Was the image hotlinked? Or was it copied and rehosted instead? I think that's an important consideration in image copyright cases like this.
Do sites that display Open Graph images generally hotlink them or copy and rehost them?
A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image I used
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Re: A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image I used
#52I create most of my OpenGraph images using AI. As far as I can tell, there is no copyright on those images. They are in the public domain (I think?)
I may be wrong, but I believe the distinction is between if I were to link to your post with one of your generated images which would get served as og:image and if I were to re-host your image to have it stand in as an "open-graph image" on my site linking to your post then what are the repercussions for me.
Re: A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image I used
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
To elaborate with some context: large sites do this to avoid hammering a small site if posts containing the link go viral. Like imagine the thumbnail were fetched every time a link appeared in someone's Facebook/Twitter feed. That could be tens of millions of hits easy.
It's also a privacy leak - the target page would get to know about every thumbnail view (a la tracking pixel). Although it's likely they only care about keeping that data so they can sell it for themselves, rather than actual privacy.
I'd rather the target know it than Twitter or Meta TBH.
Re: A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image I used
#54Was the image hotlinked? Or was it copied and rehosted instead? I think that's an important consideration in image copyright cases like this. Do sites that display Open Graph images generally hotlink them or copy and rehost them?
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Re: A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image I used
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The OP had no intent to offend and shouldn't have paid That can't be how it works. The OP had a responsibility to check the that images that the OP published were adequately licensed. The rights holder makes a claim against the publisher (the OP), and the publisher can make a claim against their supplier (the newspaper.) The judge would then divide the amount of responsibility between the two in some proportion.
> The OP had a responsibility to check Only within reason. The archive was published in bulk. I don't think there's any expectation every single post in an archive is checked prior to publication. But more than that, even had the author explicitly checked the thumbnail had been provided by the original publisher via Open Graph. Effectively the original publisher publicly provided this image and suggested that people…
> Only within reason. The archive was published in bulk. I don't think there's any expectation every single post in an archive is checked prior to publication.
Why? Just because it’s onerous doesn’t mean you don’t have a duty to do it.
If the guy had copy and pasted the whole news article and republished it himself, I doubt many people would try to argue that he hadn’t infringed the copyright of the newspaper. So that thought experiment covers the idea that something can be published legally without automatically granting a licence to reproduce the content.
The question here hinges on whether using opengraph tags on an article implicitly sublicenses the image for reproduction. There’s a solid argument that it does, but the author chose not to test that so we don’t know.
If the answer is yes, then it’s the newspaper who are liable for the infringement by sublicensing the image in a way that’s not compatible with their original licence (I assume! At this stage, we don’t know if the newspaper DID actually have the right to relicense the image for reproduction or not).
If the answer is no, then the author has well-meaningly but incorrectly used the image that the newspaper published. Normally this would probably not be heavily punished by the courts, but the author opted to instead pay the fee, which seems a reasonable approach to take given his uncertainty about the legal grounds by which the image was licensed for use (again, I assume. I doubt it, but it is theoretically possible that X/Twitter were in some kind of relationship with the newspaper that made their usage lawful).
Either way, I imagine neither party I think wanted this to be tested in court. The author clearly didn’t, and the fact that (we are not aware of) the company did not go after X/Twitter despite likely bigger payouts for multiple infringements suggests they also did not, as X/Twitter were more likely to litigate the case.
If the legal system isn’t given an opportunity to weigh in, it can’t do so.
Re: A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image I used
#56OpenGraph allows to get a preview of the content.
Allowing access to that preview is implicit and it looks fair to access the image from the media site.
However, republishing that preview elsewhere is still publishing and the author of the post seems to have missed that. Instead he should just publish the link to the media site and let the client that browse his archive access (download) the OpenGraph preview by itself.
Twitter/X does that republishing, but having the license for that republishing is their problem.
I'm curious to know if that preview was part of the Twitter archive. Because it doesn't qualify as "your" content.
Re: A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image I used
#57Why not just remove that one link/image?
What about reading the post to the end?
Re: A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image I used
#58[dead]
Re: A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image I used
#59I create most of my OpenGraph images using AI. As far as I can tell, there is no copyright on those images. They are in the public domain (I think?)
How can you communicate that to anyone who displays your OpenGraph images? I always assumed that an OpenGraph image was free to be used as a link to the page, but it turns out that this is a risky assumption.
Re: A media company demanded a license fee for an Open Graph image I used
#60OpenGraph allows to get a preview of the content. Allowing access to that preview is implicit and it looks fair to access the image from the media site. However, republishing that preview elsewhere is still publishing and the author of the post seems to have missed that. Instead he should just publish the link to the media site and let the client that browse his archive access (download) the OpenGraph preview by itse…
A technical solution would be to implement the OpenGraph preview on the client side (JS), instead of having the preview in the archive and hosted/served by it.