eBay as a reference :(

[Daniel Beardsmore]

eBay (and other auction sites, but mostly eBay for anyone in the US and Europe) serves very well as a temporary source of product information. Temporary! For example, take:

[wiki]Datalux SpaceSaver[/wiki]

One referenced auction (Tiruc) has disappeared completely. One ("G2") is still there but all the images are missing, and the auction title doesn't even reference the model number, so it's a pretty flimsy reference now, and not legitimately something that we can keep, leaving unreferenced information (which is really bad). I know that it was a valid reference at the time, but not any longer.

What I'm trying to remember to do these days is archive the photos before they disappear completely; with these I always include the auction URL and title, and the seller's identity.

In two cases, I've uploaded the images to my own website here:

http://telcontar.net/Misc/KBref/

This way, I can offload the copyright violation responsibility to me: no stolen images are actually posted on the wiki, only references to an external website. It doesn't make me a lot happier, but for example with the FK-1001, I literally cannot find any trace of that keyboard's existence anywhere outside of that auction and the FCC. That's the only photo anyone has ever taken of one, so far as I can tell, and the only person who's ever admitted to owning one.

I don't know what the answer is. I don't have an eBay account (and I've vowed never to use it) so it's a touch difficult to obtain permission to reproduce images, although on a couple of occasions I have done: one seller could be contacted via their website, and the other happened to use the same name on Flickr.

I could create an eBay account, but it would never have any reputation as a buyer or seller, so I would always look rather suspect.

Maybe reputable buyers here could ask sellers after products are sold, so they don't appear to be trying to do anything sneaky. HaaTa did try this with the owner of two auctions for FK-2001s with the funny Alps switches, but sadly no response, so those photos will be going on my Naughty Page once the auctions finally disappear completely. (They're long since sold, but the photos were still up last time I checked.)

Obviously this is why it's so fundamentally important for people to post their photos to the wiki wherever possible, so that we can avoid this mess as much as we can, but all too often there are items that no-one here or at geekhack is known to own (nor people like Sandy, whose photos we can use) and there are no permanent websites to use as references.

(There's another fascinating photo that was posted by an OCN user to Imgur, and all that's left is Google Image Search's thumbnail, large enough to clearly see everything I need to see, but impossible to use as reference. Imgur truly suck; I wish people would post images directly to forums where they shouldn't *cough* rootworm *cough* ever get lost … Sadly the person who posted it is still around but refuses to answer requests to restore the image. If I ever find him I'm going to force-feed him those sugar-free Gummi Bears as punishment.)

[wheybags]

TBH, I'd just put the photos on the wiki...
noone will complain
#yolo

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Does fair use cover that? I guess maybe it does, and they're only throwaway images to the seller. I'm happy to post them all to the wiki if there's a way I can do this legally.

#IANAL

[wheybags]

My point is it's probably not technically legal, but like... noone is going to complain

[Daniel]

I think your solution (Copying the images to one of your own servers) is the only practicable one.
Posting images with unclear copyright directly to the wiki is a no-go.

My point is it's probably not technically legal, but like... noone is going to complain

There only needs one person who feels offended by the usage of picture of his. No one wants to do paper work in his spare time and communicate with lawyers... I think monetary claims wouldn't be the worst of such a situation but the paperwork and effort needed to sort it out.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

What's worse is that, while I'm aiming to archive what's left, a) nobody has access to my archived images, and b) how does anyone know when an auction or its images have disappeared?

Should I pre-emptively re-host all images from day one and never reference eBay, i.e. indirect via my website *to* eBay? That won't work for anyone else here who wishes to reference eBay — every person will need to find somewhere different to stick them. I'm just accustomed to having my own website, as I have done for years.

Maybe we all need to configure Google (or other search engine) to exclude eBay so that we are never in position where we need to unlearn something that was returned from eBay, since it really sucks to be given knowledge that we can't reference in the future.

The only other option is to save a complete copy (as in, all the billions of files) of every auction page, although that potentially won't have the interactivity needed to view full-size images, sometimes necessary to read off model numbers etc. I don't know how well eBay works with browser save, though there's always print to PDF as a desperate last resort.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I'm going through all the eBay references — fortunately in quite a few cases I'm able to find similar images elsewhere.

Pages where I can't find a stable reference (i.e. NOT an auction), I'm putting here:

http://deskthority.net/wiki/Category:Pa ... references

My hope is that people in the community will use the article content to produce fresh photos and upload those, so that we have permanent images confirming that what's written on the pages in question are in fact true.

[jacobolus]

It might be possible to write a little scraper script that would pull any references to ebay pages that get added to the wiki, and go download the description text and any images, and host them somewhere else.

[jacobolus]

Posting images with unclear copyright directly to the wiki is a no-go.

Copying auction images to the wiki is almost certainly “fair use”, at least under US copyright laws.

But additionally, no ebay seller is going to care about this at all, so it’s highly unlikely the question will ever come up. If someone complains, we can pull down the offending image.

[jacobolus]

(There's another fascinating photo that was posted by an OCN user to Imgur, and all that's left is Google Image Search's thumbnail, large enough to clearly see everything I need to see, but impossible to use as reference. Imgur truly suck;...)

If it’s gone from Imgur, that means the OCN user himself probably asked them to take it down. They don’t otherwise disappear content.

[bhtooefr]

Register for eBay, and send the seller a message asking for permission to use their photos. You don't have to buy or sell to do that.

[Touch_It]

What sort of copy right laws does using a program like, lets say snip it to take a screenshot, break? Not that I've done this but, hey, if it doesn't break any laws.

[Muirium]

Safe to say that copying without asking the right holder breaks a few copyright laws! Always ask permission for this sort of thing. (And archive the file yourself even if you don't get it! Might come in handy eventually…)

[ramnes]

Depends what law. And depends where is hosted DT.

A good solution would be to mention something like this in the wiki: "Wiki pages are made by users of all around the world, and do not imply DT administrators responsability. Images always belongs to their author. If you are the author and don't want your picture to be there, please contact us here.", etc.

Basically, I don't see how anyone could have any trouble with something like this.

And even if someone contact you, you just remove the pictures. DT is non-profit, I don't see how it could be accused of profiting other people pictures for a knowledge base.

[bhtooefr]

Any signatory to the Berne Convention will consider the work copyrighted. That means all of Europe, and most of the world, really.

[wheybags]

it's fiiiiiine
literally noone will ever notice, and if they do they will _never_get lawyers involved in the AMAZINGLY unlikely instance that they actually care
Even if they did, they'd send a takedown notice, we'd take it down, all's well

[ramnes]

it's fiiiiiine
literally noone will ever notice, and if they do they will _never_get lawyers involved in the AMAZINGLY unlikely instance that they actually care
Even if they did, they'd send a takedown notice, we'd take it down, all's well

Yeah.

[kbdfr]

[…] And even if someone contact you, you just remove the pictures. DT is non-profit, I don't see how it could be accused of profiting other people pictures for a knowledge base.

That's not the way it works.
It is not a matter of profiting from the pictures, but a matter of infringing upon the owner's rights,
so the question is not what the profit is for you, but what the harm is for the owner.

And it is more than you would expect.
In the case of bootleg recordings, the actual objective damage is obviously the sum all recipients of the work together would have paid if buying from the owner - even if the bootlegger has distributed the work without any profit at all.
In the case of photos, one of the components of the damage is the price which the owner could theoretically have obtained by licensing his work, and this is of course not for the illegal user of the work to decide.

[Madhias]

Once a good friend of mine (I know... stories from someone else) used an Ebay picture for his own sale and had to pay then about € 800 - a bill from the lawyer of the original image owner. So that could happen!

[jacobolus]

It is not a matter of profiting from the pictures, but a matter of infringing upon the owner's rights,
so the question is not what the profit is for you, but what the harm is for the owner. And it is more than you would expect. [...] In the case of photos, one of the components of the damage is the price which the owner could theoretically have obtained by licensing his work, and this is of course not for the illegal user of the work to decide.

In theory this sounds reasonable. In practice, it’s almost always nonsense.

No one is going to make a fortune licensing their shitty cellphone pics of shit they sold on ebay. The value of these photos to the author is vanishingly close to zero.

It’s easy to make a case that any use of such photos on Deskthority falls under the fair use provisions of US copyright law. (Dunno about other places in the world.) But in any event, nobody is going to be suing Deskthority for $$$ over this. Even if they could clear out Deskthority’s entire membership fee collection, it wouldn’t cover their legal costs.

In general the worst thing likely to happen is someone demands their photo be taken down, and then it gets taken down, problem solved.


Basically, Wikipedia at some point decided that, as a very high profile and international organization, they had to dot all their i's and cross all their t's, because otherwise some litigious assholes would come after them. As a result, they started deleting all the perfectly fine fair use images, because it wasn’t worth someone’s trouble to figure out where the fair use line could be drawn. Wikipedia has to do this because, as one of the most popular sites on the internet, they’re a big target. They don’t really have that much money, but it’s enough to be attractive to a certain brand of crazy person, and any lawsuit involving Wikipedia would get a bunch of attention.

Then all the overly pedantic rule-driven nerds on the rest of the internet got the mistaken idea that they needed to copy Wikipedia’s exacting standards for their little hobby sites. Oh well.

The world copyright regime, and the surrounding culture of fear, is such a pile of bullshit.

[kbdfr]

[...] In the case of photos, one of the components of the damage is the price which the owner could theoretically have obtained by licensing his work, and this is of course not for the illegal user of the work to decide.

[…] No one is going to make a fortune licensing their shitty cellphone pics of shit they sold on ebay. The value of these photos to the author is vanishingly close to zero.

This is the typical argument (guess why I had written exactly that) of illegal users wanting to decide themselves on the value of photos made by others. While allegedly being "shitty cellphone pics of shit […]", obviously they are still good enough to be used - but just not good enough to be paid for.

It’s easy to make a case that any use of such photos on Deskthority falls under the fair use provisions of US copyright law.

No, it's not. For example, when copying a photo (it's not always eBay), you can never be sure those who published it didn't license them themselves from the copyright holder. There is a risk there because in this case, the value of the photo is documented.

In the times of analog photography, I was once engaged by a reporter to take a few photos (relating to a particular sport I practised at the time) for him. One of my photos was published in his newspaper and, if I remember correctly, they paid 300DM (actual equivalent would be around 300€) for just a non-exclusive one-time right to publish that one photo. Mind you, I've never been a professional photographer, and the photo wasn't even very good.

The world copyright regime, and the surrounding culture of fear, is such a pile of bullshit.

The copyright rules protect artistic and intellectual creation against all those who find they have a damn right to profit at no cost from anything made by others.
But well, people also want to use streets, bridges, schools and police and judicial protection, but not to pay taxes.
[still grumbling about all those cheapos claiming it as a right not to pay for anything]

[jacobolus]

In the times of analog photography, I was once engaged by a reporter to take a few photos (relating to a particular sport I practised at the time) for him. One of my photos was published in his newspaper and, if I remember correctly, they paid 300DM (actual equivalent would be around 300€) for just a non-exclusive one-time right to publish that one photo. Mind you, I've never been a professional photographer, and the photo wasn't even very good.

You can’t see the difference between explicitly contracted event photography for a newspaper vs. photos from an ebay listing being used on a non-profit wiki?

The copyright rules protect artistic and intellectual creation against all those who find they have a damn right to profit at no cost from anything made by others.

They really don’t. What they mostly protect is a small handful of extremely rich corporations, who lock away our cultural heritage for ~100 years so they can profit.

Any marginal benefits accruing to small-time creators are accidental.

For something like out of focus pictures of used keyboards, whatever, who cares, it’s mostly irrelevant. But when it comes to, e.g., access to 50 year old scientific papers (or IMO even culturally important art, music, writing, ...), the copyright system becomes downright evil.

The natural state of affairs is for published creations to be in the public domain (“published” has public right there in the word). Copyright is a government grant of an artificial monopoly on production/distribution of works, with the idea being that such a grant encourages cultural production, because people need some guarantees about profiting from their own creations, or they wouldn’t bother making them in the first place. In the US, copyright term was originally 14 years, with possible extension for another 14 years. Creators were required to post explicit copyright notice.

Copyright was never intended to be an unlimited monopoly though; the copyright term is supposed to balance the public’s interest to have access to the work against the creator’s need to be compensated for it. Unfortunately, because obscure areas of the law are now dominated by corporate interests rather than the public interest, copyright has lost any semblance of balance. The combination of automatic copyright and copyright terms lasting about a century are a cancer, stealing our collective heritage and impoverishing us all for the sake of a small number of very very wealthy people.

[seebart]

Unfortunately, because obscure areas of the law are now dominated by corporate interests rather than the public interest, copyright has lost any semblance of balance.

Yes that about sums it up. That's why there are lawyers who specialize copyright law for these very wealthy corporations and try to "appy" and "warp" the copyright laws to the sole interest of corporations. Outdated laws can in fact be a real burden when abused.

[kbdfr]

[…] Any marginal benefits accruing to small-time creators are accidental.[…]

That is complete bullshit. All photographers, authors, journalists, translators, song writers, singers, painters, poets, designers, even bloggers and the like, all creators benefit from protection of artistic and/or intellectual property, even if the creation activity is not their principal activity.

[…] a cancer, stealing our collective heritage and impoverishing us all for the sake of a small number of very very wealthy people.

To you "copyright" is just for the benefit of big business wanting to make money out of mankind's cultural heritage,
but strangely enough, this is your exact argument for refusing to pay (or even to ask permission) for the use of simple photos (not belonging to mankind's cultural heritage - "shitty cellphone pics of shit", as you put it yourself ) made by everyday people (not big business).
So where's the logic?

You're just claiming the right to use others' stuff at no cost, that's as simple as that.

[Muirium]

Yup. The onus isn't on the creator to prove what they have lost, but on the content user to seek permission first.

[seebart]

You're just claiming the right to use others' stuff at no cost, that's as simple as that.

I'm not sure if that's what jacobolus means, I can only speak for myself.Copyright laws are generally clear and apply. I'm sure the laws vary quite a bit in different countries. And then there is that "new" thing called the internet which crosses borders like the wind. I'm sure that calles for a whole new law book the size of the 5th continent. A situation made nice and complex by humans as usual.

These day's there's so much media floating around it's become a challenge keep track. But the laws are still applicable.

[Muirium]

I'm inclined to agree to that, too. Obviously, the way I often [img]inline[/img] images around here without asking permission for their use exposes the fact I've got my own ideas about when freeloading is fair or not! Hypocrite that I am. There's still some clear rules though. I'd never use someone else's photography for a sale without their permission. (Is that the sound of kbdfr opening up a new tab to check my record?) And I'd rather have their go ahead if I'm using pictures in an informative fashion, like the Honeywell thread. But I'm too lazy to go chase after green lights for funny stuff (likely the majority of all my inlined image links) and as soon as that's the case, I don't credit either. Nor am I copying their files, however. I draw another line at that.

I haven't really thought about this before. But yeah, I seem to assume that linking to (and embedding) a file somewhere else isn't the same thing as actually copying it and hosting elsewhere. Computers and the internet make this complex, though. As every image you see in your browser is a local copy of course! Where does browsing end and piracy begin? Bugger me if I know.

[bhtooefr]

A forum discussion and a wiki are really different contexts, though, I'd argue, a forum discussion having lower standards of formality.

The fun one with hotlinking vs. rehosting is that hotlinking is legally safer, but rehosting doesn't use the original host's bandwidth and is seen as more polite.

That said, for a wiki, make sure your licenses are in place. You never know who will end you just to make a buck.

[kbdfr]

You may copy an original work (photocopy a book, for example, or save a pic or audio file to your computer) for yourself, provided of course your source is not an illegal copy itself.

But as soon as you make the copy available to others, you are publishing it, thus infringing on the owner's right to dispose of it as they wish (for example modify it, cease to make it public, sell it or even destroy it). Intellectual property entails, as material property does, the right of the owner to make (subject of course to applicable legal restrictions) whatever use of it they deem fit.

I don't see anything reprehensible to that. After all, when I made photos of e.g. a guitar to sell it on eBay, I did my best to make them look great (they were by no means "shitty cellphone pics of shit", here again the typical argument of illegal users curiously depreciating others' work at the very moment they want to use it). If even years later I end finding them horrible and decide to delete them, anybody who has copied and published them prevents me from doing exactly that because I have no power of disposal over the copies.

So they have ceased to be mine. They are now possessed (without being owned) by those who appropriated them for themselves.
This is called "theft" when relating to material property.
But curiously it is claimed to be OK when relating to intellectual property.

[seebart]

oh man I will be thinking about all this the next time I spontaneously want to [img]IMG[/img] something! This is a serious matter that tends to be forgotten, ignored and belittled!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royalty-free

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... _resources