Prepare to have your work stolen!

[Giraffe]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04..._act_landgrab/

Those of you who use your photos professionally, or just don't want them being used by others without credit or payment, might (not) want to know about this.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

So basically if they can strip the metadata from any posted picture,they can claim its an orphan work?? Or am I missing something here??

[chuckskull]

So basically if they can strip the metadata from any posted picture,they can claim its an orphan work?? Or am I missing something here??

If the music industries idea of "Diligent search" is anything to go by. Then pretty much yup. Expect to be fought in court if you try to assert ownership.

Adding invisible and near invisible watermarks is quite easy at least. Still it's something that people shouldn't need to do.

Compare and contrast this with the Digital Economy Act. The contrast shows up the actual agenda of copyright reform in a beautiful light.

[TheAnimus]

Hmm, well this is a difficult one. Effectively there isn't a legally accepted way of doing the due diligence. This is the failure imsho.

People are always going to re-use orphaned work, many internet memes which are almost cultural staples are used without permission, modified bits of others work.

Now you can watermark, exif etc, but people still will steal it, sometimes only just a crop. If its up on the net, many people think its up for grabs. Given the speed at which images are distributed and low cost of hosting, this is normal. Reddit pretty much demands people imgur it, before the DOS of love comes in and takes it offline.

The only one you can hope to try and control is commercial use. I think we need some kind of registry of ownership, that would allow image searching (ie you put in the image, often called reverse searching) to find out ownership details. This would provide commercial enterprises with no excuse in their due diligence.

As is, I hope there is a test case that demonstrates using googles reverse image search is a bare minimum for due diligence.

[mikerr]

As is, I hope there is a test case that demonstrates using googles reverse image search is a bare minimum for due diligence.

I've always thought normal google image search was a quick way to steal images anyway...

[TheAnimus]

Exactly, people are going to steal your pictures, because replication is too damned easy. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar, just how much of imgur's business is copied without permission!