Ownership rights must factor in somewhere right? If I pay an artist for a painting, and they deliver it to me and take my payment I can then sell that painting to someone else, display it on the walls of my home, show it to my friends, or even give it away. If I pay someone to send me a digital photograph or even a video shouldn't I have those same options? The whole thing seems like a weird grey mine field of legal and personal rights.
If you buy a painting from an artist, or a print from a photographer, can you turn around and scan that art and sell hundreds of copies? Usually not, you typically have purchased an individual copy of a work but not to make your own copies and redistribute.
Copyright is itself filled with massive amounts of grey areas and is so overbroad that most people are regularly violating it just by living their daily lives. Some uses very clearly violate copyright, but in others it's not clear. If I bought a painting from a local artist and hung it on my wall, I wouldn't expect it to be impossible to post a picture of me standing in my living room on social media just because that painting happens to be hanging above my living room fireplace and I don't have a license to make or distribute copies.
I don't think any automated process can determine what is okay or not. This isn't a problem I think we'll have easy answers for in tech and care must be taken to make sure that attempting to fix it using technical measures doesn't invite other abuses or infringe on other rights. Blindly accepting hashes and blocking them seems like it could make things very easy for social media companies but at a cost to the rest of us.
Sure, posting a photo of you in your living room with the painting in the background isn't reproducing the original work. It'd be hard to argue that it's infringing. But let's get back to the original topic: OnlyFans' terms of use almost certainly does not give users the right to redistribute purchased content. This would destroy their entire business model: one subscriber could just repost everything.
> Sure, posting a photo of you in your living room with the painting in the background isn't reproducing the original work.
Most people wouldn't think so, but it technically is. If an algorithm spots the painting in the background and matches it to a known hash it could block the post automatically. If it didn't, than anyone could print out revenge porn and tape it to a wall, photograph it, and facebook's system would never remove it. The point of revenge porn isn't to reproduce and sell perfect 1:1 copies of a copyrighted work, but to harass someone and less than perfect copies will do that job very well.
It's not that I think any system must be perfect or else it's useless, but others have already pointed out how easy this system could be to game to remove all kinds of other content, youtube's efforts with their similar "Content ID" system shows us that these automated systems will have negative impacts for many innocent people, and these systems are becoming increasingly common (for example, apple scanning your personal devices to generate hashes to match against photos of child abuse) so it really is important that companies get this right and protect their users. Especially for a company like facebook who is doing it so that they can avoid paying for the kind of human oversight which is actually needed to combat the problem. This seems like a poorly thought out scheme that could have major consequences for users but let's Facebook off the hook because they've doing "something".
> If you buy a painting from an artist, or a print from a photographer, can you turn around and scan that art and sell hundreds of copies? Usually not, you typically have purchased an individual copy of a work but not to make your own copies and redistribute.
Depends on specific details and jurisdiction. Here, if someone commissions a work from an artist (instead of buying copy of their existing work), then transfer of copyright ownership to the buyer is implicitly a part of the agreement.
Depends on legislation and degree. I think here at least you have right to buy a print, make photocopy out of it and give limited number to your family and friends...
