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The city I write this in protected its name, so I am not allowed to use it
- __s 9y agoSelecting the black blotches reveals the name. Should be using FULL BLOCK. HN doesn't allow me to include it in this comment https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2588/browsertest.htm https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2588/browserte... Of course, this comment could be seen as commentary on laws against accessing insecure intended-to-be-secret data. Blame not the author, but me, for they obviously intended the name to be omitted, & I trespassed their security when I selected the text. Lock me up
- yunyu 9y agoClicking the button at the end of the article reveals the name. It's 100% intentional.
- r3bl 9y agoYes, completely intentional. The idea is that the city's name is hidden by default, but very easy to discover if you decide to do so. So you can highlight the text, click on the button at the bottom of the page, or go to the linked Wikipedia pages in the first paragraph to reveal the name of the city.
- f_allwein 9y agoSarajevo. Also, really? Hope this is a misunderstanding...
- Froyoh 9y agoLet me say it too! Sarajevo.
- lemiffe 9y agoThe name is visible on one of the images (from a Facebook screencap)
- r3bl 9y agoThank you for spotting that! I was so obsessed with the actual conversation that I have forgot to check other sources in the screenshot. I have pushed a change that makes those two occurrences censored.
- taylorexpander 9y agoIt’s Sarajevo and this blog post is about the only thing I can find on this with quick google searches, and you said it yourself that you’re not a lawyer, so I really think you’re just misunderstanding something and are making a big deal out of nothing.
- rocqua 9y agoI'd agree with you if this was only interpretation of the law. However, the city council actually took steps to contact the administrators of various Facebook pages with the request to pay for the name.
- baldfat 9y agoI think you didn't read the article. It basically the city using the same dumb line of thought as Paris copyrighting the Eiffel Tower at night. The author shows that the city even threatened a Facebook group. So yes this is a dumb ownership claim by the city.
- sowbug 9y agoRegulating speech is a very big deal, including when people or companies fabricate property rights they don't have. Most people, when confronted with strong language asserting such rights, will comply with it -- as you say, they're not lawyers, so how should they know which legalese is and isn't valid? This stifles full usage of the common good of ideas.
- oaiey 9y agoI think that such a legal paragraph is quite common. It prevents other entities to mimic official documents and pretend they represent the city. I am pretty sure, you can use the city name as location any time you want. On the other hand: There have been stranger things :) PS: Not a lawyer
- emilfihlman 9y ago>It prevents No it doesn't. In any way.
- Spoygg 9y agoYou might be misinterpreting the law. Not sure for that case, but it's pretty standard (in this part of the world) that you can't use city or state name in commercial purposes (as a part of the name of the business or a product) without entity permission. edit: also pages/domains that could be seen as representing the city can get notices about name usage. Domains, iirc, can be claimed for this reason by city. It's kinda common sense, using city name, for some people, might be seen as representing the city, so any posts made by the page might damage the city public image etc. edit 2: added note about part of the world edit 3: moving this from reply > I live in neighboring country, when you're starting a business you can't have city or state name in business name without permission. Also using domains that have city or state name included might get you in some trouble. > Probably more usual in this part of the world. Adding: since both our countries still have a lot of laws from communist era, there's all kind of crazy ideas pushed through laws.
- jimktrains2 9y agoI'm not sure what you mean by pretty standard, but it's literally the opposite of pretty standard. How many little place have the city they're in in their name? I could probably find dozens for Pittsburgh without much effort. Edit: I a actually had a company with my state's name at one point, registered in said state with no issue.
- Spoygg 9y agoI live in neighboring country, when you're starting a business you can't have city or state name in business name without permission. Also using domains that have city or state name included might get you in some trouble. Probably more usual in this part of the world.
- Libturd 9y agoSOUNDS LIKE FUCKING FREEDOM LULZ
- goialoq 9y agoDid you just assume parent's location in the world, after the OP and the parent both they strongly implied that it wasn't anywhere near Pittsburgh?
- ComputerGuru 9y agoIt seems the world has gone full circle and somehow we have ended up back in an authoritarian dystopia, this time one “we” ironically built and enforced ourselves.
- hennsen 9y agoPerfect idiocracy is coming close...
- icebraining 9y agoHow so? This seems to be plain-old legal censorship.
- ComputerGuru 9y agoCensorship is an authoritarian tool. It used to be carried out by the might of the sword and now it's enforced by the full weight of the law, hence the "legal censorship" as you put it.
- icebraining 9y agoRight, but legal censorship has been around for thousands of years. I don't see the full circle you're talking about - it's more of the same.
- rocqua 9y agoThe meat of the article comes from the fact that certain facebook pages were sent some form of 'cease and desist request' by officials of the Sarajevo city council. Later, we learn that things got resolved for these facebook pages. What if these requests were just a clever scammer, trying to get some money? That seems to make more sense to me than a city council being so obtuse as to request payment for use of its name.
- johannes1234321 9y agoOver here in Germany some city administrations won't do such things for money, but to make sure that this is not seen as an official page where false information is spread. Finding the right balance can be hard. I would assume it's the same over there, rather than actually trying to get money.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y agoWouldn’t it be simpler to ask the pages to politely put in a disclaimer saying they are not affiliated with the government rather than threatening damages or shutdown?
- matt4077 9y agoA cease & desist is a lawyer's way of "asking politely", the alternative being a lawsuit.
- user5994461 9y agoAgreed. Or by the same metrics I could make a fake website for my bank and put a one line disclaimer in the about page. That wouldn't be right.
- icebraining 9y agoAnd yet your bank doesn't need a special law regulating the use of its name. We already have laws against fraud, which cover such misleading cases. This is much more broad.
- megaman22 9y agoReminds me of the idiocy about not being able to use the name Superbowl, because it's trademarked. Leading to all kinds of businesses referring to it in roundabout terms like "the big game"
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- draw_down 9y agoYou can just name the city, you can just show the tower. You can just do things, believe it.
- 2Pacalypse- 9y agoOh man, now I'll think twice before I try to correct someone's spelling: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3yncb0/the_beauty_of_bosnia_and_herzegovina/cyexzrm/?context=1 https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/3yncb0/the_beauty_of_...
- tomca32 9y agoProbably thrice since that looks like a pun. "Jebo" means "fuck" in the local language.
- ithkuil 9y agoNot necessarily. Confusing v and b is a quite common mistake: they are next to each other on the qwerty layout and many languages (such as Spanish) don't differentiate the sound of b and v.
- phkahler 9y ago>> Legal and private entities that use the emblem and the name of the City of Sarajevo... With the word "and" in there, I'm thinking this is more about protecting the emblem. Using an emblem (not a flag) of a government entity in certain ways might be construed as conveying something to the content. In other words, putting the emblem along with the name of the city might lead people to think a web page was produced on behalf of the city. I seriously doubt using the name of the city like in the blog is a problem. I suspect in regard Sarajevo the author is deliberately making the situation sound more absurd than it really is. Having said that, I think his point regarding architectural works is valid. Publishing pictures of publicly visible objects - and buildings in particular - should not have legal hinderances.
- jhanschoo 9y agoIt would have been absurd if not for the cease and desist made to the FB page...
- jasonkostempski 9y agoI'd buy into the FUD a little more if the author had redacted the name for real instead of adding a black background color to black text. Selecting the text reveals the name. Obviously that's not going to fool a crawler.
- JonnyNova 9y agoCheckout the button at the bottom too. It uncensors the whole article.
- r3bl 9y agoAuthor here. As I have said in an other comment on this thread, the idea is that the city's name is easily discoverable. You can discover it by highlighting the text, clicking at the button at the bottom of the article, and by following the Wikipedia links in the first paragraph. I highly doubt that this decision could be upheld in the court. If they want to sue me, I'm ready to "pay for the damage caused" and face legal consequences. Casual Facebook users that are administering Facebook's pages are probably not ready to face the same consequences. And, since this is my blog, the only third party that could remove the mentions of the name without my consent is my hosting provider (arguably better protection than Facebook offers), but if they do so, I will put on a server on the Raspberry Pi and continue with the distribution.
- JepZ 9y agoSometimes you have the feeling that copyright laws are made by grown-ups who want to use the law so that the other kids don't copycat them...
- dahart 9y ago> Since I am unfamiliar with such a dumb court verdict from the US, I assume that I am free to show you the photo of the State of Liberty during the night. FWIW, in the US, all photos taken from public property are legal. Also, a photo of a building can't violate the building's copyright. Building another building that looks like it can, but taking a photo of it can't. http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm http://www.krages.com/phoright.htm
- grecy 9y agoCoke are famous for claiming copyright on photos of their bottle.
- vitorfblima 9y agoThat happens because the bottle is a trademark itself
- morcheeba 9y agoThat makes no sense - trademark and copyright are totally different things.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoA photo being legal to take doesn't necessarily mean it's legal to publish, or eg to sell.
- jrockway 9y agoSo... that picture of the Statue of Liberty is actually one of a copy in Tokyo. The bridge is the Rainbow Bridge, not one in New York. We also don't have a copy of the Eiffel Tower in New York, nor do we put the anti-collision lights on top of buildings like they do in Tokyo. https://goo.gl/maps/H9RAEx131UA2 https://goo.gl/maps/H9RAEx131UA2
- late2part 9y agoBut we'll always have Vegas..... https://www.google.com/search https://www.google.com/search? q=vegas+paris+eiffel+tower&source=lnms&tbm=isch
- skywhopper 9y agoUnrelated to the article: I really liked the picture of the Statue of Liberty in the article, but having been to Liberty Island myself, I thought it looked sort of off (there are no trees in front of the statue and no bridges behind it, and likely nowhere you could actually stand to get that particular angle and framing, without using some crazy telephoto setup). At first I thought the pyramidical skyscraper in the background was the Transamerica building in San Francisco and perhaps this was a shot of a replica Statue in the Bay area. But again, the bridge was unfamiliar and the apparent distance from the statue to the bridge and the city behind it did not fit with my recollection of San Francisco Bay geography. But after doing a little bit of poking around at where replicas of the Statue of Liberty may be found (there are lots of them!), this one appears to be on the artificial island of Odaiba in Tokyo Bay. That's Tokyo in the background and the Rainbow Bridge. (See the wikipedia page on Odaiba[0] for a similarly framed shot.) Anyway it's a great shot of the replica, the bridge, and the city of Tokyo. Credit for the photo is down at the end of the article[1], but whether the author of the piece realized what the photo was actually of or not, I'm now savoring the additional layers of context and irony the photo brings to the piece. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odaiba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odaiba [1] https://unsplash.com/photos/S9lCKQ9XS8c https://unsplash.com/photos/S9lCKQ9XS8c
- robin_reala 9y agoInterestingly, that probably means that that photo is illegitimate. Photos of sculptural entities attached to architecture are considered copyright breaches in Japan, and Odaiba is certainly not old enough to have moved into PD.
- rcdwealth 9y agoWhat is copyright breach in one country, it is not necessarily in the other one. One cannot just impose laws to other countries, that is why countries are sovereign. To impose copyright restrictions in other countries there must be either international agreement or the law in that other country that permits such limits.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoCouple of things, I'm not a lawyer but I follow IP law and have worked in related fields, this is not legal advice: The statute he cites says that a person under that law would be required to pay for _damages_ to Sarajevo for use of its name. A blog post is almost certainly not going to create any damages. Also as it's a local ordinance it probably applies only if you are in that city when you write. >I was already aware that I can’t show you the mascot of those Winter Olympics games, since doing so would be a copyright violation // He can probably _report_ on it. It's not the EU per se, most copyright goes back to the Berne convention, which leaves some areas open for national variances. Yugoslavia was signatory to that prior to the EU existing, and then there's UCC, TRIPS neither of which rely on EU in any way. Now, the Olympic Committees are known for abusing IP law, they'll sue you for even an allowed usage of mascots and word marks (ie textual trademarks). That's because most people would rather not risk going to court, and most people don't know IP law well enough to be certain they have an allowed use. >So, until the architect who designed the building dies and additional 70 years go by // As he later points out that is a misunderstanding. The building is not the issue, the light display is being considered an artistic work, it's the creator of the light display who owns the relevant copyright here. I don't know French law, but most arrangements of lights would fail at being sufficiently creative to acquire copyright. And of course there are usually exclusions for reporting, as the blogger is doing. In UK we have Fair Dealing which is extremely restrictive, I'd expect France to have something closer to the much more liberal USA Fair Use in which usually being non-commercial makes copying allowed (though the definition of commercial is nuanced, is not just selling; and being commercial isn't necessarily _not_ Fair Use). Something I don't know about is how French law would apply, assuming this guy is in Bosnia & Herzegovina, it seems their local law about not showing this "[art]work" shouldn't restrict him? Also, if he writes privately and has his work published elsewhere, eg on a USA based server, it seems like he should be protected by USA Fair Use laws!? IMO governments need to have some way to address the chilling effect of being sued for legal activities. A company knowingly operating in this way should have all state IP protections cancelled.
- jcroll 9y agoIs there a part of this blog post where the author isn't whining about something?
- zokier 9y agoBut does the city actually have the authority to put such restrictions? Of course they can say and claim anything, but would it actually stand in courts? What about internationally, is there some agreement that applies?
- hsivonen 9y agoHmm. I wonder if companies named after the municipalities they've been founded it have ever needed to deal with this kind of thing from their municipal councils. Such names exist in many countries. Off the top of my head, I can think of Nokia (Finland, telecom equipment), Emmaljunga (Sweden, prams) and Gorenje (Slovenia, kitchen appliances). In Finland, University of Helsinki owns helsinki.fi and City of Helsinki owns hel.fi. For a while, the city was apparently pressuring the university to have links to city stuff on the helsinki.fi front page, but it seems that now the front page is all university stuff again.
- Spoygg 9y agoGorenje was founded while former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was in blooming, it was a thing to call factories by city names, so there's that.
- HenryBemis 9y agoUnfortunately, Democracy/Freedom isn't full developed in this part of the world. Feel free to downvote, but politically speaking, there are still many open wounds, and unresolved issue, issues in this region of Former Yugoslavia. Unfortunately they were caught in the middle of a cold-war-political-game and this is one of the outcomes. I don't think that local authority has any objection that Sarajevo can be named in a blog post. I think it is to prevent other political forces from making claims (founded or otherwise) and it's Alexander (in this case) is caught in the middle of this ....storm.
- goialoq 9y agoWhich part of the world as Democracy/Freedom fully developed? The Eiffel Tower and the US NY Port Authority have similar IP restraints.
- Decabytes 9y agoAs long as laws and rules like this exists, they will get abused.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- syntheticnature 9y agoRelated: the story of the owners of Bully Hill Vineyards in New York State, who are legally enjoined from using their last name on their product. They founded another wine company under their name originally and sold it to Coca-Cola, you see... Wikipedia, since it appears their website's cert is just out of date: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bully_Hill_Vineyards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bully_Hill_Vineyards
- syntheticnature 9y agoTheir side of the story, if you feel up for temporary security exceptions: https://www.bullyhillvineyards.com/about/heritage/ https://www.bullyhillvineyards.com/about/heritage/
- craigds 9y agoThis is excellent: > During Prohibition the winery sold grape juice in small wooden barrels. A label was placed on the barrel giving explicit instructions on how the juice would turn into wine if precautions weren't taken.
- jimnotgym 9y agoWell I have a much stupider example. English Heritage (now Natural England I think) decided they owned the rights to Stonehenge[0] 3-4000 years after the architects demise. It seems they realised their error once it had been splashed across the front pages.... [0]http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/latest/photo-news/stonehenge-bosses-regret-photography-ban-update-19051 http://www.amateurphotographer.co.uk/latest/photo-news/stone...
- mncharity 9y ago> stupider example The EU side of the Euro is copyrighted, with a permissions grant that prohibits disparaging use. So nice closeups of Euro coins get removed from Wikicommons (as not freely reusable), and are yet-another-license pain to use in OER education content.
- pmatos 9y agoBut Wikipedia has no problems writing Sarajevo. Why is that?
- sandworm101 9y agoTotally incorrect for most western nations. Google "nomitave use".
- goialoq 9y agoIs Bosnia a western nation?
- chris_wot 9y agoCall it something else. Then when the city complains tell them it’s because you can’t use the name in writing.
- backtoyoujim 9y agoAs humans we could de facto rename Sarajevo to something more representative of its new policy.
- AlphaWeaver 9y agoThe author didn't mention it, but another stupid example of this in the US is the Hollywood Sign. You can't shoot pictures or video of the sign without permission. This video by Tom Scott goes into detail: https://youtu.be/KUdQ7gxU6Rg https://youtu.be/KUdQ7gxU6Rg
- icebraining 9y agoYou can shoot pictures and videos. You just can't use them for commercial purposes. EDIT: forgot the reference: https://web.archive.org/web/20100510105723/http://www.hollywoodchamber.net/index.php?page=17 https://web.archive.org/web/20100510105723/http://www.hollyw...
- OliverJones 9y agoHmm. Type "flights to SJJ" into your favorite search engine and watch it break this law. A while ago I needed to talk to a lawyer at MIT about making a derivative work of a chunk of software published, by MIT, under the MIT FOSS license. They were clear that I was free to mention the Institute's name, as long as it was clear to a reasonable reader that I was not claiming their endorsement. I suppose a municipality might want to be able to avoid confusing the public with spoofs. It's not hard to believe a scammer could send out fake municipal water bills. They need a way to shut that down. But claiming copyright in the city's name seems clumsy. Plus, the name is important. You really wanna have people calling it TCFKAS? (after the ASCII rendering of Prince's name, TAFKAP, during his dispute with his label.)
- shmerl 9y agoWhat a moronic idea to copyright buildings scenery.
- maffydub 9y agoRegarding copyright on photos of the Eiffel Tower at night due to the arrangement of the lights... It would be interesting to take a photo of the Eiffel Tower by day, and then - apply style transfer to turn it into a photo by night (which would, I suspect exclude any lights) - train a (second) neural network to predict the positions of lights on a night-time photos of various buildings (ensuring that all buildings/light arrangements in your dataset predated the Eiffel Tower's lights). I suspect that you could end up with images close to the real Eiffel Tower - at least close enough for it to be aesthetically pleasing and recognisable as the Eiffel Tower. What would the copyright position on this be? IANAL, but it seems as though either - the lights are not exactly correct, and so this (manipulated) photo isn't covered by the copyright on the lights on the Eiffel Tower or - the lights are correct (or close enough), and so the lights on the Eiffel Tower are in the obvious places (given that a ML algorithm could predict them) - in that case, is there enough creativity in the arrangement for copyright to have been granted. Thoughts? (I'm sure I'll never find enough time to actually do this - the style transfer is trivial, but finding a suitable dataset of photos of other buildings of a suitable era by night is probably too much work! :( )
- hammock 9y agoThis is an abuse of machine learning. Amy algorithm can be tweaked to achieve the intended result, even if you limit the dataset to buildings before the Eiffel tower had lights. It always comes back to a human.
- ThatGeoGuy 9y agoI think that's exactly the point he's making. There's only so many sensible ways one could decoratively light the Eiffel tower, and OP is suggesting that machine learning could generate it artificially. If that's possible, is there really anything that is non-obvious and copyright-able? If it can't be done, the manipulated photo cannot be held accountable for copyright violations (but it certainly would look like it ought to). The fact that it can come down to something any human can optimize for only makes the law surrounding the copyright of a public display on a building even more absurd.
- pjc50 9y agoThe Iain M Banks novel Against a Dark Background has a throwaway mention of a region called Regionner with capital city Capitaller, the true name having being obscured by a centuries-spanning all-consuming litigation.
- BrandoElFollito 9y agoSarajevo. There, sue me for infringement. Of course this is not the way it works. I can mention Décathlon and Microsoft even though they are registered trademarks. I can post a picture of the Apple logo when illustrating Apple stuff. There are things I cannot do (like using them as if they were mine) but mentioning the name is not a problem. So Sarajevo FTW. As a side note about the requests from the city of Sarajevo (sorry) to pay for the use of the city : they certainly should protect misuse (false documents for instance) and possibly (though I disagree) commercial use of the name. This is quite common, though enforced to various degrees (usually not, after a few cases which went wrong, for instance in Krakow, Poland). Fair use will prevail, though this is a real pity we need to come to that
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- icebraining 9y agoExcept this is not trademark law, so there's no "fair use" unless it specifies so.
- BrandoElFollito 9y agoYes, they set a local law but still try to enforce it abroad (by requesting things with Facebook). They could go the trademark way (which then may be enforceable in a commercial context) and would be subject to fair use.
- incompatible 9y agoIf they've written some wacky clause into the law in Bosnia and Herzegovina, it isn't going to affect you unless you live in that country. I assume they can't extradite you over it. Edit: You wouldn't want to visit that country, naturally, after flouting their laws like that.
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- tlogan 9y agoI'm that part of the world so I will give you some background. He was using both name city of Sarajevo and using emblem of the city on his Facebook page. And since situation there is kinda tricky it is not interest of anybody living in the city and want to ensure peace and p... (ok - just peace - prosperity needs to wait for the next century) to have any 3rd-party representing the city. I'm not sure what he was doing on his Facebook page but he might one one of the guys saying: "hey lets start the war again ...". Or might not. This was a move by politicians: maybe stupid. Maybe based on fear of another war. It is complicated.
- radovanb 9y agoThere are many various restrictions on the use of photos of landmarks / building - couple of them here: https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/contributor-resources/legal/stock-photo-restrictions/ https://www.shutterstock.com/blog/contributor-resources/lega... It also states that "Images depicting the [Eiffel] Tower’s lighting design are unacceptable for commercial use" ... which I think is fair.
- goialoq 9y agoFlagged article, headline is a lie and article is intentionally misleading.
- juandazapata 9y agoThe click baity title is mildly infuriating
- anigbrowl 9y agoLegal and private entities that use the emblem and the name of the City of Sarajevo without the permission to do so from the regulatory body Author needs to learn the difference between 'use' and 'mention'. 'Use' means to exploit for commercial purposes, eg by operating a company called 'Sarajevo tours' or selling 'Sarajevo salad'. You don't need permission just to say you live and work in Sarajevo. Remember folks, 'statutory interpretation' doesn't mean every conceivable reading of a legal text is valid. Generally you should consult a legal dictionary in your jurisdiction of interest to discover how common vocabulary is construed for legal purposes, because it often differs from what people imagine.
- valuearb 9y agoMaybe Sarevejo should have considered how people will interpret their dumb law before they made it. Can you imagine not being able to name your business “Sarajevo bed and Breakfast” or something like that? It’s like they are actively trying to suppress tourism....
- anigbrowl 9y agoYeah, I can imagine it. Perhaps their experience was that people selling inferior services by trying to freeride on the name were actually hurting tourism. You appear to have assumed your conclusion.
- valuearb 9y agoThere isn't a city in the world that doesn't have hundreds of businesses that incorporate the cities name in the business name. It's often done as a point of pride in their city by the business owner. Ever heard of the "Chicago Cubs"? How about "Portland Cement"?
- anigbrowl 9y agoNone of which is responsive to the point I made. Bye.