I don't use Twitter so I could be wrong about what happened, but this seems crazy. Three people retweeted a photo that included the photographer's name. However, Twitter didn't show the name in the thumbnail because it cropped the image (but was still visible when enlarged).
Somehow, this led to the government mandating Twitter to release the identities of the retweeters? Does anyone know how a random image from 10 years ago that picked up nearly zero traction on Twitter made it to the top court in Japan?
Another thought: what if a website displays the image lower down on the page so someone has to scroll to see the bottom? Is that also an infringement?
UNOCHA specifically asks their work to be 'Credit as follows: "Credit: OCHA"', but obviously Wikipedia don't do it on their article page if you just embed the picture, you have to click on the picture to see the credit.
Actually, they even went further and removed the "OCHA" watermark from the original image (see File History).
To be honest, I wasn't super satisfied with the answers I got there (see ref), but then again I'm not familiar with this topic.
The linked CC licence states (and it appears to be confirmed that this is the licence that applies[1]):
> If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author [...]; (ii) the title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and (iv) , consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author"). The credit required by this Section 4 (b) may be implemented in any reasonable manner
As the licence states that attribution must be reasonable to the medium and in any reasonable manner, having the attribution details on an information page would appear to be acceptable - the CC wiki[2] and FAQ[3] seem to support this:
> There is no one right way; just make sure your attribution is reasonable and suited to the medium you're working with. That being said, you still have to include attribution requirements somehow, even if it's just a link to an About page that has that info.[2]
> Additionally, you may satisfy the attribution requirement by providing a link to a place where the attribution information may be found.[3]
This is also made explicit in version 4.0 of the licence[4]:
> For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the conditions by providing a URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes the required information.
Regarding removing the watermark, it does not appear to be a copyright notice, so the right to do so would seem to be implied by the right to make adaptions.
[1] "Wikimedia Foundation has received an e-mail confirming that the copyright holder has approved publication under the terms mentioned on this page. This correspondence has been reviewed by an OTRS member and stored in our permission archive. The correspondence is available to trusted volunteers as ticket #2014031410007248."
I agree, Wikipedia indeed does enough to attribute, but I'm still a little bit concerned about the specific "Attribution Requirements" listed on the File page (second block under #Licensing).
Basically it states, modified or not, you need to keep the source "below the map", which some Wikipedia article pages obviously don't.
What's your take about this "requirements" statement? Does it carry any weight, legally speaking?
(By "concerned" i'm not saying UN would have an issue with Wikimedia, just the technicality with such requirement).
My take would be that the CC licence used does not allow you to add additional attribution requirements, so either the image is not CC licenced (which seems not to be the case), or the requirements don't carry any weight (so are essentially a request/a guide to how they would like to be attributed). I will admit I'm less certain on this than the broader terms of the CC licence though.
Well, to be fair, the judge in the dissenting position (1/5) freed the 3 retweeters from blame because they did not cut off the photographer's name, but rather Twitter did in order to fit the aspect ratio displayed within the application.
I'm still confused though after reading the article.
>but rather Twitter did in order to fit the aspect ratio displayed within the application.
This is bonkers. The attribution is still there, you just have click it. Besides, I doubt anyone who cared about the image is going to be content looking at the low-res thumbnail. The reputational damage done to the photographer is negligible.
Punishing the retweeters is also problematic because they themselves didn't crop the picture, twitter did. What does this mean for cropping that's done by the user-agent, or is otherwise device specific? eg. you post on the desktop site, where nothing is cropped, so you think everything is okay. Little do you know on the mobile site, all the images get cropped. Are you now liable as well?
> This is bonkers. The attribution is still there, you just have click it
This means, almost by definition, that the most viewed versions of these photos on twitter, probably by a very high margin, have no attribution.
Why is this bonkers? The right to attribution is clear, and it’s not your place to judge whether or not the artist should be exercising it.
The latter question comes down to how feasible it is for a person tweeting to know how their tweets are going to look on the main timeline w/regard to attribution, which seems like something it’s reasonable for a court to decide.
>This means, almost by definition, that the most viewed versions of these photos on twitter, probably by a very high margin, have no attribution.
>Why is this bonkers? The right to attribution is clear, and it’s not your place to judge whether or not the artist should be exercising it.
Does it mean that any sort of action needed to see the attribution constitutes "hiding" it, opening you to liability? What if the image was too big and I have to scroll down to see the attribution? What's the difference between having to click on a thumbnail to see an attribution, and having to scroll down? What if the attribution is too small to see at normal zoom levels, and you have to zoom in? Unless his name was plastered all over the picture (thereby ruining it), I doubt anyone on a phone is going to be able to read the authorship information. Do we need modals in front of every image with the attribution, so we know for sure that the viewer knows who created the image?
> What if the image was too big and I have to scroll down to see the attribution? What's the difference between having to click on a thumbnail to see an attribution, and having to scroll down?
Scrolling is a way to navigate a single, continuous document. The publisher has published a document in which the image is displayed properly, with attribution, i.e. the publisher has done everything right. The user's device has decided to change how that document is displayed but it's still clear and obvious that the attribution is part of the document.
A cropped thumbnail is something entirely different. This is a copy of the image, something new that the publisher created and inserted into a document, without attribution. It has a link to a document that does have attribution but the document, in isolation, lacks attribution.
The issue here is that a new copy of the image was created and displayed, specifically, a copy without attribution information. This is also illegal in the US under DMCA [0], though DMCA requires that it's intentional.
> What if the attribution is too small to see at normal zoom levels, and you have to zoom in?
This is a solved problem. Don't crop photos on your platform. If you want photos to be cropped to fit a square box, make it explicit for users to enable. Have an additional attribution field if that's not sufficient enough.
The only solution is to have the attribution in a separate field, presumably charging the poster with providing the correct information. "Not cropping" is not one because the alternative is resizing and it potentially has the same obscuring effect.
No matter what the solution is, the people who retweeted are definitely not the ones to hold responsible in any sane justice system. They retweeted a picture but had no input on how it is displayed, and have no control over whether this changes in time.
To rephrase that, they had no control over whether the result of their action is legal or illegal.
They did it anyway.
In this scenario, one should verify the result of one's action.
In any case, this is bonkers! But it probably feels that way because social media has conditioned us to take other people's work and do whatever we want to it and with it.
If the post office decides to use illegal means to deliver your Christmas postcard, or steals a copyrighted work for the stamp it's not you that should be punished.
> social media has conditioned us to take other people's work and do whatever we want to it and with it.
Perhaps but this is not the example with which to make this case. The material was already on the platform and they did nothing to appropriate it or profit from it.
I am not familiar with the Japanese justice system although it's known for some very idiosyncratic situations. But using common sense one should not be punished for an action taken with no bad faith, no reasonable expectation of breaking the law based on how another party decided to implement that action.
So I should be able to post a 400x1000000 photo on my feed and anyone that comes across it must scroll for at least a few minutes to see my attribution and get past the tweet.
Of course, this also means the "hide this tweet" functionality must be removed for images since, otherwise, you could hide the tweet after seeing only the top part of the image that doesn't have the attribution and thus Twitter would be aiding in people not seeing the image's attribution (as they are doing in this court case).
What Twitter does likely violates (eg.) all cropped cc-by-nc-nd licensed images on twitter.
I'm certainly not in favour of allowing one of the big tech companies to systematically undermine such Creative Commons licenses just because it's more convenient for them.
If we're going to allow anyone to ignore license terms, let's not start with corporations.
>Why is this bonkers? The right to attribution is clear, and it’s not your place to judge whether or not the artist should be exercising it.
Why not? It's precisely our place as citizens to criticize laws we deem absurd/unfair/bad, including people who chose to exercize them in hamrful ways.
Human law != some divine dictum everybody should not criticize and uphold at all times. Seggregation was a law too.
To be fair, they could be asking for the identities in order to summon them as witnesses against twitter. I don't hold much faith that this is the intention though...
Regardless of the legal issue, I sure hate it when social media services like Facebook and Strava crop my photo thumbnails to fit a certain aspect ratio. They frequently end up cropping out important parts like someone's face. I wish there was an option to not crop, and instead add white space around the image to make it fit.
You're right, it doesn't really matter how known the incident was. However, I don't think it should have happened at all and if someone were to sue, I would have assumed they would only be entertained if it was a widespread case or they were famous (not something I agree with, just how the world works).
Photographer published a photo on their own website.
Tweeter posted it on Twitter. Twitter trimmed it, removing the credit line.
Retweeter retweeted it. Photo was still trimmed.
Photographer sued Retweeter for distributing their work without proper credit.
An obvious question would be if Photographer asked them to delete the tweet(s) first, and why they chose to sue Retweeter not Tweeter. I'm guessing it's because the photographer is seeking financial compensation and the retweeter looked someone financially capable. This disclosure is a preliminary step to further lawsuits demanding remedies.
* Photographer published a photo on their own website
* Tweeter posted it on Twitter, the credit line is preserved.
* Retweeter retweeted it. The photo thumbnail in the reweets are trimmed in the timeline. Tapping on the photo to view it in full, you can see the credit line.
* Photographer sued Retweeter for distributing their work without proper credit.
I'd be pretty pissed if my chance at exposure was blown because the one time it got spread virally it got spread without visible attribution. With visual attribution 10s of thousands or even millions of people see my name. Without visible attribution (having to click through to a larger version) I've effectively been robbed of $$$$$$ PR
I work on lots of open source and of course all my attribution requirements (BSD, MIT) don't require things to be upfront but I posted a photo online with my name in the corner and someone cropped it out I'd be pretty pissed.
I suspect for photos it's even worse. I have 7k photos CC-BY on Flickr. If people post them to twitter I doubt they add the required attribution. Maybe CC should start requiring or at least recommending attribution to be embedded in EXIF for images so that Twitter etc can automatic provide visible attribution AND include the same EXIF text that in any scaled versions they generate so that if someone reposts the scaled versions the attribution continues. Of course people can remove the EXIF or replace but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about some photographer getting unintentionally cheated out of PR.
As far as I understand, Twitter does not crop photos, at least not without user intervention, so I don't understand how this part of it could have happened.
Twitter does in thumbnail previews. If you've seen someone post a picture of text, the thumbnail is basically unusable because a significant portion is missing until you click through to the full-size version.
It's one of the main reasons I never use Twitter, as silly as that is. It is annoying to see a picture that is cropped that sometimes obscures (or even changes if an important part is missing) the actual point being made because it isn't in the preview. It just seems like a really poor design.
>It's one of the main reasons I never use Twitter, as silly as that is. It is annoying to see a picture that is cropped that sometimes obscures (or even changes if an important part is missing) the actual point being made because it isn't in the preview. It just seems like a really poor design.
Is it really that hard to click the picture before viewing it? It seems like a necessary evil to me. If you don't do the thumbnail thing and the picture is huge (or has odd dimensions), then it's going to make scrolling past the picture a pain.
It's just that the context is frequently misleading (combined with the character limit to describe the images). If this part is designed so poorly, it makes me less interested in the rest of the product which may have other similar issues. I recognize it is a fairly silly (and trivial) opinion.
Is there a reason the whole image couldn't be scaled down? Or at least be done proportionally. That's how thumbnails work in basically everything else.
> Is there a reason the whole image couldn't be scaled down? Or at least be done proportionally. That's how thumbnails work in basically everything else.
At that point the attribution may no longer be visible, in all cases, because of the reduction in the number of pixels. Which would hit the same problem again.
To have the image fill the entire available width, you really do need to crop from the top and bottom or else someone could put an image with a 1:1000 aspect ratio and scrolling through the tweet would take forever.
Not filling the available width would leave negative space -- similar to "black bars" -- on the sides of the image. You don't have to agree, but many people dislike such negative space and cropping is the solution.
Late replying to this, but even if negative space was a solution to "showing the whole image in the thumbnail", it probably just reintroduces the problem, which is frivolous lawsuits about image attribution not being visible - because of the thumbnail is too small for anyone to be able to see the attribution, they'll sue over that. I'm not sure there's any way around the problem that allowing people to sue over attribution in a thumbnail that clicks-through to the full version is bloody idiotic.
When you make a post with an image, the twitter timeline will show a cropped viewport of the image. Depending on the size and shape of the image, some parts may be cut off until you expand it.
Possibly unrelated, as this is a bit of a stretch in giving credit, but Twitter has a huge problem with people posting content as if its their own. I've seen multiple things go viral on some random's Twitter account and they have zero relation to the creators of the content, whether it be an image or video, or even just a dumb joke. I feel like retweets died when the button was actually added to the platform. That platform has eroded a ton over the past decade.
>That platform has eroded a ton over the past decade.
Maybe so but the re-posting of content with no attribution or knowledge of the source was the norm before twitter existed. Arguably it's the natural state of the internet.
A lot of comedians complain about this. Rather than retweeting, several accounts just copy-paste jokes from any number of comedians, without attribution, and they get a million followers.
Is there some special right for a photographer in Japan to have their name shown on an image, that determines whether a reproduction of it is an infringement? As far as I know, you acknowledge the service will transform your work as part of the ToS for uploading an image to it.
Unless, of course, the photographer wasn't the one who uploaded the picture to Twitter in the first place, but then why is the case hinged on whether the photog's name was cut off in the re-tweet, versus just the picture being copied by someone without permission?
And, going after the re-tweeters seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the service. They aren't really copying anything, that's all a mechanism of the platform.
If I were Twitter I'd be counting my lucky stars that my largest userbase is in the US where, as broken as our copyright system is, I can't imagine this wacky judicial reasoning prevailing.
I'm not sure why it is the retweeters, rather than Twitter who are responsible for the automatic cropping that occurs when you retweet. But I neither a Lawyer nor a Japanese Copyright expert.
So, asking non-facetiously, as an artist I have the right to decide how my work must be attributed, even if the platform I'm posting it to tells me in their ToS that my work will be altered in a standard way in the course of using the service?
If my understanding is correct (with the caveat that I am nowhere close to an expert), that's frankly bonkers and I have no idea how Twitter can operate at all in Japan.
It's weird in our context but there's followable logic there.
Being absurdly protective of the person who did the work is at least erring on the side of protection.
It's not impossible to imagine a world where the internet could have social media platforms with some attempt at media attribution functionality...
...instead we have the wild west where the vast majority of content is shared without acknowledgement, let alone attribution or permission. Even EXIF attribution data is stripped whether you like it or not. You have incredibly successful artists trying to protect their work with watermarks and JS-disabled right-clicks. Seems silly.
Appears the original uploader wasn’t this photographer/angry copyright holder.
Uploader stole a pic and posted it, which normally constitute a consent to ToS, or something like that. Others unknowingly retweeted the stolen pic and the photographer wants their identity disclosed to proceed with lawsuits.
Twitter argued that retweets don’t count as distributing and requiring a click to show full photo isn’t cropping, but the court determined it does/it is.
Counterintuitive way to draw a line but I’m not sure if it’s terrible that court find cropping the photo with CSS require user consent. Maybe not as bonkers as Coinhive case.
While it doesn't exist in the US, many countries have the same moral right. The intent is that if I buy a painting from you and exhibit it you get to determine how your name is displayed, within reason, so I can't say the painting is by "Puppy Kicker Smith."
Note that usually people are reasonable about it, and that it's also extremely common to have contracts state the right will not be exercised. This case is unusual because the use of the photo is completely non-consensual.
I'm also not an expert: based only on my reading of Wikipedia, you are correct and it is bonkers from a US perspective.
The photographer may be in breach of Twitter's ToS for enforcing their moral rights, but that would not _stop_ them from enforcing their rights. In this case, the initial post to twitter was not from the photographer, but someone else. So Twitter likely has nothing to hold against the photographer.
The laws are also reflective of the culture --- from what I've seen, they are very pro-copyright, pro-DRM (think of companies like Sony). In contrast, someone attempting to do this in the US would probably lead to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect .
Japan also has strong privacy laws, extending into excessive and absurd defamation laws.
For example, if you have piles of proof of someone committing a crime like sexual assault and the cops refuse to take it seriously, you can reliably post it on Twitter these days and people will take it seriously. In Japan, the person who committed the crime can reliably sue you for ruining their reputation and win. Stating actual plain facts about a person that harms their image on any public platform will land you in trouble, unless it’s something that’s clearly in the public interest to know (like if a company is putting arsenic in their baby food). It’s likely one reason why incidents of work harassment and abuse only become public after someone kills themselves.
This seems like FUD. How are the laws itself “excess and absurd” compared to rest of the democratic world? It’s also strange to assert Japan has “strong privacy laws” when the exact opposite is happening in this very article we’re discussing.
> In Japan, the person who committed the (sexual) crime can reliably sue you for ruining their reputation and win
Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon thing outside of Japan [1]. And to be fair, you can’t just put a blanket ban on defamation lawsuits because it’s not wrong to sue for defamation if the allegation of sexual misconduct is in fact false. I don’t believe the majority of them to be the case, but ultimately, it’s for the courts to decide.
> Stating actual plain facts about a person that harms their image on any public platform will land you in trouble, unless it’s something that’s clearly in the public interest to know
Whoa. This the whole point of having defamation laws. Would you rather live in a world where every embarrassing details about your life can be published online?
> Whoa. This the whole point of having defamation laws.
Defamation laws normally deal with disseminating false information, not embarrassing information. True statements cannot be defamatory in many/most legal systems, no matter how much they harm someone's reputation.
The topic was about Japanese defamation laws. Outside Japan, privacy laws would cover these cases.
Also note that facts that “harm someone's reputation” isn’t indicative of illegal or even immoral conduct. For example, having caught the COVID19 disease might harm one’s reputation, but it doesn’t make one a bad person however true it is.
That’s not the point of defamation laws. If someone assaults you and you post a video on twitter, most first world countries will use that as evidence against the person who assaulted you. In Japan, it’s perfectly legal to record someone, but making the fact that the person is dangerous and not in police custody will get you in trouble, and the person who assaulted you will use the video against you. Defamation is generally globally defined to be false statements made with the intent to harm someone’s reputation. In Japan, full context, factual representations are treated as just about as bad as a false claim.
So Japanese defamation laws were designed to facilitate criminals, is that what you're suggesting? There surely are many problems with the political and legal system in Japan, but I think it's beyond ridiculous to assert that the law was created with the intent to facilitate criminals. The most likely explanation is that it's designed to prevent people from exposing every enbarassing details about others. Do note that "embarrassing" doesn't mean "criminal" here.
> In Japan, it’s perfectly legal to record someone
Slightly off-topic, but I don't believe it's that simple. People do have to respect each other's privacy.
> but making the fact that the person is dangerous and not in police custody will get you in trouble, and the person who assaulted you will use the video against you.
Not all video evidence is actual proof that a crime has been committed. If it didn't lead to convictions, then it's not surprising that you'd get in trouble for disemminating it as actual proof. And let me remind you that the Japanese legal system is notorious for its startling high conviction rate.
Another issue I have with your assertion is that video evidence of crime is often disemminated by the Japanese media way before it reaches the courts [1][2]. Some of these are picked directly from social media. Yet no one ever got in trouble for it, contradicting your statement. So far, you've provided zero evidence that what you said is commonplace in Japan.
Not reading beyond your first paragraph because I clearly didn’t assert that it’s “designed to facilitate criminals.” That’s a bizarre claim. The talking down tone is also a little much. The problem is the law is merely broad enough to be misused by criminals. There are warnings about uploading road rage/煽り運転 videos from the government and media because the person committing the crime can use the videos against you for ruining their reputation/violating their privacy.
> If I were Twitter I'd be counting my lucky stars that my largest userbase is in the US where, as broken as our copyright system is, I can't imagine this wacky judicial reasoning prevailing.
You know that the Japan userbase of Twitter is huge, right? Not that far behind that of the US, in fact.
Yep, market share wise, I'd say Twitter in Japan is much huger than the US (probably their top 1 social media if not counting Line, which is primarily a messaging service.)
Two things in this case. Attribution (which was missing and that’s on Twitter), the other, copyright infringement (the Twitter accounts who used the photo image without permission).
Well, a retweet is intrinsically attributed, that's the whole point. Does it need to be in any specific format (e.g. label on the image) that the photographer desires? That doesn't seem feasible.
In the case that the original tweeter wasn't the photographer, I see that infringement as the (only) problem here. And the only information Twitter should be compelled to provide is of the original poster.
>> Is there some special right for a photographer in Japan to have their name shown on an image, that determines whether a reproduction of it is an infringement? As far as I know, you acknowledge the service will transform your work as part of the ToS for uploading an image to it.
It was not the photographer who originally tweeted it. At first I thought the original tweeter was the one at fault, but if it was OK to tweet it with the attribution in the image then it was after that when the violation occurred.
IIRC, one reason why there are so few images on the Japanese Wikipedia is that it's almost impossible to avoid running into legal trouble with pictures there.
how is japans copyright different than the rest of the worlds? as far as i know most countries either follow the european model with stronger moral rights, or the US model.
unless japans courts take a stronger interpretation of the laws than most other countries. or few people in japan release their images under suitable licenses...
>In 2018, however, Intellectual Property High Court ruled that an act of retweeting does not infringe copyright but breaches creators’ right to show their names and their works as they are. The court ordered the disclosure of the email addresses of the three retweeters.
So how would this work with sites that auto convert links to embeds? eg. you post a link to a photograph, but the site converts your link to an embedded photograph, are you now liable? What if this was done retroactively (eg. links to embed was added later as a feature)?
People are asking about Japanese law on this, so I'll write what I know. I am not a lawyer, just a person who cares about copyright.
Japan does not have fair use, instead it has a number of specific exceptions to copyright. For example, you can take photos of things semi-permanently installed in an outdoor area and use those photos for non-commercial purposes, even if you photographed a 2D artwork that might have copyright. You can read the copyright law in English here:
The most generous exception in the law (except maybe the search engine one) is for "quotation", Article 32. For quotation you must use only as much of the work as is necessary for commentary, clearly separate it from your own content, clearly attribute it, and the quoted content must be subordinate to your own content. Regarding the last point, that means you can't just say "this is a nice painting" and post the image, you have to provide some commentary on it. (No, that's not clearly defined, so you'd need to work it out in court if there was a dispute.)
In practice this doesn't matter much on social media, and things work out much like places where you have fair use, but sometimes people try to enforce all their rights. Usually the people they are upset at take down their posts, but I guess in this case that didn't happen.
One really unfortunate side effect of this is that Japanese Wikpedia has very few images compared to other Wikipedias. Things that would be fine in an article, like book covers, are excluded because their Wikimedia file page would not have commentary and, so the thinking goes, would be infringement. (I remember reading the discussion that came to this conclusion on a Wikipedia discussion page years ago, but haven't been able to find it since.) This is why the Japanese article for Anpanman has a photo of a mural, for example, while the English article has a book cover.
For moral rights (著作人格権), these actually also exist in many places besides the United States. Practically speaking, if you license a work for use it's pretty common to have a clause saying you will not exercise these rights, and if you're in a mutually beneficial relationship any concerns over how you're credited can usually be negotiated. In this particular case the use was completely unauthorized so that didn't happen. (I am still confused about why the poster didn't just remove the image when asked.)
Ah, I found a Japanese article and the flow of what happened is clearer to me now. (Maybe I should have realized it from the English article but I didn't...)
The photographer wants to email the retweeters. The reason isn't stated but he could send them a bill for use of his image and threaten to take them to court if they don't pay it.
This is not something a reasonable person would do, but it is technically within his rights under the law. There are occasionally people online in Japan who send bills to people (mainly magazines) who quote them or use images on Twitter in ways they don't like.
> One really unfortunate side effect of this is that Japanese Wikpedia has very few images compared to other Wikipedias. Things that would be fine in an article, like book covers, are excluded because their Wikimedia file page would not have commentary and, so the thinking goes, would be infringement. (I remember reading the discussion that came to this conclusion on a Wikipedia discussion page years ago, but haven't been able to find it since.) This is why the Japanese article for Anpanman has a photo of a mural, for example, while the English article has a book cover.
Where would the violation occur if the Japanese article also showed the book cover? We've stipulated that the article poses no problem. But the Wikimedia file page already exists. Does that page violate Japanese law? Would it violate Japanese law more if a Japanese article legally displayed the same image?
> Practically speaking, if you license a work for use it's pretty common to have a clause saying you will not exercise these [moral] rights
Huh. I thought the idea of moral rights was that they were inalienable. If you can contractually waive them... that seems like a conceptual contradiction?
What's the legal status of retweets? From a technical point of view, the user is not making any copies but only referring to another post, and it's Twitter who creates the preview.
Furthermore, how has Twitter ever been able to operate in Japan in the first place, if they have not made any concessions by disabling features that are considered to be in violation of local legislation?
I have never really thought about this before or heard it discussed, because usually only the behavior of the initial poster is at issue (since they can just delete the tweet and fix the whole problem).
If you are unfamiliar with Twitter, you could consider a user's timeline like their "home page", since they control it, and an RT could be considered a form of "reposting", because you put it in places it had not been before.
I don't think that's a reasonable line of thought, but it is consistent.
But if the original tweeter deletes it, the retweet is deleted too. So I don't consider a retweet to be a copy, but rather an alias to an image that exists on someone else's account.
> I don't think that's a reasonable line of thought, but it is consistent.
I guess we can agree that this seems to apply to Japan in general :)
> you could consider a user's timeline like their "home page", since they control it, and an RT could be considered a form of "reposting", because you put it in places it had not been before.
Strongly disagree with this. I'm a seasoned user and I feel that I'm completely out of control regarding what I and others see. This might also be a cultural (wrt. internet and mobile computing) difference, but I don't consider a Twitter-like timeline to be human-generated content at all, apart from the content that the users have explicitly created themselves. I believe this is also why most of HN seems to have a backlash at the moment.
FWIW, attribution rights are common everywhere, but they're an integral part of copyright, not something that can be applied separately as a secondary measure if ordinary copyright enforcement fails. I also believe that most users here are aware of the issues with the Japanese court system and face.
Japan desperately needs a competent organization that can stand up for the digital rights of its people now. They lack organizations like the EFF that are willing to do this.
In this article the rights of a photographer was successfully defended, so the system is a least working in some cases. The bigger problems here are web design and forms that impose specific characters in some fields.
> In this article the rights of a photographer was successfully defended
The rights of the photographer was respected from the very beginning. The attribution was still there for anyone to see. The “problem” was that it wasn’t included in the thumbnail, because it unsurprisingly didn’t fit in.
> so the system is a least working in some cases
No, this case represents a spectacular failure to protect people’s right to privacy and fair use. Why this is the case is already explained throughout this thread, so I don’t think we need to repeat this here.
Japan has no fair use, which is part of the problem here.
Usually people with their rights "infringed" by unauthorized posting on Twitter don't care. If they do care, the poster usually takes the image down. I guess that didn't happen in this case, which is why it went to court, but it rarely gets that far.
Politician Taro Yamada (his name is extremely generic but real) and manga artist Ken Akamatsu are copyright progressives and have managed to avert some of the worst proposed reforms, but I don't think there's any organization working on this.
The original photo showed up if viewers of the retweets clicked on the trimmed photo, but viewers was not able to see the photographer’s name unless such action was taken, the ruling said.
Interesting. This is how Twitter works. On the other hand, it’s also true that it’s technically copyright infringement, since the reproduction is trimmed. I wonder if Twitter has a duty to enforce copyright in both trimmed and untrimmed cases.
don't we have algorithms that can smart crop an image to preserve points of interest? Could that be used to keep text at the top or bottom of an image. Ugly as that may be.
Depending on the relevant law and contracts, that may be as bad or worse than removing the attribution: the artist may consider the “uninteresting” parts of the image to be vital to its overall composition and object to the tampering— Even something as simple as traditional cropping can be controversial in this regard.
Maybe a standard to put attribution text and its location in metadata, so that the cropper can know that it's cutting it out, and know what it has to put back in?
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Somehow, this led to the government mandating Twitter to release the identities of the retweeters? Does anyone know how a random image from 10 years ago that picked up nearly zero traction on Twitter made it to the top court in Japan?
Another thought: what if a website displays the image lower down on the page so someone has to scroll to see the bottom? Is that also an infringement?