Heres a thread on rail pictures.net about a Flikr member who steal photos and takes them for his own.
I got the link from EJ818 in Teen Railfan Place in the trains.com forum.
Somebody needs to complain to that sites managers, because this guy has stolen many photos, and all the replies basicly say, “you stole this photo”
I’m going to try to get an account so I can complain(tried-but Safari keeps crashing)
heres the link http://forums.railpictures.net/showthread.php?t=6708&page=1&pp=25 (must copy into address bar)
http://forums.railpictures.net/showthread.php?t=6708&page=1&pp=25
Activated the link.
cry me a river gee you guys are a pain in the caboose, it seems to me that your crying over someone using or taking pics that you dont have permission to have. sorta like taking pictures of crews on trains with out the permission of them saying it alright and the crews opinion dont mean squat. as far as im concerned once its on the electronic billboard its far game. go cry some where else you dont have anything to gripe about
Gotta go with wabash on this one, once something is posted on the internet it’s no longer private. Could have been worse, this guy could have stolen your identity instead of your pics.
As I see it, it’s less about copyrights than it is about respect - this person appears to be passing off other folks photos as his own, even if only by implication in that he’s posting them on a photo site where people post the stuff they’re proud of.
Not significantly different from someone standing next to your prized hot rod at a car show and telling people that they built the car. You want credit for your effort and this person isn’t providing that.
Methinks that courtesy would suggest that he post the picture with a disclaimer that “I found this picture by so-and-so that I really liked and wanted to share it.”
Um…are you sure you’re not breaking a Trains Magazine forum rule, by linking another forum?
TOUCHE Murph!
But seriously, methinks flickr is a site like photobucket where you can store pictures you like.
While I sympathize with you:
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Nobody “stole” your photos. They’re still where you put them, on your computer’s HD or a CD or DVD.
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I looked at the site. He does not represent the works as his own, which while unethicical is not illegal. On the other hand, he did crop off any photo credits and copyright claims. If it isn’t against site rules, then you should remove your photos and look elsewhere.
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While this might marginally be a copyright issue, you’d have to prove some sort of monetary damages. Which is impossible, unless the person sells one of the “borrowed” photos as his own work to a magazine. Then you’d have a prima facie case.
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This is the risk you assume when you post digital images to the Internet.
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If the people that owned the phto sites really cared about such things, they’d install software that would prevent the images from being linked and/or downloaded.
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There’s no law against a person printing out a page from the web for their personal use. This would include printing out one
“4. This is the risk you assume when you post digital images to the Internet”-PZ
That pretty much sums it up.[:(]
On the website for my business, we keep the photos as small as the layout will allow and still be effective – most under 300x200 at 72dpi. Loading photos to the “blowup” size they allow on some of these rail-shutterbug sites (and here, too) invites this sort of stuff.
True, posting anything online is at the posters risk, but any work that is put on the Internet is considered to be “published” and therefore qualifies for copyright protection. Just because it is on the Internet does not mean that is free for anyone to download, copy, and/or claim as their own.
I would say that if your photo was “stolen”, I would file copyright charges.
Let me correct you. Your photos are copyrighted as an original artistic work the second you take them. Look it up.
Where would you file “copyright charges”? You’d have to pay an attorney, find the offender and prove actual damages in civil court. Toughh to do at this level.
But as for “filing copyright charges”, what if the person is in another country, as the guy being talked about seems to be?
I have to think the editors of the various rail publications live in fear of being duped into giving credit to the “thief” of a posted photo. There are steps that can be taken to mark photos that are posted.
While there is a “legal” or legalistic solution to this problem, where the copyright violations are not being used to make money, few copyright attorneys would be inclined to spend much time on the matter.
Ultimately this is a matter more for ethics, group pressure on “violators” and common standards of decency. I think we are still in the formative stages here of just what ethical standards exist when a photo is copied and shown elsewhere in terms of giving credit to the original source – such as, who knows what the original source is?
And what if the copier puts some original work into the effort? If the discussion is over brakewheels for example and someone reviews freight car photos and isolates and expands a photo to focus on a unique or special brake wheel, legally that is still a copyright “violation” but ethically is there a point to be made that they are using it to make a point that was not necessarily even something the original photographer was aware of or intended to take a picture of? I raise the question. I have no solution.
We will not resolve this issue any time soon. It may be as hopeless as trying to educate more people about “photo-line etiquette” at railfan events …
Dave Nelson
For those of you that don’t think itis a big deal, think of this.
Lets say you have a fantastic little home layout that people haven’t seen published. You put up all sorts of photos and descriptions of what you did on your own website, proud of what you did. The I come along see that, copy all the photos, write some nice text about ‘my’ layout and put it up on my website. I get lots of ‘attaboys’. Then maybe I get approaced by MR and I piece together an article and get some nice cash to boot. Let’s see how fast your tune will change then.
Wouldnt that be covered under the “fair use” policy, especially if a) the work is not for compensation, ie, a general forum or education use, and b) the work was attributed properly?
If someone was selling an article on brake wheels, then under the copyright laws (as a rank amature understands them) he would need permission to use all or part of that photo…
We have the same problem over at the photo site where I am an administrator. Generally we tell members to make sure their photos are uploaded at the lowest possible size, and resolution that our site will accept, and make the photo acceptable for viewing on the web. The other thing we tell members, that, while the photos are copyrighted while on our site, we encourage members to copyright their work.
If you want to make it “legal” then, print your photos, fill out the necessary forms from the Library of Congress, send it in with the 45 bucks, and then you can say that your work is copyrighted… However, if you think that it going to help you sue someone who is doing the equivalent of “nyahh, nyahh, I took your picture and you can’t catch me”, good luck. The only way you can recoup any damage, is if they sell the photo, and make money off of it… and then, the burden of proof is on you to prove it was yours from the beginning.
PZ is right, they are the equivalent of a “troll” and do it simply to aggravate others, because they know they can do it…
If you’re putting up high resolution pictures without any kind of watermark, you kind of deserve what you get. A magazine isn’t going to publish a low resolution shot taken off the web someplace.
It really comes with the territory. You think railroad photography is bad? Check out this image of Michelle Wie that I took at the US Open a couple of years ago:
I can’t even tell you how many times that shot, along with others from the US Open have been pirated off the web. When I find them, I usually contact the site and ask them to give me credit or remove it. I’m successful about 75% of the time, but there are sites where it’s not going to happen.
In the end, I think it far more worthwhile to post my pictures on the web so I can share them with a much larger audience than if I didn’t. If someone wants to copy it and pretend like it is his, that’s his decision. I know that because of the resolution that I’ve posted them at, they won’t be useful for much beyond web use, so I don’t worry about it too much.
Well, something seems to be going on over at the pirate site. I followed the link and went over to railpictures and then on to the flickr albumns in question and a number of the individual picture links are coming back with a blank and the comment “Oops - photo no longer available.”
Yep. I almost took legal action against a former employer back in 2002 when I saw that they’d taken a couple of my photos from Marion, Ohio and were using them for the Richland County Ohio Visitors’ Bureau’s website and claiming that they were in Mansfield. I e-mailed the organization as well as my former employer and told them that they were my photos as I had the original negatives and that they were violating copyright laws. They were off the site in a couple hours.
Kevin
I think once you have sold my pictures as your own to MR I have easy grounds to sue you - provided I can prove they’re mine.
Enjoy
Paul