This is a topic on which there has been a great deal of column inches written of late on all iterations of social media and the last year has seen changes to the law and some dubious changes to T&Cs across most of the social network sites tio try and cope with the issue, and now it's our turn. The admin team has been discussing the matter for a while now and we have prepared the following. It will, in due course be an addition to the forum rules so please take the content onboard. It will be 'stickied' in a couple locations to make referencing it simpler in the future. Right. The rights and wrongs of posting copyrighted images without permission of the copyright owner. This one is a can of worms thrown into the middle of a minefield, but, first of all, somebody has smeared dog mess on the can so the person throwing it has got dog mess all over their hands before it even starts. Firstly, this is not being posted as the beginning of a debate on the matter. I know that everybody will have an opinion on it, whether as a perceived transgression of their human rights or based on the absolute, definite interpretation of the rules as relayed to them by a bloke down the pub. We don't wish to enter into a long drawn out discussion of what the membership considers to be the right and wrong of the subject. We just wish to explain why we may be removing certain posts in future. So. Let us get something straight right at the start. For the purposes of posting on copyrighted pictures within these pages it is extremely unlikely that you do not have to obtain permission from the copyright owner first. Failure to do this is a contravention of the law. Yes, there are certain circumstances that apply for which permission is not required, but they too are extremely unlikely to apply for use within these hallowed threads and are too convoluted and contentious for me to be arsed to list here. If you wish to view them so you can argue the toss later on, I've found the most accessible of all the bumpf on the subject is located here: https://www.gov.uk/government/upload...ice-201401.pdf This means that if you want a picture that belongs to somebody else, especially if the sale of that picture is how he earns a living, you should ask permission to use it, buy the right to reproduce it and give credit to the copyright owner if you want to post it here. I will now wipe the dog mess off my hand and proceed to the worm can/minefield bit. The proliferation of social media has made this subject virtually impossible to police, simply because, like 'picking your nose and chewing it', everybody is doing it, doing it, doing it, and, if you all were to actually read the T&Cs of the social media sites that we willingly sell our souls to, you would see that their flocks of lawyers have written in to your agreement that you are signing over any rights the law bestows on your intellectual property for them to do as they please once you have posted. I've had it happen to me inside the dreaded FaceBook when in order to 'show off' I posted a large selection of images from an airshow I attended only to have somebody that I knew share the entire album with a band he followed who were looking for a related album cover. That hurt, but fortunately, they were screen resolution so they were unusable in print. Many media savvy professional image makers are aware of this and some are happy to sacrifice an 800 pixel version of their pride and joy with embedded metadata, a copyright notice or a watermark splashed across it for the sake of a free, global audience for their work that a mere website would stand no chance of competing with. Some, however, are not, and will pursue any unauthorised use of their images with, at the best, a bill, and, at the worst, the Old Bill. Just because it is so difficult to track the movement of an image once it's floating on the web is all that stands between you and a potentially crippling law suit for what is, defined by law, as theft when you lift an image of your best knee down picture from the photographer's website after your latest trackday, without permission. So what has this got to do with us at 1000rr.co.uk. Well, it could be argued that, in publishing such imagery, we are handling stolen goods (or whatever the virtual world term for it is), which, as far as we're concerned makes it a relatively big deal, potentially... The dissemination of imagery across the internet has acquired so much momentum that it is uncontrollable at best and, for the most part no one even tries. This does not mean, however, that the law cannot be applied and ignorance of it is no protection. There is nowhere near enough kudos in being part of the administration team for the best bike forum on the web to make it worth being on the soiled end of that particular stick... I am fortunate (unfortunate?) enough to have access to a considerable number of image making professionals and have polled them as to their take on the matter. To a man, and a few women, although they are well aware of the difficulties in keeping track of their intellectual property once it is displayed online, they are also all fully aware that they are protected legally and are more than happy to exercise their rights to that protection. It would be a pretty grim site without pictures though and we appreciate that just removing all existing relevant images from all posts is a hobby unto itself. So we are currently taking advice from the industry as to how best to proceed moving forward. In the meantime we are adding this topic to the forum rules and are asking you all to take it onboard as you have with all the others. We also ask that if any of you wish to post your own images that you don't wish to be used elsewhere by anybody else, please add a copyright or a watermark to help protect yourself. We will remove images that we feel have transgressed the rule. This can be considered to be our take on the matter. If we receive any more information that is likely to change this. It will be adjusted accordingly and you will be informed.
