His copyright notice and explanatory paragraphs make it clear he's trying to keep some level of control over those photographs, while still sharing them with "his community" - which means I feel a little uneasy about having archive.org unilaterally slurp the images up like that...
I know it's kind of a losing battle, but "publicly available" does not mean "in public domain".
How many of the webforums you post on give you access to update the robots.txt file to inform Internet Archive about your copyright desires?
Like I said - I'm conflicted about this, I _want_ these images to be available, and whatever the guy wrote in his forum post we know Google (and Blekko!) will index and download them and will pretty soon be causing them to be "otherwise distributed outside of this forum" - but the guy's wishes are clear, even if not explicitly machine-readable.
The photos aren't on the forum, they are on an image hosting website. Other images on the forum are hosted on the forum. If the guy knows how to host his images elsewhere, he should be able to figure out how to host the images someplace with a robots.txt that he likes.
I'm the one who initiated the archive against the page(s) in question.
While I understand copyright is important, I also believe in the preservation of digital history on the internet.
The page in question isn't password protected, nor were the images prevented by the Internet Archiver's archive process from committing the page to their archive. The author still receives their attribution, and The Archive is fairly solid in the non-profit category (which I believe respects the copyright owner's wishes).
The copyright owners wishes are very well explained:
"Images I post in this thread and my related commentary are posted and published by me, the original photographer. All copyrights and all other rights reserved. These images may not be copied or otherwise distributed outside of this forum without my express permission."
To me, it pretty clear that initiating an archive against that page was explicitly ignoring the copyright owners wishes, not respecting them, and placing your belief in "preservation of digital history" above the rights of the person who took the photos.
I'm conflicted, because like you I'd hate to see those images vanish - but I now strongly suspect _next_ time this guy takes some pictures of something I'm fascinated by, he won't be posting them publicly any more.
(And you do know "but we gave you _attribution!_" is about the lamest and most infuriating thing you can say to a rightsholder who's copyright you're violating, right? And probably one of the favourite things their lawyers can possibly have in writing...)
You're absolutely right but this is a strange situation. It would take a pretty good NLP to figure out that this is the case and all things otherwise being equal I don't know how the archive would be told not to archive certain data if not through robots.txt, which is the non-human readable form. Otherwise you could always use the absence of either to do an end-run around the other.
So for practical reasons it is probably best to claim both copyright on the page and to set up robots.txt to specifically forbid those pieces that you don't want spread around from being indexed/archived.
In the eyes of the law probably only the copyright bit matters.
Being possibly the first photos of the inside of a Model S battery sled, I understand his desire to protect them from getting spread around and used by others. Seems sensible to me.
So people don't accidentally learn something? If you take the time to post the photos I don't know why you would not want people to see them. I could see his point if he was running a Tesla related business or that was his website, but he just seems like an enthusiast.
I'm enormously grateful it exists when I want to use it, but still have a distinct feeling it's "not OK" to do that with other people's images (and especially not just relying on the "but you didn't put anything in robots.txt to say we couldn't do whatever the hell we wanted with your pictures! And we _credited_ you!!!" excuse).
I've never seen such an aggressive and hostile copyright notice in a forum signature before. It's not entirely clear that you can even claim copyright over trivial online comments.
It's not entirely clear that you can even claim copyright over trivial online comments.
Trivial or not, you have copyright in your own writings, online or off-line. Each participant on HN owns the copyright in the written expression of his or her comments. Similarly, a photographer has copyright in photographs taken by that photographer. See a user profile of a high-karma HN participant
for an example of asserting copyright in HN comments, something that any of us could do, because the copyright is already there under modern copyright law, and asserting the copyright openly and publicly helps battle infringement.
A work must be creative enough to earn copyright. Most tweets would not qualify, for example. You can assert anything you want without it being legally enforceable.
There is the complication that photographs of 2D works of art intended to represent the original are not subject to copyright, so some of those photos might not be either if someone with enough money wanted to press the issue. (Not a lawyer)
There's a history of buzzfeed and other link-farm sites writing inflammatory posts based on TMC forum posts. Many posters don't want their content stolen that way, so they put on those notices.
thanks again archive.org