitely, used to stifle innovation, etc.
> Below is my invoice for the use of 11 images to which I own the copyright. [...] Total: £3,400
However, the Daily Mail is a major tabloid serving advertisements next to my article, including Google Adsense, to which I have filed a DMCA complaint, and thus profiting from my work. Not only that, but they edited most of my images, removing the watermark and cropping the bottom off, as well as enlarging many images such that the quality becomes poor. As an aspiring photographer, that really hurts.
Or do we want a to live in a society where everyone works for free whilst only large organisations can profit?
The sad part of this story is that the Mail are probably loving the free publicity. They'll earn way more in adsense through doing this than they'd have earned had they followed the rules (and not acted like jerks).
My opinion is that you shouldn't have to settle for the fee. You should get your fee, or the revenue earned from the article. Whichever the lower.
Aditionally there are matters of David vs Goliath and generall support for the underdog, and the fact that the editor of a major newspaper obviously knows better.
Finally it would be a mistake to think of Hacker News as a hive mind, people here have differing perspectives and opinions. Most large threads regarding consumer copyright infringement tend to have comments from both sides.
You are right, I think my real question is: is there anyone who thinks that the photographer is wrong and the Daily Mail is right? It would seem like a logical application of the principle stated in PG's Defining Property.
http://paulgraham.com/property.html, discussion http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3694672
2) Do you disagree with your own summary? If it costs you more enforcing your copyright than you make off of the benefits of its enforcement, do you not think you should rethink things?
HN is filled with entrepreneurs who, in one way or another, almost always rely on copyright. Claiming some sort of blanket "anti-copyright" sentiment is both disingenuous and insulting.
The good bits of copyright are about fairness and the idea that someone is entitled to a certain amount of respect of the intention they have in how what they have produced should be used.
This guy had put copyright watermarks on the images themselves. For profit groups in media should respect that, not out of niceness, but because that is the world they choose to inhabit and well informed photographers can make them look extremely bad and still get paid.
We can safely assume a big fat newspaper wants there to be copyright laws. In which case they should obey those laws.
The universal application of a rule -- i.e. fairness -- is probably the single most important principle of morality. One would think most normative theories of ethics, across history and culture, are centered on some form of it.
I find it a continuing source of confusion that people can't distinguish between a person who submits an item, and the author of the item being submitted.
I submitted this item. I did not take the photos.
The person who took the photos did not submit this to HackerNews.
> Please keep up the support by spreading the word, especially to large social media sites like HackerNews, Reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon and any other media outlets.
Links are like that. The person who has the link is not (necessarily) the person who wrote the article being pointed at.
In other words, you pirate work X, clearly labeled as X and being from its original creator, and give it away for free, and the HN community doesn't really seem to care.
Sell work X, relabeled as Y and claimed as your own, and the HN community dislikes this strongly. I personally find this to be a pretty reasonable approach.
Cognitive dissonance to the max, caused mostly by pg's convoluted 'Kill Hollywood' and (paraphrasing) 'software piracy is like smelling someone cooking something'. No wonder people are confused.