• Anything ‘published’ on the web is viewed as intellectual property and, regardless of whether it displays a copyright symbol or not, is therefore copyrighted by the originator. The only exception to this is if there is a “free and unrestricted reuse” statement associated with the work.

    In order to protect our members and TFL from possible litigation, all members must abide by the following new rules:

    1. Copying and pasting entire articles from another site to TFL is strictly prohibited. The same applies to articles from print or other media, and to posting photographs taken of copyrighted pages or other media.

    2. Copyright law provides for “fair use” of portions of a copyrighted work. You can copy no more than a SINGLE paragraph from the article to your post (3 or 4 sentences at most).

    3. You must provide a link to the article along with the name of website. For example: ww.xxx.yyy/zzz (The Lower Thumbsuck Daily News).

    4. You must provide, in your own words, a brief summary of the article AND your reasons for believing it will be of interest to TFL members. Failure to do so may result in the thread being closed or your post being deleted as a “cut and paste drive by.”

    5. Photographs and other images are also copyrighted. "Hotlinking" of images (so that it appears in your message) from other sites is also prohibited unless you own rights to the image. If you wish to share an image, provide a clickable link to it.

    Posts that do not follow these new guidelines will be altered or deleted by staff. Members who continue to violate this policy may lose their posting privileges at TFL.

    Thank you for your cooperation and your participation in TFL, the leading online forum for firearms enthusiasts.

Question about hotlink/int.prop policy for images...

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azredhawk44

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This one is pretty infamous.

Image removed.

Obviously, HK owns the rights to this since they made the original cover art... but look more closely:

This is a cell phone picture of the back page ad in some gun mag, as the mag sits on someone's table.

I don't know who took the pic... it's been copied voraciously all over the interwebz, and I now host a copy of it on my photobucket site.

I'm sure HK would love for this pic to simply disappear down the pooper, but it has relevance to the firearms community due to the "because you suck, and we hate you" line of thought.

Technically, this is not a cut and paste. Nor is it a hotlinking to media owned by HK...

...or is it, according to the new TFL guidelines?

What about PrtScn captures of articles, hosted on one's own photobucket? Digital photographs of offensive (to our community) print articles from Time magazine?

Where is the "grey?"

ETA:

Or, another direction:

What about editorially relevant derivative works, like this?

Image removed

The original image was from a news article somewhere, but I ran it through a "demotivator" after being stricken by inspiration to come up with the composite work of art after the ATF's harassment of Cavalry Arms in my neck o' the woods.
 
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Good question. I think that taking a photograph of a print article would be a pretty transparent attempt to avoid copyright issues and probably wouldn't fly, but what about "here's a photograph I took of a funny billboard"? Obviously, the content of the billboard is copyrighted, but does that automatically make any depiction of it infringement?
 
The person who took the photograph of the HK magazine is the owner of the copyright on that particular image; to be perfectly frank, I have no clue if dual copyright issues would be present. It doesn't matter how much it's been passed around on the internet, the law as it is currently written is quite clear -- the person who created it has copyright ownership of it.


This statement is very clear:

"Photographs and other images are also copyrighted. "Hotlinking" of images (so that it appears in your message) from other sites is also prohibited unless you own rights to the image. If you wish to share an image, provide a clickable link to it."

Until the courts move to sort out some of the issues that have been raised by the flurry of lawsuits that have been filed, TFL will be taking a very strict line.

Yes, this is a pain in the ass. But, right now, there are a lot of individuals and companies facing very expensive legal fights, or equally expensive "we're going to knuckle under and pay thousands of dollars to get this off our backs" settlements.

Staff does not intend to be caught up in such lawsuits. We don't intend for TFL's owner or parent company to be caught up in such lawsuits. And we certainly don't intend for TFL members to be caught up in such lawsuits.

In essence, THERE IS NO GRAY.
 
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