Hybrid cars: some online resources -- (& Priuschat plug!

Re: Hybrid cars: some online resources -- (& Priuschat p

Notice how they mention websites about hybrids... yet they used a photo from my website without permission and didn't even mention where they got it from.

 

Re: Hybrid cars: some online resources -- (& Priuschat p

John,

I'm fairly sure I got the picture off Greenhybrid.com - it's very possible they got it from you (or that you posted it there).

Anyway, first of all, I did link to your website a couple of days ago (http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/05/how_green_is_yo.php), if you are not happy about the linking just let me know and I'll stop using your website as resource..

But what you have to understand is that Treehugger.com posts between 10 and 15 stories per week day and a handful during the weekend. We are bloggers, not a professional news team. We don't have the time nor the resources to ask permission and and give credit to all the photos that we find on google images or elsewhere (although sometimes we do, or find a way to fit a link to the website like I did with yours - but not all the time).

If you are unhappy about us using your photo, just tell me and I'll replace it by something else.

Regards,

Mike

 

Re: Hybrid cars: some online resources -- (& Priuschat p

You should find the time. Photos, like most works, are copyrighted automatically (in the US, at least). I'd hate to see someone hit you with a nastygram for copyright violations.

Wikipedia, by the way, is a great place to find free to use images. Just click the image and it should tell you what license Wikipedia is using it under.

(I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.)

 

Wait till you guys get a "cease and desist" letter from an offended copyright holder...

You can get sued for that, and having your own website, you should know that.

 

Re: Hybrid cars: some online resources -- (& Priuschat p

I have 4 years of law school (in Canada) behind me, I know about these things.

But I also have 10 years of internet experience behind me and I know that if the letter of the law had to be respected as far as copyrights go, the Internet wouldn't exist. We couldn't even link to websites without permission (thankfully the courts cleared that up).

Our stance at Treehugger is that our stories are usually positive and people are usually happy to get the exposure, but if someone's unhappy; no problem, we'll remove the picture. A cease and desist letter is exactly what it says: you must cease what you are doing, and we have no problem doing that if someone's unhappy and lets us know.

But do some browsing on the net (forums/private websites/blog/etc.. even many corporate websites) and ask yourself how many of these pictures and texts are free of copyright or were cleared with the copyright holder. Hell, I'm not even sure Google News clears all the rights of what it uses. We just don't have time to track down the author of all images and find a working email, and then maybe wait for a week for a reply that might never come from someone that might not be the owner of the photo. Nor do 99.999% (with a margin of error of 0.001%) of all bloggers. We're not the BBC.

We always link to websites when we talk about their stories and use quotes from their text, but with photos.. We just can't have a paragraph at the end of all our posts saying where all the photos come from. Esp. since in many cases the photos were found on websites that aren't even the original owners...

Such is life.

 

Re: Hybrid cars: some online resources -- (& Priuschat p

GreenHybrid took the photo from my website, without providing a link to the source. My work goes to waste if people see a photo and don't have any idea where more can be found.

Please add a credit mention.

 

Re: Hybrid cars: some online resources -- (& Priuschat p

But you have the link already. Why not just include it?

Interesting attitude.

 

Re: Hybrid cars: some online resources -- (& Priuschat p

I'll do so because I like your website and you asked, but I hope that you are writing to Greenhybrid.com right now and asking them to give credit to the owners of all the pictures they use on their website and to the owners of PriusChat.com to ask them to strictly forbid anyone to post any copyrighted text or pictures in their forums.

Have you read anything that I wrote? If you succeed in changing the internet, good for you, but until then, some photos will be used online without permission from the copyright holder, and that's a good thing -- not having to go through a month of red tape to publish a one paragraph story is what allows everyday people to have a voice in the cyber-wilderness and what makes the internet such fertile ground. When IP rights become absolute (they were never meant to even go as far as they go now, btw) and all ideas and information are locked down securely by their owners, only people with money and/or resources will have a voice and our culture will be stuck knee deep in molasse.

Now of course etiquette is important and whenever I write a story about a photo or in which the photo plays an important role, I will credit it, just like I always credit quotes and links articles I write about. But when the photo is just there to provide background visuals (like random wind turbines in an article about windmills or a panda is an article about endangered species), I won't start tracking down the geocities or 5 years old China Daily page I found the photo on -- if the owner isn't happy, no problem, he can write us.

I suggest you read _Free Culture_ by Lawrence Lessig. The book is available freely online as a PDF (under Creative Commons license) or can be bought in libraries.

LEGAL NOTICE: The text above is wholly owned by the copyright holder (Mikhail Capone) except for sections which are clearly indentified as being quotations. The text may not be duplicated in part or in full in any part of this website (priuschat.com) or anywhere else for the complete duration of the period under which the copyright applies. The start of the copyright period is now (05/23/2005, 23:45 Eastern time) and standard duration of 50 years after the death of the author applies.

 

actually many professional sites have various requirements for using their sites and no one should use any info that is not theirs without saying where it came from.

some are simple like requiring a link with the article where a reader can go read the article in full. others want you to ask permission and some will charge you for all uses personal or professional.

but there are many many gray areas especially when the use is not for commercial reasons.

 

Fair use usually applies in a non-commercial context. What exactly is fair use in each case can sometimes be hard to know, though.

Blogging is currently in a legal void, and I seriously doubt that enforcement would be possible even if some strict jurisprudence was to emerge. How do you stop granny with a blog about flowers to use a picture of a daisy she found on google?

All of this can go very far easily: When you search on google, they show you excerpts from the pages on your "result page", and if you click on "cached", you have the whole page cached on google's servers. Should they ask for permission? Google Images shows you thumbnails of pictures. Google News gives you excerpts and photos. Etc. And Google is a business making billions.

 

So what? That doesn't change the fact that it's illegal. It's also impolite. Net courtesy is net courtesy. Since the source was known it's not only impolite and illegal it's also lazy not to acknowledge the source. In a hurry? You make the time. Or as they say....you don't have enough time to do it right the first time but you have enough time to do it over to fix it?

So what? Maybe we should all start ignoring traffic signals? If enough of us do it then the law doesn't apply?

And that was a violation of copyright. And I almost posted a reply about it but decided to be polite and let those who monitor the website be the Forum Mommy.

With music it's 10 seconds or 10%(?) whichever is shorter. You can post a few sentences or a paragraph and should provide a link back to the entire article. In fact, those directions are given in the news section. If priuschat violated copyright and gets caught this site could be shut down. It is up to all posters to follow copyright restrictions as closely as possible. I know. Another forum I posted on had a poster who routinely copy/pasted entire articles. Well, the forum got a cease and desist from the New York Times. She finally got it through her thick head that if she continued to violate copyright and ignore those who constantly warned her we'd ALL lose our forum.

And copyright law.

And it's the law.

I've got several websites of my own. I track down the source of any photos I use and get permission or I use my own photos. I use my own artwork. I do my own writing. I even ask permission of sites to link to them. If everyone followed netiquette and was polite about asking and citing we probably wouldn't need copyright law. But there it is.

And in case anyone should bring this up.....profit doesn't enter in to anything. Just because you're not "making any money" doesn't allow you to use or reproduce copyrighted materials. Just thought I'd throw that in because it seems to be a real common myth on the internet.

This is probably a good discussion to have with the impending T-shirt design looming. The safest route to go is with all original artwork. If a Prius goes on the shirt, it should be a photoshop version of a photo of someone's car and not "borrowed" from a website already photo ready.

 

Re: Hybrid cars: some online resources -- (& Priuschat p

Then you should know better.

I don't know about Canadian law, but I'll be money the courts didn't say people could copy/paste/post anything they borrowed without citing sources. Nor would it open the door to copyright violation.

I believe you're just being asked to acknowledge the source. I'm sure Greenhybrid will be asked to do the same. Leading by example is a valuable in a lot of ways. Including setting an example to people of a how a legal and courteous website is run.

Corporate? All if they know what's good for them. Anyone remember reading about what happened to the model who posed for the coffee? How many million did he get when he found his picture plastered all over the supermarket?

I'll bet it does.

Then maybe you should reconsider posting the pictures until you can track down the legal copyright holder. You wouldn't want people copying and pasteing entire articles from your site without saying where they got them or providing a link back, now, do you?

Then I think you need to revisit your policy.

Life is what you make it.

 

Re: Hybrid cars: some online resources -- (& Priuschat p

If you took 2 seconds to check, you'd see that I did, and that I said that I would do it (or remove the picture) when asked.

 

By educating Granny.

I think of it this way. (Time for car analogy)

When cars were first invented there weren't that many. You learned to drive on your own or from someone who knew more than you. You used common sense and courtesy. There weren't all that many laws because there weren't that many cars and they didn't go that fast.

But as more and more people drove cars and they went faster and faster common courtesy and common sense wasn't enough. Thus we got traffic lights in red, green and yellow, stop signs, turn signals, right of way and yielding. Etc. You get my drift.

So it isn't enough that Granny knows how to drive a car. Now she must take a written test to prove she knows the traffic laws and she must demonstrate that she can safely operate a vehicle. But that's not enough. She must actually obey those traffic laws. Because if a cop catches her running stop signs and red lights she's going to get a ticket. And if she doesn't pay or show up to court they'll take her license. And if she drives without a license and gets caught...she goes to jail.

The internet has expanded exponentially. Those that know need to educate those that don't so knowledge also increases exponentially. Because if we don't police ourselves the government is going to do it. And that last thing we want is the government regulating the internet any more than they already do.

 

actually it is very common practice. in fact one major university study cited greater than 50% of term papers contained plagiarised info from the net. and uncited material is exactly that ... plagiarism

from Wikipedia.com

There is some difference of opinion over how much credit must be given when preparing a newspaper article or historical account. Generally, reference is made to original source material as much as possible, and writers avoid taking credit for others' work.

The use of mere facts, rather than works of creative expression, does not constitute plagiarism. For the latter, the issue of public domain works versus copyrighted works is irrelevant to the concept of plagiarism. For instance, it is legal for a student to copy several paragraphs (or even pages) of text from a public domain book, such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and then directly add these quotations to his or her own paper. However if these quotations were not clearly identified as to his or her source, then the student would be guilty of plagiarism, using another writer's work as if it were his or her own. High schools, colleges and universities are especially sensitive to plagiarism, and as a result, they have academic codes of ethics (honor codes) which prohibit plagiarism in all its forms.

Similarly, it is considered plagiarism to take the specifics of someone else's novel idea, and then present it as one's own work. This type of plagiarism frequently occurs in high schools, colleges and universities, when, for example, students use the analyses in "CliffsNotes" and falsely present them as being their own original analysis. A small market has emerged of web sites offering essays and papers for sale to students, while a counter-industry has developed of companies offering services for instructors to compare a student's papers to a database of sources and search for potential plagiarism.

Moreover, just as there can be plagiarism without lawbreaking, it's possible to violate copyright law without plagiarizing. For example, one could distribute the full text of a current bestseller on the Internet while giving clear credit for it to the original author, financially damaging the author and publisher. In this respect, the mere fact that a piece of text is not plagiarized may not suffice to justify its use.