Re: FW: Painted Wall Sundials Website

[John Pickard]

Title: Re: FW: Painted Wall Sundials Website

Good evening folk,   Interesting series of emails about taking images from web sites. Bill Thayer is 100% correct in what he says about intellectual property in the images. Like many other others, I've had my material stolen (yes, that is the correct word!) and plagiarised. The worst example was when I was asked to referee a paper for a scientific journal and it was MY ms. I had given a copy to a colleague from a country where IP is not highly regarded. He removed my name, inserted his, made a few changes, and sent it to the journal. To say I was miffed is an understatement.   My son is a commercial photographer and he has threatened legal action against a "client" who had ignored the licence conditions on his images. He currently has a website ( www.thomaspickard.com  ) and all the images displayed are watermarked. If you want a clean, high resolution image, then pay for it, or beg for a freebie.   As a university academic, I use images from websites in every lecture that I give. Today I gave two lectures, each 2 hours long. I would have used about 60 images, and of these, about 40 would have come from the web. Every slide in my presentation has the source URL on it. While I don't have permission, I at least acknowledge the source. As most come from government sites, I am not too concerned, but I realise that what I am doing is illegal.   If you want a nightmare of copyright and IP on images and other material, try some of the public libraries who have copies of old photos. I have seen the identical photo taken in 1910 in five different libraries, and each library is claiming copyright in the photo. What a load of bull! They may own the physical print, but they sure don't own the copyright! Having said that, it is irrelevant, because if you want a copy, then you sign the copyright form.   Getting back to where this all started ... many people are happy to have good images used on the rather wonderful PWS site. In hindsight, a link to the source may have been a good idea, but at the very least, an acknowledgement of the person who took the image is just plain good manners, and is nothing to do with legislation. Cheers, John   John Pickard [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ----- From: Bill Thayer To: Sundial-L Sent: Thursday, November 02, 2006 4:22 AM Subject: Re: FW: Painted Wall Sundials Website  I'm also sorry some photographers might get mifted that we did not mention their names. But in my opinion any photos I find googling on the internet are free game and I will copy them.  So sue me!  (not you Roger, I'm just venting.)  People shouldn't put photos on the internet and expect them to remain private.  At least I'm treating all photos and people equally by not giving any info on any of them.  So far, nobody has complained. Well, this is your first complaint. I'd intended to take it up with you privately, but since you've gone out of your way to bring up the subject then rub our noses in it, I don't see why I should. It is very easy to collect photos and throw them online without captions. It is also essentially uninformative. Yes, the work is in captioning, explaining, etc. But mostly, pirating the work of others is not an acceptable practice. Your opinion on the rights to photographs is not in accordance with the law in the US nor, very likely, in most any civilized countries: what you've done is infringement of copyright. The excuse that you believe that people placing material online are somehow expecting it to "remain private" is disingenuous. Any fool can see that the very intention of a person doing so is to make it public. You might as well claim that the authors of books, or movies, or music, shouldn't expect their work not to be pirated since it's clear they meant to keep it secret, and you're doing everybody a favor by copying it. In my case -- the photograph of the beautiful dial at Cesi in Umbria on my page    http://tinyurl.com/y7ow97 is my property (it's quite an excursion getting to that village, by the way, and I caught a horrific cold on it) and I am well within my rights to ask you to remove it from your page. Had you asked me beforehand by the way, I would have said sure, as I almost always do to requests of this kind. -- Bill Thayer http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/home.html --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial

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