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> Pictures are an intellectual property of the author, if a person wants other people to spread them, he/she needs to explicitly set the allowing license. It's
by quotemstr 6y ago
> Pictures are an intellectual property of the author, if a person wants other people to spread them, he/she needs to explicitly set the allowing license.
It's more complicated than that. What actions require a license? Nobody needs a license to create a hyperlink. The concept of a "link license" was a big subject of debate in the 1990s, but after much hand-wringing and heated discussion, we converged on a permissionless model for hyperlinking on the web. I think everyone here understands the high value of frictionless linking.
Now let's suppose for the sake of argument (and without loss of generality) that this foot fetish site were just a list of hyperlinks to publicly available foot pictures in their original context. I suspect the author of the article (and a lot of other people) would still be squicked out by the foot-fetishist link-aggregator site. But what could be done about it? Permissioneless linking is a huge boon for the web and humanity. Should we add friction to linking just because foot fetish sites exist?
Okay --- what if it's not linking, but actual photo embedding? Still, we'd need to examine the costs and benefits. Embedding public content in another context is great for commentary, synthesis, and other creative transformations. People love to showcase hard work and beauty. Should we add friction to photo embeds everywhere just because some squicky foot fetishists use embeds to aggregate images? Again, it doesn't seem worth it.
Ultimately, we have to learn to let things go. There will always be people in the world who use public things in a "wrong" way: a politician you don't like may use your favorite song in a campaign; a company might use your open source library to make a product you'd prefer not to exist; or public property records might let speculators arbitrage prices in a way that seems unfair. But whenever we're tempted to Do Something about people using the public thing in the wrong way, we have to think "is this Doing Something going to be net positive? What about the value of the commons itself? Am I willing to destroy that just to Do Something about this one thing?" Most of the time, the answer is "no".
- furyg3 6y ago> Let's suppose for the sake of argument (and without loss of generality) that this foot fetish site were just a list of hyperlinks to publicly available foot pictures in their original context. Let's not suppose this. This site does not do this. It doesn't show photos in their original context (e.g. Instagram), nor does it even display the 'original' image (meaning IG hosted image) out of context - which would also be wrong. It's primary use case is to literally re-host unlicensed images out of their original context without permission (even though it's 'rules' state otherwise).
- kachnuv_ocasek 6y ago> Now let's suppose for the sake of argument (and without loss of generality) that this foot fetish site were just a list of hyperlinks That's a huge loss of generality.
- quotemstr 6y ago> That's a huge loss of generality. I don't think so. The author's core discomfort (to which I'm sympathetic) seems to not be about the image hosting, but about people enjoying pictures of her feet in a way that makes her uncomfortable. I don't think that wikiFeet moving to a hyperlink model would alleviate the author's discomfort with wikiFeet existing, so we need to talk about that core discomfort, not about the specific mechanics of image sharing.
- drakonka 6y agoOf course it would alleviate discomfort - it would allow the author to retain full control of their image. They could, with a couple of taps, delete the image and prevent its propagation on a fetish website.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoOr, up until recently, block based on referrer; or block based on IP address (eg limit it to one ISP that all their family use).
- enriquto 6y ago> That's a huge loss of generality. Not really. It's just a couple of innocent javascript lines away (on a browser extension) to the site with visible photos.
- bidirectional 6y agoWell no, in the article the author mentions pictures posted to their Instagram story. These images are only publicly visible for 24 hours, and I imagine Instagram also does some manouevering to stop them being easily linkable. Also the obvious massive difference that such a model would allow the original poster to delete the image.
- ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago>Now let's suppose for the sake of argument (and without loss of generality) that this foot fetish site were just a list of hyperlinks to publicly available foot pictures in their original context. I suspect the author of the article (and a lot of other people) would still be squicked out by the foot-fetishist link-aggregator site Yep, what furyg3 said. I always think about cases like that from a creator perspective. If I'm a painter, I probably sell my work, so it's in my interest that every usage lead back to a canonical place where I expect to make sales/build following/communicate with fans. So reposting a picture and posting a link to a said place I chose are absolutely different things. There's always fair use, which should cover things like education, citation, etc. That's a different topic. And don't get me wrong, copyright system is broken and rotten to the core, but some of the concerns on which it builds are perfectly reasonable.
- Igelau 6y ago> There's always fair use, which should cover things like education, citation, etc. That's a different topic. This is the weird part. If aliens showed up and started viewing the site in question, they'd probably mistake it for reference material, some kind of critical encyclopedia.