It’s very frustrating if people ’steal’ your images when you’re a photographer. It’s annoying if they ‘borrow’ them (hotlinking, use them in other websited), and it’s downright evil if they are using them for generating money [1, 2, 3].
Anyway, on a ‘local’ forum, some of the members found out that Hyves.net members (you need to be a Hyves member to view this) were using copyrighted photos. Other ‘Hivers’ can use these images to create collages, or use them to ‘pimp’ their personal pages (yuk!!).
Some of the original images still showed the copyright info, while other photos were modified to remove the copyright text (deliberate copyright infringement if you ask me).
The ‘fun’ part is that people who use these images get mad if you ask them to remove the image due to copyright infringement. The general consensus seems that everything you put up on the Internet is up for grabs.
So, if you don’t want others to (mis)use your photos don’t put them online. If you have to put them online, make sure other people can’t remove the copyright info without ‘destroying’ the photo (e.g. humongous watermark across the photo). Or just put very small versions of the photos online.
The MPAA will have serious problems removing the key from the Internet. Even Google has received a letter to remove the links from their databases. Somehow, these retards have the idea that you can copyright a number.
As the word spread yesterday the articles started showing up on Digg.com. Digg.com is a popular website where you can submit ‘news’, and others may rate it and comment on it. Within minutes the stories about this key got thousands of ‘diggs’.
This resulted in the fact that the moderators on Digg removed the posts. Result: Mass uproar.
Kevin Rose (the Digg founder) wrote the following on his Digg blog:
But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
I think that’s the right attitude towards this. Hopefully, the MPAA will come to its senses (not likely), and stops harrassing the consumers with their lame-ass copy-protection.
It would even be better to abandon the ‘turn every consumer into a criminal‘ DMCA bill completely, but that’s another story….
Just to be sure you got the right key:
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B
D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
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