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I think any email marketers who want to get around this easily can. Just change robots.txt to not give permission to Google fetching the images. Copyright will
by jfoster 13y ago
I think any email marketers who want to get around this easily can. Just change robots.txt to not give permission to Google fetching the images. Copyright will laws will prevent them from wilfully ignoring that, presumably.
- cdash 13y agoSo they strip the images and show you a text only email and tell you to deal with it.
- jfoster 13y agoTrue, that would close off this avenue. Would be interesting to know if that's how they handle this currently.
- Dylan16807 13y agorobots.txt is for crawlers, it would not stop an email client from rendering the email on behalf of its user upon receipt.
- jfoster 13y agoSo then what gives Google the legal right to fetch, store, and re-serve the images?
- Dylan16807 13y agoThey're just acting as an email client. Alice sends email to Bob, Bob is granted rights to fetch and view images. Bob uses gmail, so he passes the rights onto google to do part of that serverside.
- jfoster 13y agoI'm not a lawyer, but I don't think copyright law allows for Bob to pass on that right.
- Dylan16807 13y agoHe certainly passed on a significant portion of the rights or that server wouldn't be authorized to receive and permanently store the emails in the first place. Do you think copyright law disallows running your desktop in the cloud?
- mcintyre1994 13y agoUnless they've somehow overlooked something, surely their terms of service will?
- jfoster 13y agoThe terms of service are an agreement with their users, not with third parties who are emailing their users.
- mcintyre1994 13y agoI see where you're coming from, and IANAL etc, but this surely must be a solved problem? For at least the last 15 years (longer?) we've had web mail where mail you send doesn't go directly to the user but via some other servers. If there is an actual issue here it's going to be a hell of a legal battle.
- mariodiana 13y agoI came here to say basically the same thing, so I'm going to chime in in support of what you're saying. If I'm a marketer and I send an email with a link to the image, and Google caches it in order to resend it for their own purposes (even if that's to shield their users from spam), how is that not a copyright violation? In this case, caching is no different than copying; and the kind of caching Google is doing in this instance is different than the caching an individual does via his browser, since the individual downloaded the image in the original instance.
- gohrt 13y agoIf I had to guess, I would guess that sending an email with an image link is a rather obvious declaration of intent to share the image.
- jfoster 13y agoYes, but with who? I think it's a declaration of intent to share with the person specified in the "to:", "cc:" and "bcc:" fields, but not with Google.