DC Photo pages link deleted due to self-respect
When I was writing about Markoff’s Haunted Forest I was going to use a photo from DC Photo Pages since they have a whole gallery of Markoff’s photos. In the end, though, I decided that their copyright page was so obnoxious that I didn’t even want to give them a hotlink. Paragraph one says all their content down to HTML code “cannot under any circumstances be cached for optimization, retransmitted, copied or altered without the explicit written permission of the owners” and then paragraph three says that if you submit anything you grant them “right to use, reproduce, display, perform, adapt, modify, distribute, and promote the content in any form, anywhere within” their site.
Sorry guys, I don’t want to play with folks who write the rules that one-sided.
Hmmm, I bet that quote above qualifies as a violation, huh? Tsk, better warm up my lawyers.
Don, why do you hate America? Or more specifically, why do you hate American lawyers? or American copyrights?
Don’t you know that America was founded on restricting others from using your works, in any way, and suing the be-Jesus out of them if they did?
Can you imagine how rich Tim Berners-Lee would be if everyone had to pay him royalties for using HTTP and HTML? Content is one thing, but this kind of restrictive voice and copyright policy goes against everything the Web stands for, which in general means openness.
It comes down to economics. Always about the greenbacks.
I suspect it comes down to a belief that this is the way to go economically, though I think the truth is the exact opposite. They have some nice galleries there – I was going to link to that markoff one and write a later post about another. But if I can’t use a picture from it (a) that’s a boring post for me personally to write and (b) why would anyone reading it bother to follow it? Ya gotta give people a taste or they’re not going to know if they care to come in.
So instead of a link that would bring them more traffic they get zippo. That can’t be better for their economics.