Rama Rama wrote:
Hello everyone,
today one of my photographs was again published in a newspaper, without attribution nor licencing. I phoned the newspaper and it turns out that the photograph in question happened to be "in a photo database", without any further information (How it popped up there like this is anyone's guess, and I am investigating this question).
The interesting part is that the journalist told me that he had checked the metadata before publication. Having found nothing, he went on saying "all rights reserved". Hence the bit of interesting information:
If it was all rights reserved, why did they publish it? Did they had an agreement with the photo database to only provide them photos which they would be allowed to publish?
*we should use metadata to specify licencing and attribution information.*
I'll sleep a little bit less stupid tonight. --- Rama
Do you mean by uploaders before uploading, or an automatic transformation by the software?
The later then raises that the software doesn't really know which license has each image. We could add to thumbnails a generic "go to URL foo to know about author and license terms".
Which metadata format do you suggest to use? If doing automatically, there must be a format, if only to avoid adding a metadata entry for each reupload. And it's better to use something standarised.
Also, maybe those could be whitelisted. Resized images don't keep the original metadata due to large metadata of thumbnails. A patch for imagemagick would be needed.