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Comment by rytis | Hacker News Reader

> Why are you taking this picture? It’s already on the Internet!

I am taking it, so that I can use it whenever and wherever I want, without being afraid of "copyright" holders. Not ideal, but hey, such is life these days.

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Joke's on you, the Eiffel tower is itself copyrighted! :)

http://www.redbubble.com/people/christinebetts/journal/28082...

Read up for yourself:

https://www.google.com/search?q=eiffel+tower+copyrighted

Yeah lots of 'public' things are copyright, strangely. The US national arboretum - you have to pay per photo if you take pictures of the plants!

But do they enforce the copyright?

"These days"? You mean these days, when we have instant access to millions of Eiffel tower photos through a device not larger than a pocket mirror, yet life is a suffocating grind because some of those images are not licensed for redistribution.

Exactly. "These days" you have 1 million photos of Eiffel tower, most look the same, bit blurry, not ideal lighting, etc. Yet you cannot really use them, unless you pay someone some amount of money, or you write an essay attributing them (and you spend 2 days figuring out what the license actually is for that piece of "art"). Say you want to make a t-shirt with a picture of Eiffel tower, with some catchy meme underneath, and sell it. You google/bing/whatnot for "picture of Eiffel tower", download the best looking image and silk print a t-shirt. Now, in an unlikely event it catches up, and you start selling in millions, what's going to happen? There's a good chance that you'll get a mail from someone who took that crappy picture and now demands a hefty sum in royalties. Well, just to avoid that, I take the picture. I don't care that there are millions of those taken already, they are not "mine". Yes, first-world problems, but they might be quire pricey. /rantover

There are plenty of ways to find images that are properly licensed for that purpose, e.g. Creative Commons search on Flickr.

Instead, you travel to Paris to take the picture yourself :/

Nothing wrong with traveling to paris :)

Also, nice phrase "life is a suffocating grind"!

Still a terrible use of "these days" since you're implying it was better before.

Technology has, of course, solved this as well: https://www.flickr.com/search/?q=eiffel+tower&l=commderiv&ct...

Don't think so. The very first image has "Some rights reserved". If you click on that, it says "Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use." I don't want to do that. Or even if I wanted, I don't want to spend time figuring out what exactly each clause in the license means. F* that, I'll just take the damn picture myself.

You think that adding a small tag that tays, "Picture by X, license is http://whatever" is some high burden? You've transcended first-world problems and started in on the negative numbers.

No. Adding the tag is no burden. The burden is finding out what EXACTLY needs to be added.

EDIT: Sometimes it's enough to mention the author, sometimes you need to provide link to the license as well, etc, etc.

If you click the link, it tells you what's required. I stand by what I said.

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