Dont post your photos to DASH

Thanks for the heads up, Chris.

For the record, I do not use this site whatsoever. To me, The OGR Forum is the best place to be. No hassles.

I did actually check the OGR TOS, they do not say anything either way about photo use or ownership, so by default the poster retains all rights.

I'm not sayin its right but every photo posted here will pop up on google images for anyone to use, so I'm not sure what the difference is. You name it, profile pictures, layout photos whatever.

If it's on the net, everyone can get at it.  Watermarks and all can be removed with the right software.  Only way to keep it to yourself is to actually keep it to yourself.

No Rick that is what many people think, but just because its posted does not give away rights. If you grab a picture from here or another website, use it commercially and are not covered by a release like what DASH,  has in the TOS or negotiated directly with the photographer you can be held liable. At the minimum the photographer can send out a DCMA notice to your ISP and the ISP has to remove the picture or your entire site until it's cleared. And trust me the ISP's do this very quickly. If they violation is flagrant the user can and often is billed and can be sued.

Thanks for the heads up.

Art

The lack of a watermark does not mean the image is not the property of the creator. There is no requirement that an image be marked to be protected from use

Never said it did, just pointing it out.

Like I said, if it's on the net, anyone can get at it.  Proof of ownership lies on the person making the claim anyway.  I don't have any big worries about people using my pictures of trains anyway.

I have less issues with some pics over others, however DASH should at least request permission to use before giving your images to others to use. That is common courtesy and professionalism.

Trust me the DCMA takedown is easy, I was able to nail a local newspaper that lifted my image within 45 minutes. The only proof you have to give is a statement that you are the owner of the image. If it went to court then you would have a higher burden of proof

Thanks for the tip, Chris.

- Mike

well guy when ever you post a pic on here its poops up on google....I did a google search for PRR Q2 and my pics popped up on google.com..

Chris...you have it exactly correct.  Even if it comes up on Google, it does not give publishing rights to just anyone that wants to use a picture.  This comes from many years of experience.  DASH has approached me more than once with proposals but I could not see the benefit for OGR. 

Alan

Ideally DASH sees this post and changes the TOS to one that is more fair

if you think that TOS is bad, you need to read the ones that come with the "Free Apps" on your phone. you sign away the right to everything on your phone, accounts, email lists, phone numbers and they even track your movements. all for the privilege of using that free app. people need to read and understand before signing. thanks for the heads up chris.

It's the same with FaceBook, Twitter and many others. If you post a picture they can use it anyway they want. Read the fine print when you sign up for any of these programs. Don

Facebook walks a really fine line, they can use your pics via things like a feed but they cannot sell or take ownership of your photos like DASH is asserting they want to do.

I seem to remember the Dash guy posting on the forums a while back asking for people to try the site out.  He should chime in on this.  Or maybe he'll stay away knowing he'll get land blasted for this.  Reasons like this is why I use a simple spreadsheet for inventory.

As Paul Harvey used to say "The Rest of the Story" by Scott Smith

It just had not occurred to me - Google Images having it all, that is!

I searched for my layout, then Alan's, then Patrick's, and there sure are a lot of pictures of the layouts. Then I searched for OGR forum pictures, and even more . . .

I guess if you don't want just anyone to see a picture, don't post it anywhere. 

Thanks for the thread.

Alex

You gotta watch it as there's other forums that seize any material that's posted and they claim ownership. Vertical Scopes is one such forum operator and they're buying up forums right & left.

Glad you brought this up, Chris...

We consider photos posted here to be the property of the photographer. If we see an image posted here that we want to use in some manner, we will contact the photographer, ask permission to use it and fairly compensate the photographer for use of his work. We have done that many times.

The idea that simply sharing a picture on the net conveys all rights to the use of that picture to someone else is absurd. We don't work that way and as long as I am at the helm of this company, we never will.

YOU took the picture...it is YOUR work...therefore YOU should control who has the right to publish it.

Thanks Rich!

You are so right and so few people even begin to understand this.

Gerry

Reasons like this is why I use a simple spreadsheet for inventory.

Well you learn something new every day. I thought that posting a picture here automatically I gave up my rights to ownership. Thanks Rich for the info.

I must say that it didn't bother me at all thinking that I was losing ownership of my pictures but that's just me.

Whenever I post photos on the net, anywhere, of images where I want to retain rights, I watermark and post at 72dpi. By doing that you make the image so difficult to use with regard to the work necessary to remove the watermark and the resulting low resolution, that it does not work in the best interests of the "snatcher" to use them.

I have discovered that the, so called, "photo contests" that pop up on the net are terrible offenders. They offer "prizes" for photos that go, of course, to a "mysterious" someone selected for a first place award, and all the other photos submitted become the right of the contest owners to use as they see fit. To me, they are the scams to watch out for.

I remember posting some of my best images at a professional website designed for folks to pay and download images. After having dozens of my images downloaded, I was informed that they owed me about $3.50 and didn't plan to pay until they owed me at least $50. Amazing. Apparently, I did not understand their "multi license" policy. For an annual fee, folks could then download batches of photos posted at this site and the photographers would get a tiny fraction of the fees. Of course, I removed all of my photos.

After reading all of this I guess my question would be is there a free site you can upload your photos too for posting on the various forums that will not use them with or without your permission?

I have been using Imageshack for years but now they want me to pay to use the site so I opened up an account on Photobucket but haven't uploaded anything yet.

Paul

Flickr allows you to set different kinds of copyright permissions and is free. You get 1 TB worth of storage

I would understand if you are a professional photographer like Scrapiron or use your photographs as part of your business, I just don't see the issue for the average railroader.

As such they aren't really doing anything shady as it is stated in their terms and conditions.

I will say for the record I am not a fan of Dash and their business model overall, so I intend never to use them.  I do not find anything they are doing underhanded or shady though, just of a business practice I have no interest in.  As an auction site, my bigger concern with them is the fact they take a large percent of the sale price, yet offer very little buyer protection or support.

TesasSP,

Here on the Forum I have not experienced any issue of "stealing" photo rights but, then again, that may be the result of taking precautions. As a general rule, if you plan to offer your work or your intellectual property on the Internet, there is a legal standard, and a general assumption that it is not cool to take something and use it.

There is also the "educational one use" law that varies state by state. The bottom line is, if we are referencing something and not planning to use it for our own personal gain, it may be permissible.

 Aside from those that are watermarked. There are some for the "taking". 

https://www.google.com/search?...biw=1440&bih=809

Just a quick point as to the "value" of all these possibly stolen photos. My brother is the managing director a good size adverting agency, in asking him the question he says they pay on average $20.00 for a publishable image, unless there is a photo shoot specifically for a product or campaign, then the costs are much higher but the end result is also much more specific.

Having looked at thousands of image on this forum, how many are truly publishable or have any commercial value at all? There are some, but they are few and far between.

Before we all stop putting up those point-and-shot photos taken with poor lighting of our basement or attic train layouts -- posted to help our fellow hobbyist -- over a concern that they are going to be stolen and profiteered from.

Exactly who is doing the profiteering on photos of O scale trains and layouts? In order to profit from your images someone would have to sell them, who buys images of train layout? 

Take a deep breath. 

Chris, thanks for posting this. I was considering using DASH but now forget it.

True they might not be making a lot of money from pictures that folks post there but to me it is the principal of the thing. Ask permission before using someone's work is the right thing to do. And I don't like the way it says "modify" or "adapt". What if they took your picture and changed into something you really didn't like? I know probably unlikely, but you would not have any rights to do anything about it.

Resolution...a very misunderstood image parameter.

Resolution does not matter on the internet. No matter what resolution your image may be set to, it will display at 72 dpi on your screen.

What matters is the overall number of pixels in the image. If you post an image that is only 720 x 540 pixels, that's going to be tough to use in any kind of printed piece. With only 388,800 pixels, there is not a lot of information in that small image. That 720 x 540 image could be set to 300 dpi...it still contains only 388,800 pixels.

The ONLY THING that "resolution" does is tell a printer how large to make the image on paper.

• A 720 x 540 pixel image set to 72 dpi will print at 7.5" x 10".
• That EXACT SAME IMAGE, set to 300 dpi, prints at 1.8" x 2.4".
  It still has 388,800 pixels, but the printer placed them closer together. That is all that resolution does...tell a printer how close to space the dots on the paper.
• At 72 dpi (dots per inch) resolution the printer spaces the dots that make up the image so there are 72 dots in an inch.
• At 300 dpi, the printer spaces the dots so there are 300 dots in an inch.
• That is all the RESOLUTION number does...tell the printer how large to print an image.

On the other hand, if you post an image that is 3,000 x 2,250 pixels and set it to 72 dpi, you have not protected anything! That image can still be used very nicely in a printed piece because it has so many pixels in it. With 6,750,000 pixels, that image is large enough to print at 7.5" x 10" - at 300 dpi! Changing it from 72 dpi to 300 dpi takes about 2 seconds in Photoshop.

Here at OGR we often get images sent to us for use in articles that have been shot at 72 dpi. That is a default setting for many cameras. But the PIXEL COUNT might be 4,000 x 3,000 or more. The RESOLUTION SETTING in the camera does not matter at all because I will change it to 300 dpi for use in the magazine. As I said above, changing the resolution in Photoshop takes ONE key stroke and about 2 seconds to do. At 4,000 x 3,000 pixels I have 12 million pixels available, which is PLENTY of image information to work with.

The thing to remember when posting on the internet is NOT the resolution. That can easily be changed. The key is to post images that do not have a lot of pixels in them. Ultimately it is the number of pixels that determines how large an image can be printed, not the resolution number.

Thanks for the info......but if you post on the net.....you'd best assume that someone will use it for themselves. It's not right....but it's done.

A buddy of mine in the car hobby has one of the largest photo albums on Fotki.

When Google created the image search where you can match photos he found that 100's of his photos were being used by others. Some for car show flyers, other as net images.

He fought a few....but soon found out that it took ALL his time to police it. Just not worth it.

I don't use DASH....didn't know folks post photos there.  At least they are up front with this info and are not just doing it.

Even if you have software that keeps folks from downloading your photos (msg 'right click disabled) if you are PC smart....it's easy to get around. So...post with knowledge!!!

barrister, Your situation is a little different in my mind.  Did the guy selling his loco state the one in the video was his or just like is.  Either way, he is insinuating by using it that it represents what he is selling.  Very unethical in my opinion.  Ebay even has policies against using others photos without permission and I had a friend in the RC hobby that actually got someone banned from Ebay because they used his and other peoples images to represent things they were selling.

Hi everyone. I didn't know this thread was happening.  I wrote a comment on a different thread and someone referenced this thread to me.  Here's what I wrote there:

About our T's & C's.  In creating our T's & C's we literally evaluated the terms of other very popular, related sites and tried to compile the agreement borrowing from their legal expertise.  So, you will definitely see the fingerprints of eBay, Facebook, Etsy, Flickr and other sites in our T's & C's.  All of these sites have a section of their terms that talk about how they can use info you post to their sites. From my reading, it is to protect their liability from people who would post content and then claim compensation for it's display, use, etc.  In other words, it seems to be a way to blanket avoid liability for people's submissions, and that seems smart in a world where people can (and do) submit gobs of who-knows-what content and try to concoct legal claims from the use of it.  The language just says that the sites can't be liable for submitted content.

From the DASH standpoint, I think it too seems prudent to have these protections in place.  It is in NO WAY our intention to use your information for our commercial gain.  We'd never sell your photos.  (We recently inadvertently used someone's photo in a fairly benign way, and we promptly apologized for our innocent oversight.)  We enable you to make the info you submit to your collection completely private.  Info submitted to the Catalog is by definition part of the public, community resource so I hope anyone that contributes/submits to the Catalog knows they are certainly contributing for public benefit.

So, while the T's & C's protect DASH's use of the submitted info, it doesn't say that we WILL use the info.  If you can think of a better way to preserve our protection against people that would try to make claims against us for submitted content while meeting your needs, I would certainly be willing to consider changing our T's & C's.  I'm serious and for sure willing to update our T's & C's provided we can keep protected, but I also know that the way the "big boys with big legal teams" write their T's & C's is a smart place for us to base our policies on.

------------------

Since then, people have asked that we remove the language about granting us a license to the uploaded content.  In this sue-happy world, I think this is how we have to protect ourselves from others.  If this isn't right, then I'm open to the idea, but this is definitely how eBay, Flickr, Etsy, etc. have handled the issue.

If anyone asks us to remove a photo that they own or believe has been posted in violation of anyone's copyright, we will remove it for sure.  We make the person that uploads every photo actually affirm with a checkbox that they have the rights to do so too.  Finally, we don't have any intention of profiting on the sale of photos on our site.  It's not in our business plan.  Instead, we know how important photos are in identifying trains and how much fun they can be to share with others.  That's what we are trying to facilitate.  We made an innocent mistake recently and used a photo submitted by a user.  We have apologized to him and we'll be more attuned to our use later, but I assure you it was innocent and didn't have ill-conceived commercial aims.

Some people seem quite protective of their photos, so by all means, if you aren't comfortable with our TOS, please don't post these photos. We have no sinister plans to misuse the content and the language is just for our protection from people that could have sinister purposes.