Short Version:
You can’t watermark images of artwork or photographs you don’t own the copyrights to. No, even if you buy a book and scan the images.

TLDR Version:
There’s a Tumblr I follow called Vintagegal. The site features tons of photos of classic movie stars from the 1920’s through to the 1970’s as well as pinup illustrations and shots from horror films.

It seems though, that the site’s creator, Cat, is confused about copyright law. In a post from 1 November titled, Here We Go Again, she (unintentionally) makes it clear how little she understands.

Below is the post in it’s entirety:

People you are just going to have to get over the fact that I will indeed watermark my scans. Just like people watermark their gifs.

I can physically hold these pictures, so yes I own them. I paid for them. I bid on them. I buy things and take the time to scan and edit them to share. And since people constantly re-post them, yes I will watermark them.

The hypocrisy that makes it ok to watermark gifs and not scans on here is ridiculous.

I am sorry some of you STILL can’t grasp this concept.

I really do not care if you choose to unfollow for this reason, or any reason, just don’t waste my time sending me some lame message about it.

Reposting is not the same as re-blogging.

This is the last time I will ever address this.

Cat is not the only person ignorant of what is legal and not legal in the realm of copyrights surround art and reproductions of art. I’ll even be the first one to admit I have a lot to learn on the subject.

But I do know this: When you buy a book of artwork (photographs, paintings, illustrations) and then scan images from the book and post them on your blog, you do not have the right to put your watermark on them. You actually don’t even have the right to post them to your website in the first place. You do not own the copyrights to those images. The right to copy is not yours. Is this sinking in?

This is similar to a DJ who creates a carefully curated playlist of tracks by other musicians and thinks it’s ok to “watermark” a voiceover saying their DJ name on top of the tracks they’ve arranged. You can’t do that.

In the case of a work of art, the copyright usually resides with the artist or artist’s estate, if they’re deceased. In the case of stills (or animated GIFs) from movies, the copyright usually resides with the movie studio that produced it.

I understand these laws when I post images to Daily Exhaust I don’t own the copyrights to. How does the law work when there’s a violation? The copyright owner contacts me about the offending image and I take it down.

The other issue Vintagegal brings up in her post involves reposting versus reblogging. Reblogging is an important function on Tumblr, where her site is hosted. Reblogging a post from someone else’s Tumblr on to your Tumblr maintains the trail of attribution. Reblogging allows you to see where the content of the post you’re looking at originated. It’s part of what makes Tumblr such a thriving community.

I agree with Vintagegal that reblogging is not only important on Tumblr, it’s just plain courteous. In the case of Daily Exhaust, I host it on a shared server environment on Dreamhost and I’ve been using Movable Type for my blogging software since I launched the site in 2006. Movable Type has no built-in reblogging feature which means I manually type in and link to the sources of my posts. The Internet is built on the strength of links and I think it’s important to give credit where it’s due and who knows, when someone sees I’m linking to their site, they might end up interested in Daily Exhaust and decide to reference one of my posts.

There’s another detail about reposting I should mention: I always download, rename and upload images to my server when constructing my posts. I do this for two reasons. First, it’s illegal to deep link to an image on someone else’s site. It’s called ‘bandwidth stealing’ because you’re not hosting the image, but reaping all the benefits of showcasing it on your site. And what if your site receives thousands of visitors a day and the site you’re deep linking to has a small bandwidth cap? You could potentially cost that person thousands of dollars. The second reason I re-upload images to my site is so it can be as self-contained an archive as possible. Sure, embedded YouTube videos eventually die, but I at least want the images posted to Daily Exhaust to last as long as the words written on it do.

But just because someone does not reblog or link back to your post does not give you the right to watermark images. In fact, if I wanted to, I could crop off any (illegal) watermarks from images I find and repost them on my site. In turn, I would also have to take down those images if the copyright holder asked me to.

Note: There are scenarios I have not accounted for in this post where you can post copyrighted material without risk of prosecution, such as reproducing images in educational environments. I also didn’t discuss images in the public domain.

Update: Reader (and law student) Eli Stoughton emailed me to correct my use of the term “deep linking”:

What you are doing is actually the exact opposite of what you would want to do to steer clear of infringing. What you are describing is not deep linking, but actually inline linking. And the legal precedent on inline linking is that inline linking is not infringement. The reason for this is that when you inline link an image, you have not copied that image on your server. In fact, you are merely telling the web browser to display that image. If you, instead, make a copy of the image on your server, then this constitutes making a copy and could potentially be infringement.
So, despite the fact that your intentions are well-meaning, the way you are doing things could be found to be infringement, whereas if you were inline linking, you would most likely be in the clear.

I’m happy people are keeping me on point. While my process of copying images to my server is more of a copyright infringement than inline linking to another site, I’d still rather have a archive of posts without broken image links (that I might have to take down) than to feed off of someone else’s bandwidth.

Truth be told, most of the images I post on Daily Exhaust run little risk of being taken down since many times they’re kitschy ads and illustrations from books and magazines from the early 20th century or photos by people who know and are ok with me reposting their work (like Just A Car Guy).

In my experience, if your intentions are good and you properly credit and link back to your sources, most people don’t have a problem when you repost their content.

Update 2: Seems Vintagegal has pulled the link I was referencing from her Tumblr. I’m not sure why. I guess she doesn’t realize it’s still accessible via Google Cache.

Daily Exhaust doesn’t focus on politics (unless Shepard Fairey decides to make a new Obama poster), but if you’re interested in commentary on the U.S. presidential election, fellow Exhauster Bryan will be updating his site, Missile Test, throughout the night tonight (as well as pulling his hair out and watching his blood pressure rise).

See everyone on the other side.

All of Shawn Blanc’s internet nerd friends are loving the new iPad Mini. The fact that it’s lighter, smaller and still uses all of the apps and games from their larger iPads seems to be making up for the lack of a Retina screen.

John Gruber points out even Paul “Windows Supersite” Thurrott’s initial reactions to the original iPad in 2010 are coming true.

…and Instapaper’s Marco Arment thinks the iPad Mini will be the best-selling iPad from now on.

This is making me think Microsoft is not only getting to the tablet party late with their Surface, but they’re not even wearing the right attire. Everyone is changing into smaller, thinner and lighter iPad Minis and Microsoft is ringing the doorbell with a heavy, 3-piece suit, suitcase and let’s not forget, a keyboard!

[cue the obligatory 1980’s record-scratch, while everyone at the house party goes silent and turns to look at Microsoft standing awkwardly at the door, nervously *clicking* their Touch Cover]

Once again, Google is proving itself to be much more of the ‘Microsoft of the 2000s’ than Microsoft is. When the iPad came out, instead of racing to come out with their own 9/10-inch tablet, they saw where the puck was going, and that was to the 7-inch form factor. They debuted the Nexus 7 in 2011. They waited until November of 2012 to release a 10-inch tablet.

People are continuing to move even farther away from “tradition” PC experiences and it might be too late for Microsoft.

The mindshift is underway.

Apple Hides Samsung Apology So It Can’t Be Seen Without Scrolling

Classic. Check it out for yourselves.

This reeks of Steve Jobs’s anti-establishment thinking.

Over at FiveThirtyEight, statistician Nate Silver has been aggregating and analyzing polling data in order to predict the outcome of this year’s presidential election. What a person will notice from his, and other analyses done by observers trying their best to be objective, is that the race has not been as close as the media would have you believe. President Obama can lose tomorrow, but Silver’s model has the race as anything but a tossup. See this mornings predictions below:

What Silver has been doing in this, and past elections, is try to get past the noise of pundits and news organizations that offer predictions without really delving into the complexity of the available data. It’s not new, but he has shown that even the best news organizations are still operating from their own self-interests, painting the race as much closer than it really is in a not-totally-concsious effort to keep the race exciting. I’m a big fan of news media, especially newspapers, having grown up in a household with both parents employed by newspapers. But while news organizations are invaluable in reporting things that have already happened, they are generally weak in their predictive capacities. To its credit, the New York Times recognized this, which is why they bought FiveThirtyEight.com and it now resides in their domain.

Silver has been catching a lot of heat over his model, which hasn’t had the president at less than a 75% of victory since June. This weekend, Silver wrote an excellent piece defending his work. From the column:

…we’ve about reached the point where if Mr. Romney wins, it can only be because the polls have been biased against him. Almost all of the chance that Mr. Romney has in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, about 16 percent to win the Electoral College, reflects this possibility.

Yes, of course: most of the arguments that the polls are necessarily biased against Mr. Romney reflect little more than wishful thinking.

Nevertheless, these arguments are potentially more intellectually coherent than the ones that propose that the leader in the race is “too close to call.” It isn’t. If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can’t acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.

That’s some tough language, especially considering his employers are being more conservative in their analysis. It’s obvious that Silver believes in his predictive model, and that confidence is not unfounded, having predicted the outcome correctly in 49 of the 50 states in the 2008 election. If that election got him noticed, this election has gotten him scrutiny.

If all a person does is absorb the work of editorial writers, op-ed pieces, and bloviating cable pundits, Silver must look like he’s out of his mind. Or worse, that he’s little more than a paid operative of a biased liberal media. The only evidence of that, however, is how a reader reacts to his numbers, which is no evidence at all (in fact, the opposite argument could have been made in 2010, when Silver predicted, and was correct about, massive losses for the Democrats in the House).

Silver has a lot on the line with tomorrow’s outcome. Along with watching the returns tomorrow, I’ll be watching to see how they line up with Silver’s predictions. What I’m watching for is not so much a win for Silver, but a loss for punditry. There’s so much poison on the airwaves, in print and online masquerading as truth that getting skewered by some objective analysis is sorely needed. Well-considered opinion has a place in the public debate, but faulty predictions of outcomes based on little to no evidence and biased to a speaker’s agenda, whether it be political or monetary, needs a countervailing force. That’s what Silver provides, and why I imagine he will be quite satisfied come tomorrow night, even if Romney manages to beat the odds.

via Instagram

I was walking down Mission Street in San Francisco earlier today and I came across an ad for the Microsoft Surface on the side of a building. It featured a series of three wireframe-y illustrations of Surface tablets with different, brightly-colored keyboards underneath each.

Seeing these ads made me realize Microsoft isn’t so much promoting their touch keyboard feature as they are diverting attention away from the actual product, the tablet.

It’s like running an ad for a new convertible car, but drawing everyone’s attention to the optional hard top.

David Rohde at The Atlantic, on the inequality in New York exposed by Hurricane Sandy:

A hotel bellman said he was worried about his mother uptown. A maid said she had been calling her family in Queens. A garage attendant said he hadn’t been able to contact his only relative – a sister in New Jersey – since the storm hit. Asked where he weathered the hurricane, his answer was simple.

“I slept in my car,” he said.

Sandy humbled every one of the 19 million people in the New York City metropolitan area. But it humbled some more than others in an increasingly economically divided city.

As they point out in the article, everyone is getting hit hard in the aftermath of the hurricane, just some are getting hit harder than others.

No reason to stop posting great New York links.

How about Anthony Bourdain with Talib Kweli in Brooklyn.

Hell yeah.

(thanks bro)

From Jason Kottke:

Publishing on kottke.org is suspended until further notice. The situation in New York and New Jersey is still dire** so posting stupid crap seems frivolous and posting about the Sandy aftermath seems exploitive. Information is not what people need right now; people need flashlights, candles, drinking water, safety, food, access to emergency medical care, a warm place to sleep, etc.

Interesting he identifies his site content as “stupid crap.”

In the face of dire living conditions, it’s amazing how much of what we do seems so pointless.

See, this is what happens. I moved out of NYC in April all this bad stuff happens. First it’s Hurricane Sandy and now my friend Victor switches from an iPhone to a Samsung Galaxy Note:

The good news is he hasn’t totally lost his mind, as he’s ready to “hit the EJECT button” if things don’t go well:

So I’ll make the switch but with two huge EJECT buttons: 1) If I find i’m not using the stylus enough (maybe it’s like the Pepsi Challenge in that it seems better at first, but you have to live with it for a while to truly judge), if adopting a new music ecosystem is too cumbersome. As I write this I’m reminded of the brilliant Samsung commercials with the hipsters in line for the new Apple product release bemoaning the feature gap… If the iPhone 6 comes out and closes the gap, there’s still one thing that Apple has that no one else does… the “Apple Experience” – and that’s a competitive differentiator.

*Regarding his observation of his Samsung not being as ‘smooth’ as his iPhone. I think this has less to do with the screen type and more with the fact that Android wasn’t designed for animation. With iOS, everything you see on the screen is built on top of Core Animation. This is why animations are smooth even on first generation iPhones.

People generating power by bicycle to charge their devices after Hurricance Sandy left a good chunk of NYC without power:

This is why I love New York.