Discussion on the ownership of uploaded photos

Roon Software Discussion
83

Anyone who uploads a photo frankly has absolutely no idea who owns it in the vast majority of cases. Just because it comes from website xxx doesn’t mean anything relative to ownership. While fan art requiring this field is honorable I suppose, the info in it for 99% of the stuff will be garbage (unless submitted by the actual creator) and they like everyone else will follow DMCA if anyone has issues.

A simple example is let’s say I upload a photo from a Sony Music site for one of their artists. They may be the copyright owner but most likely the copyright owner is a photographer who is not named on the web site who licensed it to Sony and you have absolutely no way to know that from their site. So you would (if required to fill in a copyright owner field) fill in “Sony Music” as the owner and it would almost assuredly be garbage and no value. And then worse yet, Roon may take it down because the owner is defined to be “Sony Music” even though the actual copyright owner – the photographer – would likely be thrilled to see it in Roon (if he/she was a user).

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84

Yeap, that’s fair use. And yup, different can of worms when a company (for profit or not, for that matter) starts using copyrighted material without clearing it. It doesn’t matter if you’re British Petroleum, or if you’re the Red Cross…

For people who don’t get this, let me propose the Mickey Mouse test: if, say Phillip Morris, decided that they wanted to take a picture they found on the Internet of Mickey Mouse in his Fantasia magician’s robe, and use it for their advertising, what do you think would happen ?

Well, that’s what some people here are suggesting is OK.

I’m not suggesting asking users clear the work before uploading it, neither was he, and you know it, so let’s please not build straw men here. A simple chain of custody is probably the best way to tackle the types of (ab)use cases @danny mentioned - if you know that, say, all the pictures on фанарт dot ru were illegally obtained, then you can easily blanket ban фанарт dot ru.

We of course agree on the rest, but my argument is that there’s a 3a), which is “do what Roon is doing, allow crowdsourced submissions and make it as easy as possible for content creators to get it taken down if it infringes.”

That, or you could also just say that they’re hypocrites who’ve been reselling access to illegally-obtained material, which is what they are. Nothing honorable about those people, though we completely agree that it’s an almost intractable problem.

Oh, it can get so much better than that - Sony Music might want it in Roon, the photographer might not, Sony Music might own the copyright, and the photographer the moral rights. :wink:

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85

This is true. I’ve put in quite a few hours over the years I’ve used Roon doing what I can to help the Roon developers improve it – whether that’s by providing the best bug reports I can, or chiming in with feature requests I think make sense, or helping test and populate the internet radio stream database before it was released, or now providing some photos where there are gaps in Roon’s coverage.

I do this not just because I’ve paid for the service and demand as a customer that it work the way I expect it to; I mostly do it because I believe that Roon makes the world better, and I’d like to help it continue to do so to the best of its potential.

Just because Roon is commercial software, that doesn’t mean (for me) that I’ll never want to help in any crowdsourced (or “community”, take your pick) effort to improve it. I decide what projects I help with on a case-by-case basis, and I’ve made what I believe is an informed decision to put in some time when available to keep making Roon better. That I pay for Roon doesn’t automatically disqualify it from being a project I want to help succeed; indeed, the commercial basis Roon’s on gives me some increased confidence that it may continue to thrive for at least a few more years, and that is what I wish for (both for myself, and for the world).

[I would contrast my decision to help with Roon, which I have known from the outset to be commercial software, with decisions many made to help with a certain CD tagging database which started as a community project then had its collected data walled off and turned into a profitmaking scheme.]

But anyway – as I’ve said, I want to help with Roon in whatever small ways I can because I believe it makes the world better. But that’s why any hint that Roon is doing something in a way which doesn’t make the world better is especially egregious.

Collecting images from users with absolutely no attempt to collect attribution information at the same time doesn’t feel like making the world better.

Sure, you have no way to validate what users enter as attribution. But still, I believe that the same users who in general make a good faith effort to make Roon better to the best of their ability will more often than not also make a good faith effort to fill those fields correctly. And just including things like:

  • Name of copyright holder

  • [checkable] I am or represent that copyright holder, and I give Roon permission to use this image within Roon

would have the potential to improve the state of this image collection greatly.

Yes, it’d be cool to show image credits (and in the Roon way, be able to click in an image creator and see that person’s other work, just as you can now click on Rudy Van Gelder and see what he’s engineered); but buildout of features like that could happen in the fullness of time. Collecting the data should start immediately (and of course should have been going on while this feature was in alpha). And while, clearly, user-entered attribution could be prone to some errors, at least it would be a good-faith effort to do what should be done.

Yes, for Roon as a corporation, it’s probably sufficient to obey the letter of copyright law and rely only on takedown requests to police content in whatever haphazard way that accomplishes.

But merely obeying copyright law is a far lower, and I strongly argue less worthy, bar than trying to do what’s actually right. Attributing works is what’s right. And it’s the Roon Way, at least for music. Not treating images with the same respect makes no logical or moral sense.

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86

What should Roon show when your uploaded photos are displayed? Your name?

What should Roon show if Craig uploads your photo and checks off “I own it”?

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Yes – the name entered in the submission field as the formal name used in copyright declarations.

Craig’s name, until that error is caught and corrected. But I live in possibly-naive hope that more often than not Craig won’t be a dick.

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And how is that error caught, corrected, and validated? My understanding is that only the DMCA can do that. Is there another way?

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The DMCA is the established legal framework for handling online-publishing copyright claims for commercial purposes, but that doesn’t mean that no other way can exist.

I’d suggest that for the purpose of preening the Roon attribution database, it may be sufficient just to allow Roon users who notice what they believe to be incorrect information to submit correction requests, and Roon moderators (who could be employees or volunteers) would mediate those disputes. For this purpose, I’d think that showing a photo website with multiple images clearly from the same session and/or pointing out a copyright declaration in the submitted image’s EXIF should be sufficient to establish a presumption of ownership; it seems vanishingly improbable that Craig-who-likes-to-tick-boxes would go to the trouble of setting up all that backstory.

If there were an extended clash of competing claims, then it’d probably be appropriate just to give up and remove the image.

Yes, this sounds like a pain in the ass to set up and an annoying amount of overhead to take on. But “It sounds hard” isn’t a valid reason for not doing something right, a principle you Roon guys adhere to in general when sweating user interface design.

…and of course formal DMCA takedown notices would override all this informal happy families activity, because law.

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No one used this argument, So I ask kindly that you not jump to conclusions about what we are or are not willing to do in terms of work.

I need to digest your proposal a bit. I’m not exactly sure what problem it’s solving. It seems to me that the thing you’ve done is replaced the DMCA letter with something a little bit less formal.

Have you ever sent a DMCA takedown? It’s quite simple. There are free online sites that give you boilerplate templates where you just fill in the details. We actually link to one in our FAQ.

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I ran an entertainment website with over 300M monthly uniques with 60M pages of user created content including over 50M uploaded pics/photos mainly from movies, music, video games and TV. In the 8 years I ran it we NEVER got a single DMCA that I can recall for a photo/pic. Our Star Wars community – one of our 500K communities – was the largest collection of knowledge on it with over 50M pages of content and boatloads of pics/photos. George Lucas came buy one day a long time ago to try to understand how this content was created. Even he had no copyright issues with the photos uploaded by the community and he could be very very protective of copyright. He like almost everyone else does not view photos celebrating the love of art as copyright infringement the way you position it. The vast majority view at as great promotion and have no issue with fans embracing it in they way they would be doing in Roon.

You’re creating a mountain out of nothing and are way off the mark IMHO.

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93

And you sound like you’ve never, ever worked with a photographer. @Charles_Peterson spelt it out for @danny and you. Some of the pictures that are used by Roon are not amateur photos, or production photos, made by fans or “for the love of art”. They are someone’s livelihood.

If you’re fine with having made a fortune off of other’s destitution, then so be it. I have hope that the principals at Roon aren’t.

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94

I didn’t say you’d made that argument, and I apologize if it seemed as if I was implying that you had.

My observation about the additional overhead my suggestions would impose came out of the discussions I was having in my head as I thought about trying to balance the good of proper image attribution against the way any additional feature development or administrative overhead uses resources which could be applied to other neat stuff we’d love to have. So I responded to something I’d argued against myself, and it came out perhaps seeming as if I was responding to you.

I agree that the DMCA takedown mechanism handles the case where a photographer sees an image used in Roon and doesn’t want it used there.

The case I’ve been focusing on is where a photographer does indeed want to contribute an image to the Roon database, but wants it properly attributed (and how to handle cases of incorrect attribution).

I believe (though with no data to back that up) that conflicting claims of ownership where the desire is just to change a photo credit rather than to take down a photo Roon shouldn’t be using would be infrequent, and not burn up a lot of administrative time. There’d just need to be a framework for handling that communication.

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95

I have worked with tons of them, many in the music space.

But in this case that’s why you have DMCA. In 99.9% of the cases a user submitting a photo will have no ability to determine the copyright owner. So if that’s the bar, no product.

If there is a photo that a professional photographer wants removed, that’s the purpose of DMCA.

You may disagree with the way the way this process works for User Generated Content (UGC). That’s fine. Some do. But that’s the way it works. I have 20 years of experience in the area with never a lawsuit and only a handful of DMCAs – and we reacted to any DMCA with respect and speed. And don’t forget Roon already licenses a large library of photos which are likely the ones copyright owners care about. For every Charles Peterson who you reference, there a million people taking photos with phones that don’t care. And I do NOT agree that every photo Roon would use is a professional photo. That’s just not realistic or close to accurate.

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96

This one is worth considering as many photo copyright owners just want proper attribution and are fine with it’s use in Roon like product if they get it. But it is a sticky wicket to solve properly…

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97

Everytime roon makes a new feature users discuss the feature with positive or negative arguments.

I think the new photo feature will make our visual experience one of the best we ever had since the beginning of roon, and all users collaborate in a positive way to archive a better experience for all of us.

Every time a product betters our experience there’s is always someone complaynig. I have a friend that has is Music on all streaming services, and uses roon also because I presented to him the app, he became a lifetime user and was very happy when I uploaded is álbum photo and banner to roon, when he saw is photo on the roon and banner immediately called me to tell me about is presence in roon, I said it was I that uploaded the photos he sent me with the master version.

So if someone user or artist does not want is photo on roon why not simply ask to be removed to the team. Anyway why is your photo on the internet, makes no sense, as anyone can use it in worse ways than on an artist foto on a music program.

Anyway roon gives the option to flag a photo as inappropriate, is Christmas time let’s be a little more positive about this.

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I haven’t. But one time I sent an invoice to a news outlet that used a photo of mine without permission. They promptly took it down and apologized. I would have preferred they had just paid the invoice.

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This I like. As @Craig_Palmer stated, doing this right is a “sticky wicket”. I’ll give it some more thought.

As an example, if you and another unsavory character were in dispute, how would you provide evidence of ownership of the photo?

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100

You’d probably just take it down…

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It’s probably done on a case by case basis, but it feels like an opportunity for denial of service attacks. Also, do we only do this for user uploads and not for licensed content?

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Let’s keep the big picture in mind here: Roon is already doing quite a bit more than the law requires.

Roon seems to be licensing all the images that it can, from all the reasonable commercial sources (they are imperfect, sure, but Roon can’t fix that). So they’re trying to do the right thing, paying where paying is reasonably commercially feasible. Roon doesn’t have to do this – many, many online platforms don’t, and are still within the limits of copyright law (I say this as a copyright lawyer with more than 20 years of experience advising online platforms).

Based on what @danny has said here, it sounds like Roon introduced the user contribution channel primarily to fill in gaps where the licensed commercial sources fall short, which is likely lesser known artists. Despite some dark accusations in this thread, I’m not hearing @danny say that Roon has any plans to stop licensing from the sources it uses today.

I appreciate that @danny is willing to consider reasonable improvements suggested here, but some on this thread seem to think Roon is now flying the Jolly Roger and responsible for the destruction of the livelihoods of photographers. Seems to me that’s wrong, unfair, and unjustified.

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103

Then you understand that in the example you gave, Lucas was celebrating the commoditisation of his complement, and not the monetisation of material he owned. How do you think he would’ve reacted if you’d offered his fans perfect copies of his material ?

Would you be kind enough to let me know how a professional photographer who isn’t a Roon subscriber would check if their material is used by Roon ? Should they get a trial licence, and then prune every artist they shot manually, by first adding an album of theirs to their music library ? Because one thing you seem to disagree with is @Jeffrey_Moore, and my calls, arguing that this process be made easier.

I absolutely haven’t forgotten that, but it’s also not what I was making a mountain about: if Roon had come out and said “hey guys, help us prune the stuff we have rights to, get the stuff that’s plain bad out, and also frame the face, not the forehead”, then I absolutely would not have reacted in the way I did. Same if @danny had come out and said “yo, if you went to a gig, please upload the picture”.

The issue I have is an entity, whether commercial or not, encouraging infringement. This is, unfortunately, what would likely happen if users started uploading their curated pictures of musicians lists: you’re going from fair use to mass infringement. That said infringement isn’t usually prosecuted with the same tenacity as it has been for music or for film is beside the point. That either the musicians or the recording companies have rights to the material is also beside the point. Same applies to the feel-good black swans like the drawing guy - it’s awesome, and this community is awesome, but unfortunately, the reality of the real world isn’t, as we both know.

Once again, we completely agree on many things, including that photography licensing is a nightmare.

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