On Fri, 2017-10-27 at 14:43 -0600, brynn wrote:
TinEye - Omg, a whole new world, haha!!
Are we now saying that we will address certain copyright issues?
Well it's not our job to delve into the legality, so these images shouldn't be removed because we've made a decision about copyright. But because we can see a moral issue with the posting of works like this and that they create noise and reduce the quality of our galleries.
Moderation is firstly a measure to improve the quality of our community content. Secondary is the removal of legal issues when identified by actual lawyers and we can take action for them.
I know this seems like a cop-out, but I'm always concerned vesting discerning and subjective powers into volunteers.
But maybe posting someone else's image needs to be addressed. And especially having such a tool as TinEye. I knew that it was possible to search an image, but I didn't know it was publicly available. (Thought probably cost a lot of money to buy or subscribe.)
I would be so happy to use it, to take out this type of image. And I would even go retro to the date we put the CoC into effect. (in extra spare time)
It's actually a lot of work to do proper tracking. Every one of the previous entries was not just a search on tiny-eye, but also google image searches, searching for authors by email or username, looking for patterns.
I tend to trust user content first, but there are signs that content is poor quality such as users with only one entry, who have only logged in once and that have posted jpeg images etc etc.
This might not be explainable (since I've asked it a few times over the years, and it always gets ignored). But I'm just so curious why people go around posting things, like images that aren't theirs, or meaningless messages in forums. Is it a certain class of spammer which tries to fill unmoderated forums or galleries, to overwhelm it, or test to find out if they are moderated? There can't be that many people who are sad wannabees, can there?
I think it's not ignored, but just a really hard question to answer. It could be a bot posting random images in the belief that posting content will make their accounts look more real. It could be real people attempting to create a bit of fake pride in themselves by pretending they made a work. There's not a good way to know for sure why.
One reason to post an image would be to get us to host their avatar image. So they can link from forums or other places their favourite artwork.
We have space limits to stop spammers.
Best Regards, Martin Owens