Japan top court tells Twitter to disclose retweeters' info

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/07/22/national/japan-top-court-tells-twitter-disclose-retweeters-info/

by evanb • 6 years ago

119 91 6 years ago

japantimes.co.jp

dang• 6 years ago

Url changed from https://thenextweb.com/insights/2020/07/22/twitter-copyright..., which points to https://torrentfreak.com/warning-for-twitter-users-in-japan-..., which points to this. Submitters: the HN guidelines call for original sources (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so it's best to follow the trail like this when submitting.

sillysaurusx• 6 years ago

The original photo showed up if viewers of the retweets clicked on the trimmed photo, but viewers was not able to see the photographer’s name unless such action was taken, the ruling said.

Interesting. This is how Twitter works. On the other hand, it’s also true that it’s technically copyright infringement, since the reproduction is trimmed. I wonder if Twitter has a duty to enforce copyright in both trimmed and untrimmed cases.

ladberg2• 6 years ago

I don't use Twitter so I could be wrong about what happened, but this seems crazy. Three people retweeted a photo that included the photographer's name. However, Twitter didn't show the name in the thumbnail because it cropped the image (but was still visible when enlarged).

Somehow, this led to the government mandating Twitter to release the identities of the retweeters? Does anyone know how a random image from 10 years ago that picked up nearly zero traction on Twitter made it to the top court in Japan?

Another thought: what if a website displays the image lower down on the page so someone has to scroll to see the bottom? Is that also an infringement?

halfjew22• 6 years ago

Well, to be fair, the judge in the dissenting position (1/5) freed the 3 retweeters from blame because they did not cut off the photographer's name, but rather Twitter did in order to fit the aspect ratio displayed within the application.

I'm still confused though after reading the article.

gruez4• 6 years ago

but rather Twitter did in order to fit the aspect ratio displayed within the application.

This is bonkers. The attribution is still there, you just have click it. Besides, I doubt anyone who cared about the image is going to be content looking at the low-res thumbnail. The reputational damage done to the photographer is negligible.

Punishing the retweeters is also problematic because they themselves didn't crop the picture, twitter did. What does this mean for cropping that's done by the user-agent, or is otherwise device specific? eg. you post on the desktop site, where nothing is cropped, so you think everything is okay. Little do you know on the mobile site, all the images get cropped. Are you now liable as well?

nradov• 6 years ago

Regardless of the legal issue, I sure hate it when social media services like Facebook and Strava crop my photo thumbnails to fit a certain aspect ratio. They frequently end up cropping out important parts like someone's face. I wish there was an option to not crop, and instead add white space around the image to make it fit.

fireattack3• 6 years ago

This reminds me of a question I asked before on Wikipedia [1].

Some of their pictures on Commons, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Belgium_-_Location_Map_(2... , are from UNOCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs).

UNOCHA specifically asks their work to be 'Credit as follows: "Credit: OCHA"', but obviously Wikipedia don't do it on their article page if you just embed the picture, you have to click on the picture to see the credit.

Actually, they even went further and removed the "OCHA" watermark from the original image (see File History).

To be honest, I wasn't super satisfied with the answers I got there (see ref), but then again I'm not familiar with this topic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy...

stordoff2• 6 years ago

The linked CC licence states (and it appears to be confirmed that this is the licence that applies[1]):

If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author [...]; (ii) the title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and (iv) , consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author"). The credit required by this Section 4 (b) may be implemented in any reasonable manner

As the licence states that attribution must be reasonable to the medium and in any reasonable manner, having the attribution details on an information page would appear to be acceptable - the CC wiki[2] and FAQ[3] seem to support this:

There is no one right way; just make sure your attribution is reasonable and suited to the medium you're working with. That being said, you still have to include attribution requirements somehow, even if it's just a link to an About page that has that info.[2]
Additionally, you may satisfy the attribution requirement by providing a link to a place where the attribution information may be found.[3]

This is also made explicit in version 4.0 of the licence[4]:

For example, it may be reasonable to satisfy the conditions by providing a URI or hyperlink to a resource that includes the required information.

Regarding removing the watermark, it does not appear to be a copyright notice, so the right to do so would seem to be implied by the right to make adaptions.

[1] "Wikimedia Foundation has received an e-mail confirming that the copyright holder has approved publication under the terms mentioned on this page. This correspondence has been reviewed by an OTRS member and stored in our permission archive. The correspondence is available to trusted volunteers as ticket #2014031410007248."

[2] https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/best_practices_for_att...

[3] https://creativecommons.org/faq/#How_do_I_properly_attribute...

[4] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

gerland• 6 years ago

Does it matter how many people rights were borkend and how famous they were?

ladberg2• 6 years ago

You're right, it doesn't really matter how known the incident was. However, I don't think it should have happened at all and if someone were to sue, I would have assumed they would only be entertained if it was a widespread case or they were famous (not something I agree with, just how the world works).

whym• 6 years ago

My understanding is:

  Photographer published a photo on their own website.
  Tweeter posted it on Twitter. Twitter trimmed it, removing the credit line.
  Retweeter retweeted it. Photo was still trimmed.
  Photographer sued Retweeter for distributing their work without proper credit.

An obvious question would be if Photographer asked them to delete the tweet(s) first, and why they chose to sue Retweeter not Tweeter. I'm guessing it's because the photographer is seeking financial compensation and the retweeter looked someone financially capable. This disclosure is a preliminary step to further lawsuits demanding remedies.

bscphil2• 6 years ago

Twitter trimmed it, removing the credit line.

As far as I understand, Twitter does not crop photos, at least not without user intervention, so I don't understand how this part of it could have happened.

anonymousab• 6 years ago

When you make a post with an image, the twitter timeline will show a cropped viewport of the image. Depending on the size and shape of the image, some parts may be cut off until you expand it.

For example: https://imgur.com/pP0HrhG https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1286456314701307906/photo/1

The same thing applies to retweets.

trashcan2• 6 years ago

Twitter does in thumbnail previews. If you've seen someone post a picture of text, the thumbnail is basically unusable because a significant portion is missing until you click through to the full-size version.

It's one of the main reasons I never use Twitter, as silly as that is. It is annoying to see a picture that is cropped that sometimes obscures (or even changes if an important part is missing) the actual point being made because it isn't in the preview. It just seems like a really poor design.

kalleboo• 6 years ago

Worse. According to the article;

* Photographer published a photo on their own website

* Tweeter posted it on Twitter, the credit line is preserved.

* Retweeter retweeted it. The photo thumbnail in the reweets are trimmed in the timeline. Tapping on the photo to view it in full, you can see the credit line.

* Photographer sued Retweeter for distributing their work without proper credit.

greggman3• 6 years ago

Why is that worse?

I'd be pretty pissed if my chance at exposure was blown because the one time it got spread virally it got spread without visible attribution. With visual attribution 10s of thousands or even millions of people see my name. Without visible attribution (having to click through to a larger version) I've effectively been robbed of $$$$$$ PR

I work on lots of open source and of course all my attribution requirements (BSD, MIT) don't require things to be upfront but I posted a photo online with my name in the corner and someone cropped it out I'd be pretty pissed.

I suspect for photos it's even worse. I have 7k photos CC-BY on Flickr. If people post them to twitter I doubt they add the required attribution. Maybe CC should start requiring or at least recommending attribution to be embedded in EXIF for images so that Twitter etc can automatic provide visible attribution AND include the same EXIF text that in any scaled versions they generate so that if someone reposts the scaled versions the attribution continues. Of course people can remove the EXIF or replace but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about some photographer getting unintentionally cheated out of PR.

akersten3• 6 years ago

Is there some special right for a photographer in Japan to have their name shown on an image, that determines whether a reproduction of it is an infringement? As far as I know, you acknowledge the service will transform your work as part of the ToS for uploading an image to it.

Unless, of course, the photographer wasn't the one who uploaded the picture to Twitter in the first place, but then why is the case hinged on whether the photog's name was cut off in the re-tweet, versus just the picture being copied by someone without permission?

And, going after the re-tweeters seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of the service. They aren't really copying anything, that's all a mechanism of the platform.

If I were Twitter I'd be counting my lucky stars that my largest userbase is in the US where, as broken as our copyright system is, I can't imagine this wacky judicial reasoning prevailing.

mc32• 6 years ago

Two things in this case. Attribution (which was missing and that’s on Twitter), the other, copyright infringement (the Twitter accounts who used the photo image without permission).

akersten3• 6 years ago

Well, a retweet is intrinsically attributed, that's the whole point. Does it need to be in any specific format (e.g. label on the image) that the photographer desires? That doesn't seem feasible.

In the case that the original tweeter wasn't the photographer, I see that infringement as the (only) problem here. And the only information Twitter should be compelled to provide is of the original poster.

duffmancd2• 6 years ago

There is. Japan's "copyright" laws are different and include Moral rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_Japan#Moral_r...) which are nontransferable and include the right to how your work is attributed.

I'm not sure why it is the retweeters, rather than Twitter who are responsible for the automatic cropping that occurs when you retweet. But I neither a Lawyer nor a Japanese Copyright expert.

akersten3• 6 years ago

So, asking non-facetiously, as an artist I have the right to decide how my work must be attributed, even if the platform I'm posting it to tells me in their ToS that my work will be altered in a standard way in the course of using the service?

If my understanding is correct (with the caveat that I am nowhere close to an expert), that's frankly bonkers and I have no idea how Twitter can operate at all in Japan.

userbinator• 6 years ago

The laws are also reflective of the culture --- from what I've seen, they are very pro-copyright, pro-DRM (think of companies like Sony). In contrast, someone attempting to do this in the US would probably lead to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect .

phkahler• 6 years ago

> Is there some special right for a photographer in Japan to have their name shown on an image, that determines whether a reproduction of it is an infringement? As far as I know, you acknowledge the service will transform your work as part of the ToS for uploading an image to it.

It was not the photographer who originally tweeted it. At first I thought the original tweeter was the one at fault, but if it was OK to tweet it with the attribution in the image then it was after that when the violation occurred.

quelltext• 6 years ago

If I were Twitter I'd be counting my lucky stars that my largest userbase is in the US where, as broken as our copyright system is, I can't imagine this wacky judicial reasoning prevailing.

You know that the Japan userbase of Twitter is huge, right? Not that far behind that of the US, in fact.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/242606/number-of-active-...

The amount of attention (resources, staffing, features) Twitter gives to the Japan market because of this is significant.

fireattack3• 6 years ago

Yep, market share wise, I'd say Twitter in Japan is much huger than the US (probably their top 1 social media if not counting Line, which is primarily a messaging service.)

gruez4• 6 years ago

In 2018, however, Intellectual Property High Court ruled that an act of retweeting does not infringe copyright but breaches creators’ right to show their names and their works as they are. The court ordered the disclosure of the email addresses of the three retweeters.

So how would this work with sites that auto convert links to embeds? eg. you post a link to a photograph, but the site converts your link to an embedded photograph, are you now liable? What if this was done retroactively (eg. links to embed was added later as a feature)?

Camillo• 6 years ago

IIRC, one reason why there are so few images on the Japanese Wikipedia is that it's almost impossible to avoid running into legal trouble with pictures there.

em-bee4• 6 years ago

how is japans copyright different than the rest of the worlds? as far as i know most countries either follow the european model with stronger moral rights, or the US model.

unless japans courts take a stronger interpretation of the laws than most other countries. or few people in japan release their images under suitable licenses...

soraminazuki• 6 years ago

For starters, Japanese copyright laws don't have a fair use exception. Publishers lobby against any attempts to introduce one hard.

lanius• 6 years ago

What are they going to do with the email addresses of the retweeters? Send a strongly worded email?

wsatb• 6 years ago

Possibly unrelated, as this is a bit of a stretch in giving credit, but Twitter has a huge problem with people posting content as if its their own. I've seen multiple things go viral on some random's Twitter account and they have zero relation to the creators of the content, whether it be an image or video, or even just a dumb joke. I feel like retweets died when the button was actually added to the platform. That platform has eroded a ton over the past decade.

malwarebytess• 6 years ago

That platform has eroded a ton over the past decade.

Maybe so but the re-posting of content with no attribution or knowledge of the source was the norm before twitter existed. Arguably it's the natural state of the internet.

hatmatrix• 6 years ago

A lot of comedians complain about this. Rather than retweeting, several accounts just copy-paste jokes from any number of comedians, without attribution, and they get a million followers.

waon5• 6 years ago

Japan desperately needs a competent organization that can stand up for the digital rights of its people now. They lack organizations like the EFF that are willing to do this.

tasogare• 6 years ago

In this article the rights of a photographer was successfully defended, so the system is a least working in some cases. The bigger problems here are web design and forms that impose specific characters in some fields.

nieve• 6 years ago

I think the person you're responding to might possibly have meant the rights of other internet users.

waon5• 6 years ago

In this article the rights of a photographer was successfully defended

The rights of the photographer was respected from the very beginning. The attribution was still there for anyone to see. The “problem” was that it wasn’t included in the thumbnail, because it unsurprisingly didn’t fit in.

so the system is a least working in some cases

No, this case represents a spectacular failure to protect people’s right to privacy and fair use. Why this is the case is already explained throughout this thread, so I don’t think we need to repeat this here.

polm237• 6 years ago

Politician Taro Yamada (his name is extremely generic but real) and manga artist Ken Akamatsu are copyright progressives and have managed to avert some of the worst proposed reforms, but I don't think there's any organization working on this.

thaumasiotes2• 6 years ago

Politician Taro Yamada (his name is extremely generic but real)

Isn't that the name given to anonymous males in Japanese court cases? I wonder how many Americans are named John Doe.

jonny383• 6 years ago

2020: Where pressing a single button on a website or app can get you into trouble with the law.

polm237• 6 years ago

People are asking about Japanese law on this, so I'll write what I know. I am not a lawyer, just a person who cares about copyright.

Japan does not have fair use, instead it has a number of specific exceptions to copyright. For example, you can take photos of things semi-permanently installed in an outdoor area and use those photos for non-commercial purposes, even if you photographed a 2D artwork that might have copyright. You can read the copyright law in English here:

https://www.cric.or.jp/english/clj/cl2.html#art32

The most generous exception in the law (except maybe the search engine one) is for "quotation", Article 32. For quotation you must use only as much of the work as is necessary for commentary, clearly separate it from your own content, clearly attribute it, and the quoted content must be subordinate to your own content. Regarding the last point, that means you can't just say "this is a nice painting" and post the image, you have to provide some commentary on it. (No, that's not clearly defined, so you'd need to work it out in court if there was a dispute.)

In practice this doesn't matter much on social media, and things work out much like places where you have fair use, but sometimes people try to enforce all their rights. Usually the people they are upset at take down their posts, but I guess in this case that didn't happen.

One really unfortunate side effect of this is that Japanese Wikpedia has very few images compared to other Wikipedias. Things that would be fine in an article, like book covers, are excluded because their Wikimedia file page would not have commentary and, so the thinking goes, would be infringement. (I remember reading the discussion that came to this conclusion on a Wikipedia discussion page years ago, but haven't been able to find it since.) This is why the Japanese article for Anpanman has a photo of a mural, for example, while the English article has a book cover.

For moral rights (著作人格権), these actually also exist in many places besides the United States. Practically speaking, if you license a work for use it's pretty common to have a clause saying you will not exercise these rights, and if you're in a mutually beneficial relationship any concerns over how you're credited can usually be negotiated. In this particular case the use was completely unauthorized so that didn't happen. (I am still confused about why the poster didn't just remove the image when asked.)

anilakar2• 6 years ago

What's the legal status of retweets? From a technical point of view, the user is not making any copies but only referring to another post, and it's Twitter who creates the preview.

Furthermore, how has Twitter ever been able to operate in Japan in the first place, if they have not made any concessions by disabling features that are considered to be in violation of local legislation?

polm237• 6 years ago

I have never really thought about this before or heard it discussed, because usually only the behavior of the initial poster is at issue (since they can just delete the tweet and fix the whole problem).

If you are unfamiliar with Twitter, you could consider a user's timeline like their "home page", since they control it, and an RT could be considered a form of "reposting", because you put it in places it had not been before.

I don't think that's a reasonable line of thought, but it is consistent.

polm237• 6 years ago

Ah, I found a Japanese article and the flow of what happened is clearer to me now. (Maybe I should have realized it from the English article but I didn't...)

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20200721/k10012526381000.ht...

The photographer wants to email the retweeters. The reason isn't stated but he could send them a bill for use of his image and threaten to take them to court if they don't pay it.

This is not something a reasonable person would do, but it is technically within his rights under the law. There are occasionally people online in Japan who send bills to people (mainly magazines) who quote them or use images on Twitter in ways they don't like.

thaumasiotes2• 6 years ago

One really unfortunate side effect of this is that Japanese Wikpedia has very few images compared to other Wikipedias. Things that would be fine in an article, like book covers, are excluded because their Wikimedia file page would not have commentary and, so the thinking goes, would be infringement. (I remember reading the discussion that came to this conclusion on a Wikipedia discussion page years ago, but haven't been able to find it since.) This is why the Japanese article for Anpanman has a photo of a mural, for example, while the English article has a book cover.

Where would the violation occur if the Japanese article also showed the book cover? We've stipulated that the article poses no problem. But the Wikimedia file page already exists. Does that page violate Japanese law? Would it violate Japanese law more if a Japanese article legally displayed the same image?

Practically speaking, if you license a work for use it's pretty common to have a clause saying you will not exercise these [moral] rights

Huh. I thought the idea of moral rights was that they were inalienable. If you can contractually waive them... that seems like a conceptual contradiction?

totetsu• 6 years ago

don't we have algorithms that can smart crop an image to preserve points of interest? Could that be used to keep text at the top or bottom of an image. Ugly as that may be.

emiliobumachar• 6 years ago

Maybe a standard to put attribution text and its location in metadata, so that the cropper can know that it's cutting it out, and know what it has to put back in?

kd5bjo2• 6 years ago

Depending on the relevant law and contracts, that may be as bad or worse than removing the attribution: the artist may consider the “uninteresting” parts of the image to be vital to its overall composition and object to the tampering— Even something as simple as traditional cropping can be controversial in this regard.

Japan top court tells Twitter to disclose retweeters' info

Related Stories