Comments
about copyright
Case studies :
copyright and commercial right (III)
1. LUXORION website
The permission to
reproduce documents published on this website is reserved, i.e. subject
to conditions, and is thus not automatically granted.
See the FAQ for details.
In concrete terms,
having legally registered the whole content of this website (name, URL,
texts and images), without convincing opposition, to eyes of Court I am
the creator and thus the sole owner of documents that I claim the paterny,
including face to a forgery. It is an authentic right.
In addition, as
author and due to commercial concerns, texts and images are protected by publishing and copyrights
registered by the French right company Aegeus at
National Library and to Department of Interior (Home Office). These rights are thus better protected than a
registering to a notary. It
stands to reason that if we discover an infringement of our
copyrights, we will initiate legal proceedings.
It
has been agreed with several responsibles of Internet websites and
moderated newsgroups of small or large audience established in
Belgium, France, Switzerland and the U.S.A that they will attend to
the respect of my rights and will not allow the reproduction of
copyrighted material on their servers without my first written
consent, mention of copyright or paiment of a license, depending on
the case. Any copy without mention of copyright, notwithstanding the
other legal information, will be considered as a plagiarism, and the
violation sued as it.
Unless you read the contrary,
due to different claims for plagarism addressed to several amateurs, I do not
more grant permission to use my documents to members or moderators of
newsgroups (forums), responsibles of blogs and RSS(1).
This decision prevails on the one from the publishing house within
the limits of the commercial agreement.
However, we can find a mutual arrangement if needed. See
the FAQ
for details. In case of any doubt, contact me by email
*before* any use, explaining me the frame of your action and giving me
the URL of your site for evaluation.
2.
Pictures of Albert Einstein taken by Philippe Halsman
Let's
imagine
that you want to publish a book about the theory of relativity. How
to know what law applies (e.g. copyright or fair use), and in the
first case, how to get the right to reproduce a portrait of Einstein, like the one
displayed below ?
All depends on
the purpose of the publication (commercial or not). Consider a book
or an article for the general public. Recall that an
illustration in a book in connection with its subject is not
considered as "commercial".
Einstein
Foundation, actually the Hebrew University, is the copyright
holder of all Einstein work. According to her responsible, B.W.,
Hebrew University controls the commercial exploitation of Einstein's
image (which means much more than just pictures showing
Einstein). Most pictures of Einstein at Princeton like this one from
1947 were taken by Philippe Halsman. He is represented by Steve Bello, NY, who controls reproductions.
Most pictures are archived at Library
of Congress.
If
you don't use the picture of Einstein for commercial purpose, which
is well the case, then Einstein Foundation or Library of Congress is not
involved. Like for any copyright, you have only to ask
the Halsman
Estate for permission (represented by Magnum
Photos agency in Europe). Usually this use requires the paiment
of a fee.
|
Doing
a positive review of a product like of this signal analyzer
and multi-mode decoder sold by SkySweep
is a good way to get all permissions you need from the
publisher or the manufacturer, and in this case, a free
evaluation copy of their software too. |
3.
Private companies
At first sight we
imagine that documents released on the
Internet by private companies or public institutions are freely distributed
in the community (many owners of blogs think that...). Not at all !
In
fact all documents released on Internet or elsewhere belong to an author and
cannot be used without their permission and mention of sources (the insertion of a credit
line). Hopefully, most authors will grant you this permission, including
enterprises for which this can be considered as a free publicity for
their product.
Indeed,
being given that you virtually help them in their business
as many readers will connect to their website after reading your
comments, you can download what you want or almost from their website without their
permission, or better, after have requested it a first time.
Their only
wishes are legitimate and understandable like to insert a link to
their website, what you did, and to not give a negative review of
their product, what is logical in the frame of this gentleman agreement.
4.
Scientific institutes
Generally
speaking, scientific institutes are public research centers (NASA, CNRS,
observatories, analysis labs, etc). They receive grants for the national
or federal government. Some of these governmental
agencies carry out applied research, audit control or support to
users who bought their products (NOAA, Meteo France, Solar
Terrestrial Dispatch, etc).
All
these institutes release documentation and sometimes sell products
(articles, books, prints, services, etc). Pratically all them have a
website were we can found scientific data and sometimes query online
databases (USGS, NOAA, SPIDR, European Commission, etc).
|
Synoptic
chart analysed by the Met
Office and adapted by the author to illustrate an article
about Tchernobyl. |
In
the case of the London Met
Office, all documents are protected by the Crown
Copyright. Like any intellectual work, the use of their
product (synoptic chart, satellite picture, forecast, etc)
is subject to the paiment of a fee and the concerned
document has to mention the source (their logo or their URL
in incrustation, in a link or a reference).
Like
other scientific institutes, to name CHCI,
Met Office exceptionally grants concessions. That
means that any people wishing to use their material for
non-profit purposes, e.g. to illustrate an article published
on a personal website, like the chart displayed at left that
I adapted, has first to get the written permission from the
institute. For the Met Office, the requester has to
complete the "Licence
to reproduce Registered Content".
For
NOAA, as stated in their About
page, their images are in the public domain but the credit
must be given to the institution or to the photographer and
the use of their slides requests a permission. For
Météo France, check
their conditions of use at the bottom of theirs pages. For
short, as long as their logo is displayed, you are in order.
For
the European
Commission there are some circumstances (e.g. the use of data from
the Caesium Atlas)
where you have also to inform them by written that you wish to use
their documents.
5.
Museum
It
seems quite surprising when you are not used to work with media and
copyrights that some public museum or national art galleries request a
fee to use pictures of their collections, even portraits, statues,
books and any object fell in the "public domain"
for centuries. Where does this copyright comes from ?
In fact
these objects are well in the public domain, and can be seen
by anybody visiting these institutions, which access is often free.
The fee requested to use an image is charged for the intellectual
property right linked to the secondary copyright in the photographs
and scans that such museums have taken of those works. When it concerns
very old books (e.g. incunable, etc) the process can be quite complex
and expensive. All this material is protected by The Berne Copyright
Convention. Unauthorised reproduction of such content may be an infringement of such laws.
A public
institution like the National Portrait Gallery
of London for example, states that even for an amateur website, personal, educational and non
commercial, receiving some hundreds hits per day and wishing to use
some images to illustrate its internal pages, "I am afraid
we do charge a fee for this, although we have a special domestic rate
of 18.00 £ plus VAT per image that your site would qualify
for. [...] We could supply you with a JPEG image (25.00 £)
or we could give you permission to download the image from
our own site. [...] If you do not have a budget at all, then we would not object to you
including a direct link to the images as they appear on our own
site at NPG. Although not the same as having the images on your own site, it is
at least a way for visitors to your site to see the images
through the link to our site".
This
is one of the reasons for which, for time to time, there is a link
under the name of some people or objects listed on this website instead of
their image. Not all amateurs can invest 25 £ or 100 € each time they want to
get a JPEG copy of an illustration under copyright...
Similar policies are available on request from all
publishers and institutions from NASA
to National
Geographic, including websites providing free wall papers for your
personal usage like Webshots
or Imagestate.
However,
with the development of the Open Data concept, a growing number of museums provide
free access to images of art in the public domain without any
restriction. These documents can be used in any media. So, in 2014
the New York's
Metropolitan Museum of Art released on the web close to 400,000 documents from its encyclopedic
collections.
5.
Private or amateur works
The
same copyright law also applies to works from amateurs or professional photographers like Tony
and Daphne Hallas,Dan
Heller, Jerry Lodriguss, Pekka Parviainen
or myself to name a few people publishing
freely pictures on specialised websites like Photo.net,
APOD,
and doing in parallel a commercial usage on their pictures.
Internet,
Wi-Fi, viruses and spams
Dealing
with Internet and newsgroups among other things, recall that Internet is unsecure,
uncontrolled and that any computer, even idle and without active
connection to Internet but wired to the web (via a DSL connection, a
cable modem, etc), can be under attack by a virus in a few minutes !
Then,
if you give a valid email address on a public server know that
malicious people have programmed robots (or do it themselves) to
search all throught the web valid email addresses and send them
spams and other unsollicited mails, including viruses.
Be
aware to these both problems and take them seriously. Virulent
viruses and other trojan can hang your system or damage data stored
in your computer. This can happen simply in opening an email sent by an
unknown or fake user and reading or running the attached file, which in
fact contains a virus.
So,
before connecting you to Internet, check that your computer is well
protected by a complete anti-virus
solution and above all, updated.
The
same rule applies to Wi-Fi connections. Without local protection on your
computer you can be the victim of hackers. To prevent any abuse, activate the
option hidding your modem (SSID=1) and the WPA-PSK encrypting mode, if
necessary using a key
generator (cf. this illustrated explanation).
Note that today these settings are automated and the encryption system uses a
128-bit key in addition to the router password (and your possible computer
session password). So for short, you are well protected against sniffers and
other hackers.
Then,
if you want posting a message on a newsgroup or a public server, to
prevent receiving unsollicited mails, either give a response-email
addres directed to a public mailbox (e.g. hotmail.com) so that the
information can be filtered outside your own system (but the control
is never safe) or, better, direct it to a "trash mailbox"
where emails can pile up or, simply, don't give any
response-email addres or a fake one. It is indeed safer to read
responses given by readers only on the newsgroup instead of being
locally infected and in pray to spams !
But
on newsgroups as well, viruses can be attached to threads. Thus,
take care when opening a message associated to an attachment. By
security, do never open an email if it is sent by an unknown system
or user. Delete it simply. If the sender really want to contact you
he will surely find another method.
Do
give only a valid response-email addres if your computer or network
is protected by a complete anti-virus solution and installed in a
DMZ (with firewall, IP and mail filtering, etc) in order to neutralize all viruses and
trojans, reject all unsollicited emails and spams.
Of
course, as usual if the violator is well identified, the most secure
method to contact this person is still to send him/her a registered
mail with optionally a statement (PV) by post. The minus side of this method is its slowness which is
really not adapted to the light speed of Internet traffic.
By
way of conclusion
Voilà
in a few words all you need to know if you decide to publish a document
belonging to others on your website, blog, RSS, newsgroup or even in a
magazine, it is personal, non-profit or at commercial purpose. You probably
also know more if you have to protect your interests. For short, all is
protected, even implicitely, and aims to protect the author's interests
from any abuse.
|
Internet
traffic an ordinary day visualised with Arc Map, a 3D software
developed by Stephen
G. Eick at Bell Laboratories-Lucent technologies. |
Of course,
whatever could be your reasons, the other solution is to publish
the document without permission, but know that even with the mention
of a credit line you incur a legal prosecution for this abuse, and
many organizations, private or commercial, are not refrain to do it.
Regularly, legal departments from Reader's Digest, PBS, webmasters,
editors or photographs take the time to browse Internet searching for person guilty of fraud.
At
the time of Internet and network management, we can quickly identify a server and any people
infringing a copyright, and if needed initiate legal proceedings. In
a State of right, it is normal that such delictual behaviour fall
under the law application. As the law applies practically everywhere
in the same terms, the case is quickly solved.
If
the tone or the form used to notify the offender don't
please him, that he avoids to receive such notices in respecting rights
attached to authors' works.
Let's
recognize that some responsibles of blogs or members of newsgroups among
others are sometimes unscrupulous and naïvely believe that all is
permitted in the best of worlds. Unfortunately, they will learn to
their expense that we don't live in such a world and that the
freedom of each stops where begins the one of others... So,
as one says in this case, an informed man is worth two of them.
Remarks
Blog
: webzine or personal diary kept online. Pages are usually
associated to advertisings. They are often updated, like news
websites. Updates are usually not executed by FTP but using a
complex management system, and they must stay online during updates
(sometimes with a password). They can become as large as true
websites. They can be used for commercial purposes and reach a wide
audience. More than one blog's responsibles don't respecting the
copyright law, to protect my interests I unfortunately decided to
not permit them to reproduce my documents or the one of people who
have supported my project.
RSS
: Really Simple Syndication, is also a mean to publish quickly
information on Internet.
For
more information
European
Digital Rights (EDRi, wider scope than DMCA)
New rules on copyright
for the Internet, EP, 2019
Copyright in the Digital
Single Market, EP, 26 March 2019, ref. P8_TA (2019)0231)
BEUC
Copyright
(Wikipedia English, informal)
Intellectual
Property Court Cases
About
policies
Library
of Congress about pictures of Albert Einstein
NASA
Copyright Notification
Greenpeace
policy
National
Geographic
Met
Office Reproduction Licence Application
NOAA
About page
Restrictions
for Using NOAA Images
Reproducing
images from NPG collections (UK)
NRCAN
Copyright / Permission to Reproduce (Canada, en français)
AFP
News Agency copyright notice CNN
service agreement
Finding
Species non-commercial license
Anti-virus
and spam reporting
Kaspersky
Symantec
(Norton)
McAfee
How
To Complain To The Spammer's Provider
Spamcop
Back
to my Biography
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