[d@DCC] Embed logo into a product photo

[mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Fri, 20 May 2005, Russell McOrmond wrote:
>    If you want to sue someone smaller I am quite willing to mirror your
> site so you can sue me to test your interpretation.

If he says "yes" to that, he'll probably hurt his case, because you'll be
able to claim that he gave permission.  I think in order for it to work,
you have to just go ahead and make the copies without permission.

I, of course, am not a lawyer, and can't give anyone legal advice.

> Would you be upset by the following:
>
> "Hey, I have a JAN-CK-35Z5GT for sale.  If you haven't seen one, there is
> a picture at http://www.telecomottawa.net/~cmacd/tu-z556.jpg which is
> pointed to from http://www.telecomottawa.net/~cmacd/tubes.html "

I tend to be annoyed when people distribute pointers to images on my site
without mentioning the page containing them, nor anything about me or my
site at all beyond the URL of the image, as in:

   "Hey, I have a JAN-CK-35Z5GT for sale.  If you haven't seen one, there
    is a picture at http://www.telecomottawa.net/~cmacd/tu-z556.jpg."

Image hosting usable in postings on eBay, phpBB, Livejournal, etc. is a
valuable service.  You can buy it or you can get it free with strings
attached; I object to people taking it from me, when I've paid for it
myself, without providing anything in return.

I can't, and I don't think I should be able to, actually stop people from
doing that; but I can and do instruct my Web server to redirect incoming
requests for images if they seem to be coming from referrers that are
doing the above.  For images that seem to be frequent targets, I also add
text describing my site to the image itself.  Even though people could use
an editor to remove the text, in practice they don't; they don't even copy
it to their own server; they just point to my server, which ultimately
puts them at my mercy as far as what readers will see.

This is *not* a copyright issue; it's about the hosting service and
bandwidth, not about the bits that go out on that bandwidth.  But if the
image in question was original with me, copied to a mirror, and
represented as original to the mirroring site without any indication of my
involvement, that would be a copyright issue and I'd be annoyed for much
the same reasons.  Your examples of caching and archiving don't fall into
that category; there's no misrepresentation made there as to the origins
of the images.  On a legal plane, I'm talking about the moral rights as
opposed to the economic privileges of copyright.
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala at ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                    Embrace and defend.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/