learning wrote:I still don't get it. You are saying that looking at a photo is okay but actually copying and re-sharing it is somehow bad? That's even more repressive than facebook, at least in facebook you can re-share people's photos on your own page with no limitation. And what about derivative works? If I want to take a photo and make some shopped version, do I need to seek out the photo's author and ask for their permission? This is stupid and that's not how the internet works, and it will never work this way and I don't want to live in a world where it would work this way. This is some sort of copyrightist dystopia that might as well serve as kopimist version of eternal damnation. In real internet whenever information — any piece of information at all — becomes publicly available, it doesn't "belong" to anyone and anyone can copy, share and modify it ad libitum. And this is the natural way, the way it should always work, and it will always work like this unless copyrightists somehow manage to subdue the internet with copious amount of government coercion.
Yes, Joel is right, and this is not exactly new news. And, in fact, the internet does often work just as copyright laws (which have, in fact, typically been updated to adapt them to the digital age) intend. You can share photos on Facebook because the Facebook user agreements says that you give permission for this to happen when you upload a photo. And yes, some people don't respect the law, or are ignorant of it, but people have been getting caught and forced to take down copyrighted content--and even, sometimes, pay fines--for years. Some copyright holder explicitly allow certain types of use, some overlook it where the violating material isn't spread too widely and the individuals in question aren't profiting from it (fan fiction and fan art--derivative works--can fall under both of those categories), and there are corners of the internet visited so infrequently that no one bothers to police them. Nonetheless, none of these laws is news.
I'm not sure why you think putting a picture online is tantamount to making it publicly available--any more than is putting the same picture in a book in a public library. You can see it for free either way, but the owner also has a chance to profit off of it, either by getting paid for the library copy of the book, or selling ads on his website.
Personally, I think the length of copyright is currently too long, and I found the sponsorship of one particularly egregious law in the U.S. by a member of Congress with a deep personal interest (Sonny Bono's widow) to be extraordinarily cynical, but copyright does have a purpose in providing a way for the creator of an original work to get rewarded.