TIME Inc. s*cks / Lose the right to your picture through adoption 28/40

March 24, 2007 at 9:43 am | Posted in TIME, Web 2.0 | 3 Comments
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I did partake in the the craze about Brangelina’s latest addition to their family by posting of a picture of Pham Quang, now know as Pax Thien. This morning I found an email in my mailbox and this notification on the post’s site:

This blog post has been marked private by WordPress.com staff in response to a DMCA notice. Please remove the Time Inc copyrighted image before making this post public again. Please see our DMCA process and contact us if you have concerns.

How bizarre. Can they claim that? Technically, I did not take their picture at all, but simply entered the URL of _their_ picture in the image tag. I suppose they wouldn’t complain about me providing a text link to their website – technically, there is hardly any difference between the two methods. The image tag retrieves the image from their server to display on my website, the link opens their page first before it displays the image. If they don’t want such a thing to happen, they should develop a script that generates the images in such a way on their site that one cannot easily retrieve their URL.

Furthermore, I entered a total of two links (!) to their website. In academia, that would be properly referenced and no copyright theft. In doing so, I also generated traffic to their website, for free – but they obviously have no understanding of the workings of the web 2.0.

And generally, isn’t it questionable whether_they_have the rights to Pham’s picture? The individual automatically has the right to his/her picture – this only changes once somebody becomes a person of public interest. Does being adopted by a celebrity automatically mean that you lose the rights to your picture, that you become a public persona? I’m highly critical of that.

Anyhow, the conclusion of that is: No more links to TIME Inc. publications. They s*ck anyway.

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3 Comments »

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  1. Time Inc dies suck. (oops, parapraxis, I’ll leave it.) You might be able to fight to keep the picture. The DMCA process seems to simply say that someone “believes” their copyright has been infringed and that the parties will be notified. Don’t know if you want to be bothered, though.

    It’s not like you’re selling the picture !? As you note, not very Web 2.0. If Pham is now a celebrity, then he loses (which seems unfair somehow) the right to his picture, but so too does Time Inc.

    With the DMCA process we don’t seem to see what Time’s copyright argument consists of. Note, too, the red font scare tactics.

    Grrr….

    Comment by skunkcabbage— March 24, 2007 #

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  2. Yep, red fonts, uniforms, that all works pretty well. If this was my own website, I’d probably keep it (although there are topics that matter to me more than that one). But I don’t want the WP guys to get into trouble – TIME Inc. turned to them, and they to me.

    Comment by anaj— March 24, 2007 #

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  3. That makes perfect sense.

    Comment by skunkcabbage— March 24, 2007 #

    Reply

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