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This is only for commercial usage, private and non commercial is explicitly exempted.
by rkachowski 7y ago
This is only for commercial usage, private and non commercial is explicitly exempted.
- Reventlov 7y agoSo, for example, reddit or imgur would be affected by this as they're for profit, right?
- eschulz 7y agoThey are probably considered neutral public forums even though they may operate a for profit business. I believe laws such as this will generally apply to the content creators, although public forums will usually have to cooperate with authorities who request assistance in enforcing the law.
- ben_w 7y agoThis is good, of course. I am curious: while a typical user of imgur would clearly be non-commercial, would imgur itself be at risk for hosting the material? Or does Germany have a “safe harbour”-like concept for platforms that host user content?
- rvnx 7y agoimgur is clearly a commercial image hosting platform. There wouldn't be any ads nor payment systems if it would be non-commercial
- johannes1234321 7y agoYou can also be commercial without ads. Distinction is more complicated. Even a non-profit without ads can do it for business.
- ben_w 7y agoThat is why I asked about imgur in particular. Safe harbour, y/n?
- chadlavi 7y agoCommercial... memes?
- dx87 7y agoI've started to see a lot of ads that are based on memes, mainly on reddit.
- laszlokorte 7y agoIn Hamburg for example public transit busses are covered in memes [0] [0]: https://i.redd.it/ygj1fa5130f11.jpg https://i.redd.it/ygj1fa5130f11.jpg
- pmontra 7y agoIt could be that the ad agencies are using the memes not to pay for the images. Maybe the photographers that used to work for them complained and got this law.
- icebraining 7y agoI don't see why you'd need a new law to prevent the unlicensed use of a copyrighted work in an ad; I'm pretty sure that's been illegal for quite some time now, including in Germany.
- afandian 7y agoYes. I've seen the Harold meme used in commercial advertising. The original was an unlicensed (I think) ShutterStock image. (Discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21481351 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21481351) Why should commercial companies be able to make money off copyrighted material? Or if you think they can, why not expliclty abolish image copyright?
- cyxxon 7y agoWell, commercial use of memes, like, say a company liek Reddit or Imgur that profites from the use of memes (let's not go into their revenue or business model in detail now). So in reality ALL memes are commercial (unless you host yourself, I would guess).
- blkhawk 7y agoEven an ad-banner put on your page by a free hosing service makes it technically commercial in Germany.
- swiley 7y agoIMO: this is a good thing, memes are addictive and worse still they’re often themselves advertising on commercial sites. I’m glad something is being done.