Japan top court tells Twitter to disclose retweeters' info • Hacker News Board

Re: Japan top court tells Twitter to disclose retweeters' info

#91

Post by thaumasiotes » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 1:25 PM UTC

polm23 wrote: post #57

People are asking about Japanese law on this, so I'll write what I know. I am not a lawyer, just a person who cares about copyright. Japan does not have fair use, instead it has a number of specific exceptions to copyright. For example, you can take photos of things semi-permanently installed in an outdoor area and use those photos for non-commercial purposes, even if you photographed a 2D artwork that might have cop…

> One really unfortunate side effect of this is that Japanese Wikpedia has very few images compared to other Wikipedias. Things that would be fine in an article, like book covers, are excluded because their Wikimedia file page would not have commentary and, so the thinking goes, would be infringement. (I remember reading the discussion that came to this conclusion on a Wikipedia discussion page years ago, but haven't been able to find it since.) This is why the Japanese article for Anpanman has a photo of a mural, for example, while the English article has a book cover.

Where would the violation occur if the Japanese article also showed the book cover? We've stipulated that the article poses no problem. But the Wikimedia file page already exists. Does that page violate Japanese law? Would it violate Japanese law more if a Japanese article legally displayed the same image?

> Practically speaking, if you license a work for use it's pretty common to have a clause saying you will not exercise these [moral] rights

Huh. I thought the idea of moral rights was that they were inalienable. If you can contractually waive them... that seems like a conceptual contradiction?

Re: Japan top court tells Twitter to disclose retweeters' info

#92

Post by thaumasiotes » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 1:30 PM UTC

polm23 wrote: post #62

waon wrote: post #41

Japan desperately needs a competent organization that can stand up for the digital rights of its people now. They lack organizations like the EFF that are willing to do this.

Politician Taro Yamada (his name is extremely generic but real) and manga artist Ken Akamatsu are copyright progressives and have managed to avert some of the worst proposed reforms, but I don't think there's any organization working on this.

> Politician Taro Yamada (his name is extremely generic but real)

Isn't that the name given to anonymous males in Japanese court cases? I wonder how many Americans are named John Doe.

Re: Japan top court tells Twitter to disclose retweeters' info

#93

Post by kd5bjo » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

totetsu wrote: post #75

don't we have algorithms that can smart crop an image to preserve points of interest? Could that be used to keep text at the top or bottom of an image. Ugly as that may be.

Depending on the relevant law and contracts, that may be as bad or worse than removing the attribution: the artist may consider the “uninteresting” parts of the image to be vital to its overall composition and object to the tampering— Even something as simple as traditional cropping can be controversial in this regard.

Re: Japan top court tells Twitter to disclose retweeters' info

#94

Post by ladberg » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 4:51 PM UTC

gerland wrote: post #74

ladberg wrote: post #4

I don't use Twitter so I could be wrong about what happened, but this seems crazy. Three people retweeted a photo that included the photographer's name. However, Twitter didn't show the name in the thumbnail because it cropped the image (but was still visible when enlarged). Somehow, this led to the government mandating Twitter to release the identities of the retweeters? Does anyone know how a random image from 10 y…

Does it matter how many people rights were borkend and how famous they were?

You're right, it doesn't really matter how known the incident was. However, I don't think it should have happened at all and if someone were to sue, I would have assumed they would only be entertained if it was a widespread case or they were famous (not something I agree with, just how the world works).

Re: Japan top court tells Twitter to disclose retweeters' info

#95

Post by em-bee » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 6:03 PM UTC

roblabla wrote: post #90

em-bee wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to punish twitter they wouldn't need the identities of the retweeters. the only use for knowing the retweeters is to haul them into court.

To be fair, they could be asking for the identities in order to summon them as witnesses against twitter. I don't hold much faith that this is the intention though...

the thought crossed my mind, but wouldn't you do that after you sue in the discovery step?

Re: Japan top court tells Twitter to disclose retweeters' info

#96

Post by stordoff » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 11:13 PM UTC

fireattack wrote: post #52

stordoff wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The linked CC licence states (and it appears to be confirmed that this is the licence that applies[1]): > If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author [...]; (ii) the…

Thanks for the detailed reply. I agree, Wikipedia indeed does enough to attribute, but I'm still a little bit concerned about the specific "Attribution Requirements" listed on the File page (second block under #Licensing). Basically it states, modified or not, you need to keep the source "below the map", which some Wikipedia article pages obviously don't. What's your take about this "requirements" statement? Does it…

My take would be that the CC licence used does not allow you to add additional attribution requirements, so either the image is not CC licenced (which seems not to be the case), or the requirements don't carry any weight (so are essentially a request/a guide to how they would like to be attributed). I will admit I'm less certain on this than the broader terms of the CC licence though.

Re: Japan top court tells Twitter to disclose retweeters' info

#97

Post by slevir » Sat, Jul 25, 2020, 4:45 AM UTC

Thorrez wrote: post #67

darren_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is bonkers. The attribution is still there, you just have click it This means, almost by definition, that the most viewed versions of these photos on twitter, probably by a very high margin, have no attribution. Why is this bonkers? The right to attribution is clear, and it’s not your place to judge whether or not the artist should be exercising it. The latter question comes down to how feasible it is for a pe…

Most people don't watch the credits of a movie. That doesn't mean the actors didn't get attribution.

Interestingly enough, in japanese movie theaters most people do stay to watch the credits. From what I hear, specifically out of respect for creators.

...Well, I'd say it's because there's often additional short scenes after credits.

Re: Japan top court tells Twitter to disclose retweeters' info

#98

Post by bscphil » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 2:26 AM UTC

hunter2_ wrote: post #47

trashcan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just that the context is frequently misleading (combined with the character limit to describe the images). If this part is designed so poorly, it makes me less interested in the rest of the product which may have other similar issues. I recognize it is a fairly silly (and trivial) opinion. Is there a reason the whole image couldn't be scaled down? Or at least be done proportionally. That's how thumbnails work in…

To have the image fill the entire available width, you really do need to crop from the top and bottom or else someone could put an image with a 1:1000 aspect ratio and scrolling through the tweet would take forever. Not filling the available width would leave negative space -- similar to "black bars" -- on the sides of the image. You don't have to agree, but many people dislike such negative space and cropping is the…

Late replying to this, but even if negative space was a solution to "showing the whole image in the thumbnail", it probably just reintroduces the problem, which is frivolous lawsuits about image attribution not being visible - because of the thumbnail is too small for anyone to be able to see the attribution, they'll sue over that. I'm not sure there's any way around the problem that allowing people to sue over attribution in a thumbnail that clicks-through to the full version is bloody idiotic.