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The problem: its value. People will steal this.

https://xkcd.com/538/



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If you think that's bad, you should see the many people who tried to copyright an empty file: http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html


https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107

It’s fair use though. You would have an extremely difficult time arguing that a piece of generated art for just yourself passes muster on:

> the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Because the effect of the use on potential market is just 1 sale and it’s not even clear that there’s a diminishing impact on the actual rights holder for that guy.


This is already a problem with anyone who ever copypastes from Stack Overflow. You're all violating CC-BY-SA[0] and nobody really cares about this.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing


Well, somebody should then copyright the whole contents of https://libraryofbabel.info/

:)


Sigh. It's 2009. This has been going on for like 15 years now. Just assume it's going to get stolen if it's on the net.

It's not stealing if the content is lawfully acquired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild%2C_Inc._v._Googl....

A statement like: "We are outraged by this behavior. People must understand what is right and wrong. Stealing material like this on the internet is a threat to economies worldwide" should make it clear that they are joking.

They even have a Kopimi-symbol (http://www.kopimi.com/kopimi) on the site, making it clear that they encourage copying.


IP theft is rampant in comedy circles, evidentally:

http://www.radaronline.com/from-the-magazine/2007/02/take_th...


it's so easy to mitigate, though, that the fact that one doesn't sorta implies that one might want randos from the internet to use one's resources to view this image.

it's not theft if you leave it out for everyone to use.


The article itself lists three other recent examples, two of which are clearly copyright infringement https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554

It is not a theoretical concern


A link to something isn't possession of something. Any URL might become worthless anyway once the real offending source material is removed.

Link to yourself so when they steal and publish, you get a link.

I hate Facebook just as much as the next guy, but linking to other websites should not be seen as copyright infringement. It is the essence of the web.

Linking != stealing


I live from my website. Stolen content uses my labour but routes its fruits to someone else who adds no value. I'm competing against copies of my own work.

Worst of all, the lazily copied versions of my work introduce serious errors because the authors don't know what they're talking about.

Oh and some copies are used for phishing scams, so that's another concern.


People who don't care enough about being caught committing copyright theft will never pay anyone, whereas those who care will usually pay.

cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3523024


> Even simpler: do not upload copyrighted materials to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.

Do not store a single "1" in a file, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30060405


For me, the really objectionable part isn't the "thievery", it's the sloppiness of it.

Anyone with half a clue knows that if you're copying HTML:(a) you'd better redact any references to the original source, (b) you ought to change the class names, and (c) you sure as shit better not link to resources on the owner's servers. After all, most HTML/CSS is borderline protectable under copyright in the first place.

P.S. If you're copy/pasting HTML/CSS, you're pretty terrible at web design. Anyone with even the slightest facility in web design could whip up a clone of the 37Signals landing page in an evening without doing more than sneaking a peek at the source.


Reading https://www.salon.com/2011/06/21/spamazon/, it seems having lots of scammy, poorly formatted copied content isn’t a recent problem. What may be new is that this takes copyrighted material.
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