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Without knowing the full details, how can you be so quick to cast judgment? There is a wide spectrum between actively stealing photos and mistakenly using phot

Without knowing the full details, how can you be so quick to cast judgment? There is a wide spectrum between actively stealing photos and mistakenly using photos because they seemed to be in the public domain. The key questions are: was the intent malicious? And how soon was it rectified? And I say this as someone whose photo was used by a highly read tech blog without attribution; and when I pointed this out, they quietly put a link to my original photo in there, but still did not attribute it to me.

SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
A simple rule: if there's no visible film grain, the photo is almost certainly copyrighted. If there is grain it might be copyrighted. Copyright in the US lasts for the life of the author + 70 years, or the shorter of 95 years after publication / 120 years after creation for works made for hire. Digital photography hasn't been around that long. Copyright is automatic. There's no need to register it. Willful infringement can increase the penalties, but is not required for there to be penalties. Your key questions are not particularly important from a legal standpoint.
onion2k 9y ago
...they seemed to be in the public domain. There's no such thing as "seemed" to be in the public domain. Either they are or they aren't. If you don't know then you assume they're not. If you assume they are when they're not, or you assume the attribution attached is correct when it isn't, then the photographer is entirely within their rights to sue you for approximately $5100. This is why running a website properly is actually quite a lot of work. And I say this as someone who's been running websites for 20 years, and I've seen lots of my content reused without permission. It's really annoying. I used to be on the side of "if it's online then it's fair to reuse it", but as more and more sites have appeared that do nothing more than repost content from /r/<some subreddit> I've changed my mind.

SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago

A simple rule: if there's no visible film grain, the photo is almost certainly copyrighted. If there is grain it might be copyrighted. Copyright in the US lasts for the life of the author + 70 years, or the shorter of 95 years after publication / 120 years after creation for works made for hire. Digital photography hasn't been around that long. Copyright is automatic. There's no need to register it. Willful infringement can increase the penalties, but is not required for there to be penalties. Your key questions are not particularly important from a legal standpoint.

onion2k 9y ago

...they seemed to be in the public domain. There's no such thing as "seemed" to be in the public domain. Either they are or they aren't. If you don't know then you assume they're not. If you assume they are when they're not, or you assume the attribution attached is correct when it isn't, then the photographer is entirely within their rights to sue you for approximately $5100. This is why running a website properly is actually quite a lot of work. And I say this as someone who's been running websites for 20 years, and I've seen lots of my content reused without permission. It's really annoying. I used to be on the side of "if it's online then it's fair to reuse it", but as more and more sites have appeared that do nothing more than repost content from /r/<some subreddit> I've changed my mind.