New acsearch die match/previous sale function

Perhaps @acsearch.info can look into the matter and clarify it for us since this issue quite frequently involves CT members posting content from their website.

 

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As a test, I was able to copy/paste these two images of different coins (both fakes) on a computer not logged in to acsearch. The first one has been removed from the listing auction house which removed the lot before the sale. I find it interesting that it still appears on acsearch. I assume they are not linking to the house sites but have permission to copy and retain images.

https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=5650131


https://www.acsearch.info/search.html?id=2733653

 

That is what you get if you try to copy the enlarged image in the left column. Try using the image in the right column that is presented when you have opened the individual lot by clicking on the description (not image) at the left.

 

Many thanks Doug. This was the solution. I appreciate your help with this.

 

You have to be logged in to acsearch to see their photos...try that in case you are not logged in.

 

Thank you but that was not the problem. I was logged in. In fact I tried it in 2 different browsers with the same results. Doug's suggestion solved the problem.

 

You beat me to this! I was going to post the exact same passage from the copyright law/fair use. Thanks for saving me the work!

I agree with your viewpoint that posting pictures of coins obtained from the Internet, on this site and for the purpose of illustration and discussion, is highly likely to fit the definition of "fair use" and highly unlikely to violate copyright laws.

I'm not a lawyer and my opinion is based only on my business experience with contract law and intellectual property, so I can understand if CoinTalk doesn't rely on my opinion to formulate their policies, but I do think that CoinTalk's stance is overly restrictive and far more cautious than it needs to be.

 

@Severus Alexander your information is correct but if the photographs are of ancient coins I believe the legal perspective is different.

The art on ancient coins (except fakes) is in the public domain! As public domain works, Americans have always been free to publish them from their own scans or photography.

Museums traditionally protects their licensing revenue stream two ways. First, they ban photography or tripods in the museum. Second, they claim copyright on the photograph used to facilitate the reproduction. These copyrights last a long time -- the life of the photographer plus 70 years in some countries! By keeping the public from high-quality photographs the museum corners the supply.

It takes a lot of creativity to paint a portrait or take an artistic original photograph. Taking an accurate photograph of a painting hanging on the wall isn't difficult. It seemed unfair for museums to get free 100+ year copyright enforcement on mere photos of paintings, so there was a lawsuit. In the famous "Bridgeman" lawsuit a judge ruled that there is no new copyright on photographs of paintings and "2D" artworks.

The Bridgeman decision only applies to photographs of 2D art. Most coins have some depth (the exception being printed "coins" like wooden nickels). Greek coins are almost sculptural. Does Bridgeman apply to them?

A good lawyer could argue either way. As a non-lawyer my gut instinct is that a judge would ask the jury to rule that photographs showing "originality" (special lighting and camera angles) earn the photographer a copyright. Non-original photographs (flatbed scans, or that mirror-box) probably don't.

After Bridgeman the law books didn't change but the law did. Now anyone can "probably" get away with selling reproductions of public domain paintings. No permission is needed.

Unfortunately copyright law isn't like the speed limit where you are safe at 55mph and risky at 56mph. It's all up to how a jury of your peers feels about acts of creativity vs. mechanical reproduction.

There is of course also a question of ethics. Is it ethical for me to build upon a dealer's photographic effort? Ask your gut. For me, unless there is some special lighting or focus stacking I do not care about the photographer's copyright. The photographer doesn't even sign the photographs in auction catalogs and is rarely even named.

 

That's a very interesting wrinkle! Thanks, Ed. Yet another arrow in the fair use quiver, though I think you're right that it would turn on how "original" (and/or transformative) the photograph was. I guess we are pretty safe with crappy photographs, eh? Plus most modern coins, inferior 2D products that they are.

I think @dougsmit might disagree that only "special" lighting or focus stacking would qualify a photo for tender treatment.

With auction or dealer photos, I think either you need to own the coin, or it's ethically required to name the company. But if you do that you're providing them with a benefit, free advertising, so it's all on the up-and-up. (Though of course that should ultimately be their decision, thus the copyright law. This is also probably the reason why copyright suits must be initiated by the copyright holder, and there's no suit if the material is taken down as per request.)

Well, in the case of this particular post, there's no other way, never mind an easy way, to do what I wanted... I wanted to show some search engine results, exactly how the search engine presents them. Thus the screenshot. If I get explicit permission from acsearch for the screen shots, can I put them back up again? (Given that they're thumbnails and acsearch has permission to use them?)

(Sotto voce: You're comfortable with the linking thing as an "easy" solution, but that seems to be manufacturing a bright line where there is none. A lot of the discussion above aims at achieving better clarity.)

In any case, it's good that we can link the medium sized acsearch images! I didn't know that before. And I'll note here that I'm happy for anyone to use AMCC images, full size or otherwise, as long as AMCC is mentioned.

And I'm sure we are all supremely grateful for the efforts that you and the other mods, and Peter, put in to make sure we have this fantastic forum available to us. Thank you!

 

What Simon says is exactly right, he can't grant permission for images for which acsearch doesn't own the copyright. But acsearch does own the copyright to their website design, so the thought was that they could give permission for a screenshot... although it seems to me the screenshot very clearly (a bright line!) satisfies fair use in any case.

Your worry of course is about the incorporation of thumbnail images of coins within the screenshots. Again, the thought is that fair use covers this, with extra protection due to the Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, 2002 and Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 2007 judgements, at least in the U.S. But acsearch may feel differently given that they're based in Europe, so I'll wait for Simon to weigh in.

 

If you give me editing privileges on the OP again I can at least post screenshots with the coin thumbnails blacked out.

 

Fascinating thread and (as usual) I'm very late to the thread.

The one aspect everyone has missed so far is that in almost every instance that a coin has ever been photographed the original intent was as an advertisement to sell that coin. The act of copying an ad to freely redistribute it is held to be compatible with the intent of the ad's creator. This is why you can post, for example, old TV commercials to YouTube without fear of them being taken down. Presumably you could even make money off of this if you had enough subscribers but this definitely gets into that gray area. Anyway, check as many auction catalogs as you want and you won't find copyright notices anywhere. This isn't an absent-minded omission, it is the publisher's active desire that it be disseminated as widely as possible since, obviously, the wider the audience the higher the chances of a successful sale.

Something else worth pointing out: in order for a copyright holder to bring a lawsuit against someone allegedly misusing their works they must previously have registered it with the copyright office at the Library of Congress (not sure how it works outside of the U.S. to be honest). It is not a trivial expense in time or money. They could still force a takedown but since they can't sue for monetary damages what's the point? It's essentially a guaranteed loss.

Rasiel

 

This misses an important point. Photographers and all employees on staff for corporations often/usually have contracts built into their employment agreement that what they create (including photographs) on the job belongs to the employer. I took a lot of photographs in the time I was working for the US Government but not one of them is my property any more than they are of any US citizen. I worked for a Defense contractor who employed a man who accidentally invented the microwave oven by having a chocolate bar in his pocket.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Spencer
"For his invention, Spencer received no royalties, but he was paid a one-time $2.00 gratuity from Raytheon, the same token payment the company made to all inventors on its payroll at that time for company patents."

I strongly suspect that the unnamed photographers who work for big auction houses have similar clauses forfeiting rights to whatever they produce on the job. There are some such agreements that forbid an employee from producing the sort of thing they do on the job when they are not on the job. That would prevent someone from claiming he invented or produced something at home and not when covered by the 'on the job' rule. This also would allow someone to contract a photographer to take pictures for them and transfer all rights to all images taken. This needs to be spelled out in the agreement if you hire a photographer to shoot your coin collection, wedding, real property or even yourself.

I suspect this is just one of a thousand ways most of us ignore the reasons we hire lawyers until after we discover we should have considered the matter more carefully.

 

@Suarez, very interesting additions, thank you! I haven't been able to confirm the first one, about redistributing advertising. Can you point us to a statute or case reference?

I was able to confirm the second one, though. It turns out that if the work is first published outside the U.S., you don't need to register it to launch a suit. (See e.g. here for confirmation.)

The monetary damages thing is interesting. You can always claim actual damages, but to claim statutory (i.e. standardized) damages and attorney fees, you have to register your copyright within three months after publication or prior to infringement. (This applies to both U.S. and non-U.S. publications.) Without being able to claim those damages, launching a suit is prohibitively expensive, certainly for any alleged infringements on CT where actual damages will be tiny to nil and very hard to prove in any case. So I think you're right this affords us some additional protection, at least where copyright hasn't been registered within three months. (It's possible to do an online search of the records.)

On the other hand, registration doesn't seem to be very expensive (fees here). One work (e.g. one auction catalogue including all the photos) costs only $35, and it's also possible to do a group registration of multiple works. I'm not sure how onerous the application is.

 

Aren't we sort of missing the obvious, here? ACSEARCH does not hold the copyrights to the pictures that they use on their own site, yet they use them freely and in a for-profit manner (if you subscribe to their extra-cost service that lists the hammer price).

Surely, if ACSEARCH can use such photographs, CoinTalk also can.

 

In my own case, I gave acsearch permission to list my auction results w/ photos, and I'm sure that applies to all the other auction houses on the platform. So, while still clearly OK IMO, it's maybe not quite as obvious as this.

 

100% true by US copyright law. In some countries there is a concept of moral rights. I believe it is morally OK to re-use commercial photos taken without attribution, but morally wrong to re-use attributed art photography.

 

Please excuse my late reply to this thread. Although I was following all your comments, I was not able to respond due to some problems logging in to my account.

Although not a lawyer, I have dealt with copyright laws more than I wish in recent years. Websites are accessible form all over the world, which is a great thing, but makes it all even more complicated. Let's say a collector from Italy posts a picture of a German photographer on CT. What do you think which copyright laws apply? According to some international conventions and contracts, the copyright laws of both the US and Germany apply (see for example the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works).

Now in Germany, for example, copyright laws are very restrictive. Any picture (no matter the reason it was taken for or how artistic it is) is protected by copyright laws and you are not allowed to use it without permission of the copyright holder (which in our case can be the auction company OR the photographer, depending on their contract). Furthermore, permission to use an image does not necessarily include the right to give others permission to use the same image. That is exactly the reason why we can not grant permission to use any images from acsearch on other websites. We simply do not have the right to do so.

If you check out Google, you will see that even they started to link images (also the thumbnails) rather then delivering them from their own servers for this exact reason.

Now while I support Doug in making sure no copyrights are violated, I am not quite sure the CT way of linking images is save at all.

Looking at the HTTP response code (200), the file is delivered from the CT server. Linked content either uses a remote URL or returns the code 30x, which indicates a redirect of the request. Although the CT URL contains the remote URL as a parameter, the request itself clearly goes to CT and the response is delivered from CT. I assume CT is loading the image on the back end and delivers it from its own server, which is a very bad idea when dealing with copyrights. In fact, I think it doesn't make any difference if you "link" (the way CT does) or directly upload the images to CT.

A linked image's URL would have to look like this:
https://www.acsearch.info/media/images/archive/83/5203/5293898.m.jpg

The CT "linked" image URL looks like this:
https://www.cointalk.com/proxy.php?image=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.acsearch.info%2Fmedia%2Fimages%2Farchive%2F83%2F5203%2F5293898.m.jpg&hash=1e70eb03ef352b66a1e4f9976240d174

As some of you already figured out, you can link the small and medium thumbnails from acsearch without any restrictions (those are the ones whose URLs end with ".s.jpg" and ".m.jpg"). The enlarged images, however, are only visible to logged in members in order to protect them from being easily downloadable by bots and other software.

Simon