Rama Rama wrote:
Hello everyone,
today one of my photographs was again published in a newspaper, without
attribution nor licencing. I phoned the newspaper and it turns out that
the photograph in question happened to be "in a photo database", without
any further information (How it popped up there like this is anyone's
guess, and I am investigating this question).
The interesting part is that the journalist told me that he had checked
the metadata before publication. Having found nothing, he went on saying
"all rights reserved". Hence the bit of interesting information:
If it was all rights reserved, why did they publish it? Did they had an
agreement with the photo database to only provide them photos which they
would be allowed to publish?
*we should use metadata to specify licencing and
attribution information.*
I'll sleep a little bit less stupid tonight.
--- Rama
Do you mean by uploaders before uploading, or an automatic
transformation by the software?
The later then raises that the software doesn't really know which
license has each image. We could add to thumbnails a generic "go to URL
foo to know about author and license terms".
Which metadata format do you suggest to use?
If doing automatically, there must be a format, if only to avoid adding
a metadata entry for each reupload.
And it's better to use something standarised.
Also, maybe those could be whitelisted. Resized images don't keep the
original metadata due to large metadata of thumbnails. A patch for
imagemagick would be needed.