Bob Blakely said: I don't think it's theft.... [And then continued, probably unwittingly, to insult the female members of the group. Snip... OUCH!! Snip... OUCH!!]
Hi Bob, The particular fellow in question did take someone else's copyrighted, legally published creative work, and used it without permission for commercial purposes. That violates the fair use provisions of US copyright law. Certainly, that constitutes theft, does it not? (He also appears to represent it as his own creative work, which is plagiarism -- but I don't believe plagiarism is illegal, just immoral.) Certainly, one might also argue that this fellow is technically guilty of "theft of services" -- Boz, or Dario, or their respective ISPs, are stuck paying for the bandwidth usage for all of this fellow's prospective customers who are linking to the improperly referenced images. The fact that this fellow "only provided a link" is not particularly relevant. Haven't the big image-harvesting sites been successfully sued for doing essentially the same thing? Your examples about images for new items are interesting. You're right -- a picture of a new item in a catalog is only representative, and it certainly isn't the actual item you will receive when you make a purchase. Nonetheless, an ethical manufacturer ~pays~ for product photography. When you buy a new rifle, Sturm-Ruger (or Winchester, or Remington, or H&H, or whoever) has already paid someone for the product photography, and this is built into the price. When your brother sells high-end Adirondack chairs, he's paid someone to do product photography, or he's expended a certain effort doing it himself. Likewise, the cost of this work is built into ~his~ product price. This eBay fellow didn't seek any sort of permission, or offer to provide any sort of compensation, for the creative work involved in producing the product photography. And you can be sure he won't share any of the profits with the fellows who did the product photography. That's the issue in a nutshell. Smells like theft to me. Bill Peifer Rochester, NY P.S. Bob, please note that wrote the heading to this note with a <VBG> and a smiley ;-) -- I'm only being funny and pullin' yer leg about the snip-snip, ouch-ouch stuff -- but you're probably gonna catch hell from the ladies in the group.... - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
