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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

"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.

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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.

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