Comments on: Microsoft in Flickr rights shockr

The software giant, you may have noticed, has always been rather strident on the topic of copyright infringement. That makes the tale of its "Iconic Britain" photo contest all the more astonishing.

[benjaminstraight]

yawn.

[Penguinisto]

Funny, but as I read your comment, that's exactly what the old guy over in the "Mojave Experiment" ad to the right is doing...

(I wonder if Microsoft ripped that image off too?)

/P

[ppgreat]

Sometimes, not always, monopolies ask for forgiveness.

[Penguinisto]

So, let's see... where's the MSFT fanboy brigade?

Vegaman_Dan?

Kwasiwhateverthefrigyouspellyername?

Me_Dee?

Where'd you go, kids?

(*sound of crickets chirping...*)

c'mon, campers - let's see you spin this one - tell us how it's okay for Microsoft to violate intellectual property rights.

[smilin:)]

At least they are trying to get copyrights which is more than we can say for Google and youtube.

[Penguinisto]

Google and YouTube remove material when the rights-holders notify them as per the DMCA - it's a matter of policy.

MSFT simply says they're working on it, but keep the pirated images published on their site.

Not sure what your definition of "more" is, but I suspect that MSFT's actions are a lot higher on the reprehensibility scale, no?

I'm confused Penguinisto. What do you want Microsoft to do differently now? Someone at Microsoft came up with a promotion idea that they thought was clever, people told them it had a terrible flaw in it, they've admitted it, they're trying to get rights to the content to fix the problem, and they're asking for comments from photographers on how to do a better job next time.

Now are you arguing that they never should have made the mistake in the first place? Fine. I think Microsoft is wishing that too. Sounds like everyone's on the same page now--at least I hope so once all the rights issues get straightened out.

[Penguinisto]

That's easy: How about honoring takedown requests (they originally didn't)? How about pulling the images and publicly apologizing? (they have at this time pulled the images, but did it behind the lie of saying they have all the images they need now).

And no, it's not a "flaw" to encourage contestants to go scraping websites. It's outright infringement. You'd think a company that crows high and mighty about such things would've at least learned to not do it themselves?

...and maybe, just maybe Ballmer can ST*U next time he goes harping on alleged but baseless IP infringement by others, while his own company is doing the same thing?

[gggg sssss]

who would have thaught that something posted on flickr, or facebook, or any other cloud thingy for that matter would stay private? If you want privacy build your own website. Morons. And what about the "public" that "posted" other people's stuff to MS? Is it YouTube's fault when somebody posts a SNL clip?

[Penguinisto]

It isn't q question of privacy, it's a question of copyright. If I ripped off a photo from the front cover of Time Magazine, by your logic I could claim it's somehow okay... obviously doing such a thing is not okay. What part of this doesn't sink in for you?

[codevalley]

Penguinisto, i am not a microsoft fan, but, I seriously think u r a laughing on someone's plight. It leaves a bad taste. What would you have done, if you were in MS's shoes? What about Googlebot, crawling all login based access restricted forum, with Googlebot and making them available thru, "Cached" pages? Is that not copyright infringement?

[edgreywolf]

How quickly people forget that most of what Bill Gates and now MS has, has been stolen from the beginning.... from stealing from IBM/Steve Jobs.... to using heavy handed techniques to shut down competitors and take them over or force them to sell to MS.... how is this any different? they have it on their servers it is now theirs, they think... and unless you have a bigger stick than MS tough luck... this has not changed over many, many years.... the big fines that have been imposed from US, EU, or other courts have had little effect on MS, they have only made minor adjustments to how they do things (even with being fined BILLIONS with a B).... the only way to have a real impact on MS is to move to linux and opensource programs, getting away from the monopoly that microsoft has had for sooo long..... it will take time but it is the only way that will really work

[ulric2]

apparently, microsoft wasn't making copies of the images to its servers, what the contest does is only store the search terms the user has used to find the image.

then, the final competition simply re-does the search and displays the Live Image Search results.

Clear?