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The thread about the borrowed Lamborghini Diablo design illustrates some
significant issues about intellectual property (IP) and the Internet.
The facts of the matter are ...
1) content on the Internet can be accessed worldwide (we all know this, I hope)
2) laws are made by nations, and apply to their citizens and/or things that
occur within their territory
3) some nations agree through treaties and trade agreements to have some kind
of mutual respect for certain laws of the other country, or agreements about
how interactions between their nations will be conducted
4) the United Nations does not make any laws. Any agreements made at the United
Nations must be then taken by the individual nations and legislated in their
own country. Many nations are signatories to UN agreements and never get around
to creating their own legislation.
Many western industrialised nations have intellectual property laws. Most are
structured around the notions of:
* copyright which protects the copying of the presentation/appearance of a
thing
* patents which protects the right to commercially exploit an original idea
* licensing which seeks to agree how something may be used by the licensee
but the precise rules vary from nation to nation, and some nations have no
rules. So, if Righteous Richard in RegulatedLand creates some intellectual
property and puts it on the Internet and Naughty Neville in NoRulesLand copies,
exploits or uses it in some way, then it is the laws of NoRulesLand that apply
and Righteous Richard can do nothing about it. If Naughty Neville comes to
RegulatedLand and continues to rip off Righteous Richard's IP in RegulatedLand,
then the laws of RegulatedLand may apply. Put simply, there are some parts of
the world in which it is completely legal to rip off anyone's intellectual
property from the Internet. If this is not an acceptable risk for you, don't
make things publically available on the Internet.
OK, now most of us here on LUGnet live in countries with more-or-less similar
intellectual property laws and which have agreements with many other countries
to more-or-less mutually respect one another's intellectual property. So, lets
forget the minor differences and focus on how intellectual property works in
practice for most of us from hereon in.
Copyrights can simply be asserted by the creator of a work at no cost (just
write a copyright notice). Patents require a formal application and usually a
large payment of money and an investigation as to the originality of the idea.
Licenses are an agreement between licenser and licensee and so the licensee
must explicitly agree to the conditions of use.
So where do we stand when we put a picture of our latest MOC on brickshelf?
Well, to begin with, what intellectual property rights are we asserting when we
put the image on brickshelf. Well, every gallery page on brickshelf says "All
Gallery content is property of the uploader, unless otherwise stated", so there
appears to be some claim by the uploader to some kind of intellectual property
rights. Since we are discussing images and text (and in the absence of any
patent application or license agreement), I assume that the brickshelf
statement is implying copyright is held by the uploader. So, if a picture of a
MOC on brickshelf is copyright, what can be done with it?
Well, it is perfectly legal to *look* at a copyright image but it is not legal
to copy it without permission. At some level, the act of looking at the image
on our computer screens is a breach of copyright as the file is *copied* from
the brickshelf site to the user's computer and then rendered onto the screen
from the user's computer. Since the WWW browser will usually delete the image
file from the local computer (and any cached copies along the way will
hopefully disappear over time), I assume that this temporary copy is probably
not considered a "copy" for the purposes of breaching copyright. This is why
there is no technical way to protect your images from copying once they are on
a publically accessible part of the Internet. Ignore anyone who tells you to
use PDF with permissions, disabling the right-mouse in the browser etc, as all
of these things may make it more difficult to copy the image, but ultimately if
you can display something on your screen, then it is in the memory of your
computer and hence it can be copied. So, we cannot stop people technically from
copying our copyright image on brickshelf.
However, if we believe that someone has copied our image on brickshelf, then we
can take legal action against them for doing so. This is a fairly expensive
process and may have to done in another country (where the breach of copyright
occurred). The legal action would presumably seek compensation for your
economic loss incurred through their copying. However, unless you are actually
selling the image to people or the copying person starts selling the image, it
is going to be hard to argue that the image has any significant economic value,
and so the payment if you won your case would be quite small and unlikely to be
worth the risk of undertaking the legal action in practice. The "happy snaps"
that most of us are taking of our MOCs have no economic value.
So, yes, if someone copies or prints your brickshelf image, then they have
breached your copyright. However, unless the image is worth a lot of money,
it's probably not practical to pursue the matter legally. Really all you can do
is ask the person to stop doing it, and if they are republishing (e.g. on
another WWW site), ask that publisher to stop doing it. So, if someone copied
your images to another part of brickshelf or LUGnet, the admins of these sites
would probably delete the copied images. However, some other WWW site
administrators might not give a damn.
What if someone uses your MOC photo on brickshelf to create their own model or
something similar? Copyright protects the image, not the idea that the image
may represent. To protect ideas, you need a patent. Because of the cost of
taking out a patent, most of us would not patent our Lego designs unless we
expect to make a lot of money from them. Even if the image is not of the
finished MOC but is instead instructions for building your MOC, it is still the
text/images that is protected by the copyright, not the actions described by
the text/images. In this case, someone else cannot copy/print the instructions
but they can look/build from the picture/instructions.
Having been built from the picture/instructions, the resultant model is the
property of the person who built it (assuming they owned the bricks) and they
are free to sell it to anyone without any requirement to give credit or payment
to you, so long as they don't include a copy of the image of the MOC or its
instructions. They can take photos of their own model (created from your image)
and these new images belong to them and they can distribute these. So, yes,
they can look at your image, build exactly the same model, and then photograph
it at exactly the same angle with the same background and produce a virtually
identical image to yours, but they have not breached copyright by doing so. It
would only be a breach of copyright if they took your image into a photo editor
(or similar) and actually used some of it to create their own image. If it is
an original photo of their own model (no matter how derivative the model is),
it is not a breach of your copyright.
So, what can we do if we want to protect images of our MOCs or instructions
from being built and sold etc? The only way to do this is by licensing the
image. That is, make the image available only to those people who will agree to
use it according to whatever rules you choose to impose. Most of you will have
downloaded demo software or Microsoft updates etc, and will be accustomed to
the window that displays the license and wants you to click "I agree" before
you can commence the download.
Suppose you have developed a MOC and want to make some images (perhaps even
instructions) available via the Internet for to others to build, but you feel
that it is not OK for them to sell the resultant built model or publish an
image of it without giving credit to your original efforts etc. Well, first
thing, don't put the MOC/instructions onto a public WWW page like brickshelf.
Instead, you will need to have a WWW page that says "I have this fabulous
MOC/instructions for a Thingummyjig. I will make it available to you subject to
the following license [blah blah blah]". Note that the license conditions may
include a purchase price, or give different rights to people who pay different
amounts of money, etc. Then you make the images available only to those who
signify their agreement to those conditions (by clicking a button or sending an
email etc). Naturally you will save their agreement so you have proof that they
agreed to the conditions. Now, what happens if they breach those conditions?
Well, you have the evidence of their agreement and you can take legal action
against them. However, once again, the economic loss you sustain will probably
need to be sufficiently large to justify your expense/risks of pursuing a legal
action. Again for those of us for whom Lego is just a hobby and not a source of
income, it is unlikely in practice to be worthwhile.
Summary.
* In some counties, there is no legal protection for images on the Internet.
* In many countries, there is copyright protection available for images on the
Internet, but this does not protect the design that is revealed through the
image.
* Licensing is a means to control the use of images (and hence the design) in
countries where such rights will be respected by law.
* Most of us could not realistically undertake a legal action to enforce our
rights.
Conclusion.
For hobbyists, there is no *effective* way legally or technically to protect
our images or the ideas they embody. If you put them onto the Internet in a
publically accessible way, you must understand that their subsequent use, miuse
and abuse will be effectively beyond your control. But, to balance that out,
most people are nice people and will probably cooperate with your requests, if
you explain your concerns to them politely. As for the rest, you have the
choice of seeing it as flattery and ignoring it, or getting angry and having a
heart attack.
Kerry
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Message has 3 Replies:
 | | Re: Intellectual property and the Internet (Was "Borrowed" Lamborghini Diablo design on Ebay.de)
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| (...) This doesn't make much sense to me. If I create a sculpture, for example, I own the copyright to the sculpture, because it is a unique creative work, right? So if I build a MOC, I have the copyright to the MOC, not just the pictures of it... (...) (22 years ago, 29-Dec-02, to lugnet.market.auction, lugnet.general, lugnet.loc.de)
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