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:
*we should use metadata to specify licencing and attribution information.*
I'll sleep a little bit less stupid tonight. --- Rama
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.
On 06/12/2007, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
Do you mean by uploaders before uploading, or an automatic transformation by the software?
Realistically uploaders isn't going to work very few understand metadata.
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".
Seems reasonable as long as it doesn't clash with existing metadata.
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?
I assume they had. How the image went to come in such a database withour the information totally beats me, though.
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".
Yes, at upload time, automatically. It should be possible to request that a fields "author" and "licence" be filled and to automatically update the corresponding EXIF tags if they are void. Or even to have some elementary data-mining component that would extract the data from Template:information and such things.
And maybe advertise the issue to users, pointing to easy ways to EXIF-tag the images.
-- Rama
On 07/12/2007, Rama Rama ramaneko@gmail.com wrote:
Yes, at upload time, automatically. It should be possible to request that a fields "author" and "licence" be filled and to automatically update the corresponding EXIF tags if they are void. Or even to have some elementary data-mining component that would extract the data from Template:information and such things.
That would be cool, but not likely to happen for a while (but don't let that stop you opening a bug report :)).
And maybe advertise the issue to users, pointing to easy ways to EXIF-tag the images.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Manipulating_meta_data
Unfortunately users are already rather "overwhelmed" with issues being advertised at them.
Anyway let us know if you find out any more about this mysterious database, Rama.
cheers Brianna
On 06/12/2007, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Unfortunately users are already rather "overwhelmed" with issues being advertised at them.
And in this case the copyright violation appears indistinguishable from someone taking something just because they can.
If they're US-based, a DMCA notice will work very well.
- d.