Wikipedia reveals Google 'forgotten' search links
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Reminds me of Inspector Clouseau's encounter with an organ grinder.
"I am a musician and the monkey is a businessman. He doesn't tell me what to play, and I don't tell him what to do with his money."
But, assuming for purposes of argument, that something neither a person nor a legal entity can somehow copyright a photo, I'm willing to bet that said monkey didn't release that photo under an appropriate license for Wikimedia to use. So if the monkey does own the copyright, Wikimedia still doesn't have the right to use it.
(Perhaps it's also worth noting that the monkeys weren't "taking selfies" per se; they were simply fiddling with the camera and noticed that pressing a button made a sound.)
It's really a fascinating corner case. On the one hand, I agree that the photo almost has to be considered to be in the public domain. On the other hand, the photographer did exercise effort and choice in retrieving his camera, finding the one (hilariously adorable) image in the several that the monkeys inadvertently took, and making it available as a photograph. (Not to mention cropping and rotating the raw photo to properly frame the monkey. But one could ignore that by focusing on the original image, which isn't shown in the article but is floating around the web.)
I suspect that if this exact situation had happened forty years, back when photos still had to be chemically developed, nobody would think for a second that the photographer didn't have full copyright ownership. He may not have exercised intent, but without his efforts there would be no photograph. It's only now, when the process of turning a camera's image into a viewable artifact has become relatively transparent, that it becomes less clear what the human photographer has contributed.
However, how is that really different if--in this case--the photographer had deliberately given a bunch of monkeys cameras that they could fool around with and take pictures of each other or whatnot? In both cases, you're essentially creating the opportunity for autonomous entities to take photos under only somewhat understood conditions. And how different is that really from this case?
Levels of abstraction and indirection in the creative process. Do you draw a line somewhere?
(Mind you, in this case, IMO there's a pretty clear presumption that the human photographer owns the copyright and Wikimedia is playing with fiddly legalisms that aren't appropriate in this context.)
"The term "authorship" implies that, for a work to be copyrightable, it must owe its origin to a human being. Materials produced solely by nature, by plants, or by animals are not copyrightable."
Was the photo really produced "solely" by the animal? No. You couldn't exactly say that a monkey with a camera lives in a natural environment.
The real talent here was preparing the camera for primate use, giving the camera to the monkey, somehow getting it back, and developing the photo. The work absolutely owes its origin to a human being. This is an unambiguous case: the man owns the copyright.
Laws aren't generally written in some context-agnostic way, like a philosophy class works out after a bull session. Its lawyers writing about what's at issue at the time.
With an aside that if it's not public domain, the Indonesian government is actually the most likely copyright holder
They also put a poll there for people to vote on who owns the copyright and the monkey is currently leading, but it's close.
The photograph example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tom_Carstairs_In_Concert.j... is odd. The photographer took the picture, and has released it to the public domain. There is clearly confusion between photographers and venues / bands about what the laws actually are, and what reasonable behaviour is. I'd be interested to know why the musician wants this very low quality photo taken down?
Here's evidence of confusion over legal status of photographs: http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2014/04/24/cant-photographers...
streisand.com maybe?
http://www.wipo.int/treaties/en/ip/rome/summary_rome.html
wikimedia itself observes that shoting without a permit may put you in breach of a contract you signed when you purchased the ticket, as I alluded to above:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyright_rules_by...
...which is why publishers won't buy photographs without a signed release, such as this one:
Dear fellow web developers, please stop overriding essential browser functionality like scrolling, clicking on external links, right clicks and touch events. Especially on a web page with static content. Trust me, it will break.
I wonder, are Google doing this to make the 'forgotten' content "relevant" again, because of recent news articles covering the move. Then they can start linking to it again?
Then all these links could be listed in a website. Maybe the simple fact that each "forgotten" link is automatically listed there will prevent people from using this right to be forgotten, and make the law obsolete.
[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Notices_received_from_s...
your page
Even a great firewall of Europe would not make this kind of censorship work.
The most annoying thing is, that when you type google.com (instead of google.de for example) you still get the localized version. I don't keep Google cookies for long, so http://www.google.com/ncr is in my muscle memory.
O wait, corporations using their legal leverage to remove content is perfectly ok.
https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Category:DMCA
I wouldn't assume that the Foundation or the Wikipedia community would think that the existence of the DMCA safe harbor is a good idea or that it's OK that people invoke it against Wikipedia. Certainly the Foundation is very actively involved in pushing back against takedowns; notice that that page "does not include the numerous requests that were found to be invalid or otherwise inappropriate where no content was removed" -- presumably through the hard work of Foundation lawyers resisting those takedowns.
Wikimedia is the only web 2.0 site that gives a hoot about copyright.
It's not exactly pointless. After all, the original websites are still up and running, it's just more difficult to find this content with a search engine. Having an obscure list of links somewhere isn't going to make the information that much more dangerous.