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The Two Teenagers Who Run the Popular Twitter Feed @HistoryInPics
- instakill 13y ago> Who really deserves the scorn—the two best players in the game or the people who own the stadium? Are the two mutually excluded? I'm not sure about the platforms, but the owners of the account are definitely in the wrong. Ignorance doesn't absolve you of your responsibility to play within the bounds of the law.
- yetanotherphd 13y agoI think the only difference between these entrepreneurs and big businesses is that big businesses would say "talk to our lawyers" instead of "talk to our lawyers, lol". That said, if they do get sued I'm not going to feel sorry for them.
- digitalengineer 13y agoThis: "The audiences that Di Petta and Cameron have built are created with the work of photographers who they don't pay or even credit. They don't provide sources for the photographs or the captions that accompany them. Sometimes they get stuff wrong and/or post copyrighted photographs. " Combined with this: "I'm sure the majority of photographers would be glad to have their work seen by the massives." Nothing 'new media' about it. Theft plain and simple.
- burntsushi 13y ago> Theft plain and simple. Well, no, not plain and simple. At the worst, it's copyright infringement. You may think this is a pedantic correction, and from your point of view, maybe it is. But it isn't for people who see intellectual property as unjust.
- digitalengineer 13y agoNo no, your right. I should have know better. My old company, Royalty Free Models, used to sell regular people for commercial photoshoots. I sold them with all rights included like a ShutterStock database with actual people. Even agency's don't understand copyrights...
- sgdread 13y agoStock companies require signed model release for every person on the photo. But copyright is belongs to creator - photographer.
- archgrove 13y agoThis trope is getting exceedingly tired, on par with the "taxation is theft", "atheism is a religion" and "Linux should be called GNU/Linux" brigades that often crop up in the appropriate discussions. Theft and "steal" have long been used outside of the OED definitions; I can be a "thief of time", "steal an idea", "steal a base" and so forth. "Theft" and "steal" are appropriate words for the behaviour of people who have decided, in defiance of the laws and remunerative structures society has constructed, that they're entitled to the work of people without giving anything back (apart from some advice like "I'm giving you free advertising", "find a new business model" or "this will actually help you in the long run"). Society has created intellectual property, in the same way it created physical property, and if you can steal the later, you can surely steal the former. One other angle on this, for the "steal absolutely must deprive someone of something" view, well - something is actually lost, that cannot be replaced. The right of the IP creator to be repaid by the person who grabbed it. Many people say "Well, I'd never have bought it anyway". Whilst true for now, would it still be true in 1 year? 5? 10? Would you have bought it for your kids, or because a sequel came out that you do want to buy? By taking it, you rob the person of the ability to sell it to you in the future. I think it's incumbent upon anyone who thinks "intellectual property is unjust" and who acts on this belief by just denying its existence, to propose and get support for a viable alternative for supporting the millions of people who depend on it for their livelihood. Otherwise, you're just an anarchist, burning the system down and denying any contribution to the people who have committed to a certain lifestyle on the guarantees currently provided by society.
- GuiA 13y ago> They don't provide sources for the photographs or the captions that accompany them. Sometimes they get stuff wrong and/or post copyrighted photographs. I can reverse-search for any picture on Google Images and, with extremely high accuracy, find a picture's origins. If this is something we deem as problematic, why not solve it at the source by having the service (i.e. Twitter) identify the images that are posted and properly credit them? That'd be a neat startup idea actually (and it probably already exists in some form?) A service to which you send a picture, and it returns to you its copyright information. You could market it by doing things like writing a Twitter bot (named "HistoryInPicsCredits" or something) that automatically tweets copyright information of images posted by HistoryInPics.
- kevinchen 13y agoWhen you reverse-searched on Google Images, did you notice that their captions often distorted the facts or outright lied? I think that's the bigger story here: it's not that "new media" or "kids these days" don't care about attribution for the sake of giving credit. The photos aren't attributed because it would be easier to find their contexts. If people know the facts, the account would be less interesting and therefore less popular.
- virtuabhi 13y agoShouldn't this be considered "fair use"? A bunch of guys find some pictures on the internet. These pictures are not the originals but low-res jpegs. The pictures are saved on their machines (by the browser). Then the pictures are uploaded to Twitter. The source/photographer is provided with every picture (if info. is available). I don't understand how photographers are losing here? They are getting free publicity from the pictures which were already accessible to everyone.
- chadwickthebold 13y ago"free publicity" Exposure doesn't put food on the table.
- fr0sty 13y agoIndeed. "working for exposure" is basically a swear word in some photography circles.
- ama729 13y ago> They are getting free publicity For that, they would have to be properly credited in the first place...
- BeccaCory 13y agoI don't think I agree with this. A lot of their pictures ARE public domain, and I have to say, the fact that a) they met through youtube and b) managed to create an organic following of nearly a million, not to mention the number of impressions each tweet gets, in a matter of months, is highly impressive. There are plenty of people who use pirated photos through twitter, and true, they are now making a profit from it, but think of the things YOU were doing when you were 17 years old.
- doktrin 13y agoIt's quite possible to consider those facts in isolation. What they have accomplished is impressive for 17 year olds, but it's very reasonable to acknowledge the moral (and legal) gray space their work occupies. Moreover, it's possible to comment without bringing both of those facts up together. I know I'm not particularly interested in extolling the virtues of these particular individuals. It's just not interesting. Maybe the OP feels the same way?
- mbateman 13y agoDi Petta's flip attitude towards copyright is contemptible. But it's true that it is often impractical to get information about creators and rights. I wonder part of the solution isn't some service that decreased the friction (by a lot) for looking up the relevant information. (As I'm typing this I realize this probably isn't a new thought.)
- untitaker_ 13y agoGoogle's reverse image search and tineye.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoCouple of others: http://karmadecay.com/ http://karmadecay.com/ [reddit focussed] http://saucenao.com/ http://saucenao.com/ Also there was http://www.gazopa.com/ http://www.gazopa.com/ but it's shutdown. These http://iqdb.org/ http://iqdb.org/, http://www.ascii2d.net/imagesearch/ http://www.ascii2d.net/imagesearch/, are for anime/manga.
- masklinn 13y ago> Di Petta's flip attitude towards copyright is contemptible. But it's true that it is often impractical to get information about creators and rights. It sometimes is. Time and again, people have checked the pair's featured pictures and found sources in a few minutes.
- mbateman 13y agoI totally agree. And again I don't want to excuse their behavior. But it being inconsistently easy to find a source and copyright information is also a problem that it would be nice to have solved. That there's a lot of variance in this process is itself a disincentive to engaging in it. It would be beneficial for everyone if, in general, finding sources was as easy as finding the images to begin with. There's no in principle reason (or is there?) why technology has to make content discovery easy and source discovery difficult, it just is that way right now.
- jere 13y ago1.3 million followers, eh? Aaannd my headlines-from-1914 bot has 11 followers. tl;dr I suppose.
- digitalengineer 13y agoWell, it would help if you added your Twitter handle when saying something like that. Like the idea actually.
- jere 13y agoI posted about it here before. It may be too dry, but I find it quite entertaining. https://twitter.com/NEWS_XX14 https://twitter.com/NEWS_XX14
- mr_luc 13y agoOn the contrary! You need to post links to these articles. I want to read all of those articles. I absolutely love the history leading up to and around the first world war, I've read a good portion of the issues of Punch from those years. But a headline is only enough to arouse my appetite without bedding her back down.
- jere 13y agoWell, you can find the articles by googling the headlines. These are all from the New York Times and you should find the first result is a link to a pdf article there.
- calbear81 13y agoI think I've seen a lot of the @earthpics photos on the Earthporn sub-reddit. A bot that scrapes that and cross posts the top photos to a twitter account might work.
- Nicholas_C 13y agoSssshhhh, I'm working on that now.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- evan_ 13y agoStart re-posting their tweets on a halfway-popular account and see how quickly they learn about copyright.
- smackfu 13y agoBut all they care about is the follower count. Once it hits a million, they can sell off this account to someone who wants to monetize it. I mean, they have no real attraction to "History in Pics" as a constant, or to any particular post. They just care about it as something that people seem to like to follow. If someone else rips off their content, I doubt that would have any impact at all.
- evan_ 13y agoYou might have a point about the "History in Pics" account, I guess you would have to be competing with a newer account and outpace its follower count- or have an "Ad free History in Pics" account that catches traction or something. Or maybe they really wouldn't care at all, I don't know.
- adventured 13y agoIt's against Twitter's terms to sell an account or username. Does Twitter commonly look the other way on this? Are there public examples of Twitter accounts being sold for a lot of money?
- smackfu 13y agoWhat's a twitter account, a username + an email address? From Twitter's perspective, a sale is the same as just changing the email address.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoHow about allowing someone else to post on that account, is that allowed? If not I imagine nearly all corp accounts are in breach of their rules. They don't need to "sell" it legally to create the same practical result. Seems it's pretty unenforceable for Twitter?
- truxs 13y agoSo basically to start a successful account all you need to do is find a popular subreddit and upload most upvoted post on Twitter
- smackfu 13y agoNot just that, the key is to already have followers on a separate account, and then you can cross post them to build up the new one.
- fourstar 13y agoSomeone did that to a big subreddit I created. There are tons of copy-cats who are even using my trademarked name and Twitter won't do jack about it.
- smackfu 13y agoThe credit thing seems like a red herring. Either you have the license to the photo or you don't.
- _delirium 13y agoFrom an ethical perspective I often think credit in these cases is more important than licensing, at least for older stuff. If it's a photo from the 1930s, I honestly don't care if some great-grandnephew technically owns the copyright, but it would be nice to have an accurate caption. The licensing issue gets bigger in my mind the more recent the photos get.
- dublinben 13y agoI agree. I think that (mis)attribution is a much more fundamental crime than unauthorized reproduction. It's essentially fraud to pass these off as their own works, or with incorrect captions.
- chc 13y agoThere are a lot of opinions about the legitimacy of modern copyright laws, but almost everyone agrees that people deserve credit for their work as long as it is appreciated, so focusing on the latter addresses a more universal issue.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoCredit seems to matter. When you see images on Google Image search you get an attribution - that seems the only difference legally between displaying the results of a db query for @HistoryPics twitter posts and displaying the results of a db query for "historic images" (say) on a search engines image search. Sure, the former has been more curated than the latter but having robots do your bidding doesn't appear in TRIPs agreements AFAIR.
- dkrich 13y agoI think we're in some kind of media bubble when a "news" website publishes stories about people who steal content and Tweet it. This feels like a lot of people chasing each other in circles without really producing any new content.
- brucehart 13y agoI stopped following accounts like this because of their promotion tactics. They retweet stuff from other accounts and then delete it 15 minutes later. If you look at the feed before subscribing, it looks like it is a bunch of interesting photos. Once you start following them, you see these lower quality retweets at the top of your feed that are deleted as soon as they start to get pushed down on subscriber timelines.
- md224 13y agoA recent tweet from Kyle Cameron's twitter feed: "If The Wolf Of Wall Street doesn't inspire you to become successful, nothing will." [1] Makes me a little sad. [1] https://twitter.com/GirlsGoneKyle/status/427666832636403712 https://twitter.com/GirlsGoneKyle/status/427666832636403712
- GuiA 13y agoHe's a 19 year old making money selling Twitter accounts. I wouldn't spend too much time looking his way for deep life advice and insights.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago>"They are playing by rules that "old media" and most new media do not. To one way of thinking, they are cheating at the media game, and that's why they're winning. (Which they are.)" // It seems fairly often I hear a comment that so-and-so media company (BBC, local paper, RIAA, ...) are using a private individuals media without permission or attribution. They're it seems serially copyright infringers. Whilst big-media generally correct it after-the-fact when they're caught it seems worth noting that it's not only "young punks" that are profiting by playing fast-and-loose with media available online. Yes there's a difference in complexion too: which goes both ways - if the images are historic then arguably [morally] the creators have had time to make them pay. The corollary of course is that unlicensed duplication of new images, particularly those used in the news, is more damaging. This is not to excuse such tortuous infringement but just to shed more light on the context.
- johnwards 13y agoFollow https://twitter.com/PicPedant https://twitter.com/PicPedant for lolz, and credits :)
- jimmaswell 13y agoIf you want the source, you can try Google Reverse Image Search
- NamTaf 13y agoI'm not terribly surprised they're run by teens. I've seen them retweet some pretty bad/offensive tweets on both accounts before shortly deleting them (e.g.: misogynistic comments about periods), never mind their cross-promotion and all that. It's as if they mis-judged what they could get away with, because I couldn't work out why someone would want to see a photo of blood-stained pants otherwise. I briefly followed Earth Pics until they started unrelentingly posting obviously fake photos with no attempt to do research into whether they were real or not. HIP has the same dirty feel to it and so it's no surprised to find out they're related. They've taken two very possibly interesting topics to run a twitter feed on, and essentially run them in to the ground by not doing even a modicum of work to ensure some sort of integrity behind them. Maybe it's an intentional decision, I don't know, but it just seems like when you're trying to appeal to a semi-academic interest such as geography or history, you'd benefit from doing some fact-checking and verification. It'd be as if IFLS started posting pseudo-science, for example. In fact, exploring the relative success of both approaches would be a really cool study into new-media or whatever buzzword you want to call it.