APOD: Aurora, Stars, Meteor, Lake, Alaska (2007 Oct 09)

[NoelC]

Gee, two different photos of Aurora Borealis actually look similar.

Could it be because they're both good photos, showing actually what Aurora looks like?

So much time and effort has gone into trying to discredit an absolutely beautiful photo because it looks a little like another photo of the same type of subject material, but from a completely different place. I can't even begin to imagine a motive for doing so.

Aviatress, if you can't immediately see that these two photos are completely different from one another, save for similar subject material, perhaps you should should consider submitting to some neurological examinations.

-Noel

[santa]

I just filed my first DMCA notice and it involved this image (cropped portions) being used by THREE different people for Firefox Personas. Silly people to use something so well known. Hopefully they won't be there real long.

I had completely forgotten this thread but it's somewhat ironic that this image was at one time disparaged as a fake or a derivative of a Windows Desktop or some such nonsense, then is stolen. Perhaps people thought they could just crop any old portion from a photographer's work and that would be just too cool and never noticed.

[geckzilla]

Comes with the territory. I used to get upset about copyright infringement too. Most battles aren't worth fighting.

[santa]

Agreed but from what little copyright law I know I am under the impression that if you don't assert copyright ownership you can lose it. With an image like the APOD image (which I have licensed for sale more than once) I don't want to risk losing the copyright. Since I'm not a lawyer and not about to hire one for something trivial like this, asking Mozilla to remove that usage seemed like a good idea and one that others here might wish to know about.

[geckzilla]

Copyright law is very gray. It would probably depend on who had the better lawyer... but it's true that those tidbits of your image could get copied over and over with some domino effect because all of the Mozilla apps are released with a very loose license. Wasn't saying this battle wasn't worth fighting. Of course that's up to you. Personally, I just gave up on it. I don't even sign my images. I went from being totally anally retentive about copyright to virtually not caring at all. Kind of funny.