Monetization idea and legal issue

[babyrats]

I guess there are too many legal black holes going down this route. I would be different from pininterest as it is a site that generally would have people with their own photographs (the site is information on a specific country), but yeah.. Lawyers scare me. I am still thinking going down the route of making a gallery, but scrap the idea of posters. I have seen a few sites be successful with gallerys even though they are obviously carrying copyright material and they are pretty large. I would link an example but it has NSFW content that some users may find offensive.

[akirk]

I would run a million miles from this without some tightly drawn legal terms / contract between you and each photo supplier...

I own and run a stock library of 80,000 historical images
I own and run a design business which uses photos
I am also a professional photographer

so I know this area very well...
some thoughts:

- you have no way of knowing if a photo uploaded is the property of the person uploading
- you can be liable for considerable costs if a photo is fraudently uploaded (photographer's legal costs / lost earnings (e.g. if photo was otherwise for sale exclusively) / damage to reputation (e.g. if photographer doesn't allow photos to be used for mass production) / damage to value of other works by the same photographer (e.g. if their work is only released in limited editions and you suddenly publish 20,000 of them!)) - in reality very little of this will apply - but all are possibilities...
- most serious photographers run a long way before signing over rights to a photo - especially to anyone planning to make money from that photo - why would they? profit sharing yes - ownership / etc. no.

Instead I would consider a split approach:

- let folks upload images to a gallery - much reduced set of issues
- licence photos from getty / corbis / etc. on your topic for resale - you will get a cut and the photos will be good and you can offer your service...
but don't use uploaded photos in any other way - you then become very much less liable...

Alasdair

[KenW3]

One problem stock photo sites (iStockPhoto.com, BigStockPhoto.com) have is people uploading images they do not have rights to, and saying it is theirs in an attempt to profit from other people's work. Those sites are for-profit, and are careful about what is sold. (I imagine they do make the occasional mistake.) Public domain photo sites are filled with copyrighted material, and are not monitored as closely. For PD images, I've used sxc.hu, commons.wikimedia.org, and gimp-savvy.com/PHOTO-ARCHIVE, but be very careful. (Don't tell anybody, but I recapture those images after downloading, and rename them to avoid identifiable fingerprints embedded within the files.)

I have read stories where litigious people have uploaded photos and then filed lawsuits against website owners who use their images - No notice, no C&D, no reports or prior contact. Personally, I have had people send emails claiming ownership of public domain material, demanding payment for use; These were, of course, attempts to make money from extortion. I maintain an IP spreadsheet to keep track of where everything on a site originated; It has been useful.

Photo recognition has become more of a tool in recent years. For the history I know, it evolved out of a need for facial recognition in Las Vegas (and other) casinos around the world to enforce the Casino Black Book and other blacklists. Governments have taken to the technology quite readily. It is a matter of faster processor speeds (and added SE algorithms) before facial recognition, and keyframe analysis of video, allow search engines to determine duplicate content for these two areas.

A new site, just discovered through a blog post linked from EP, is TinEye.com. This is a reverse image search site. I tested it using graphics posted to eBay listings; It did very well at recognition, so I installed their browser plugin.

[Kay]

Ken, the stock photo site I use insists on hi-res submissions and has very particular rules about what they'll accept or not. I don't see how anyone could just steal something from another website and say it's theirs if they don't have the original to submit in the correct format. I suppose it's possible to buy a hi-res version from a stock photo site so you have that and then try to sell it elsewhere as though it's your own work. But hi-res images are expensive to buy and I can't really imagine that many of the thieves would do that.

Maybe some of the stock photo sites aren't so fussy? Perhaps that's the answer.

[Kay]

Still on the subject of copyright, even though I was doing something different at the time..

I was reading an interesting article about the generation gap in technology - it's worth a read. I found the comments about digital natives as opposed to digital immigrants quite interesting. I was also amused by the cartoon at the top of the page. And there was a credit, including a link, to the site where the image had been taken from. That seemed a bit of a cheek to me, as though the author of the article thought it was OK to lift any content from someone else's site as long as they give them a link. What? That's not OK at all! It's not "fair use".

Anyway, as it happened, the first and only comment so far included this:

Hey, thanks for the credit with the image from Stolen Droids. However, credit where credit is due, the comic itself is from the great Bill Porter (http://www.billporterdesign.com/lollygaggin/). I realized myself that I had forgotten to give him credit when I used it. Oops.

He forgot? Huh? I wonder how the professional artist Bill Porter would feel about his work being freely taken and posted by anyone who likes the look of it. Not only that, but also being credited to someone else. Unfortunately, I couldn't find information on Bill Porter's blog about what, if any, his conditions are for use of his artwork.

Why do so many people seem to think that anything on the Internet is up for grabs and an invitation to help yourself for free? And how could Pinterest possibly think it would be OK to create a business around encouraging people to post other people's content?