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The ruling is groundbreaking because the top court made clear that the rights of any individual should not be violated even through something as easy and seemingly innocent as a retweet.

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Rio Saito, a lawyer, speaking after the Supreme Court ruled that Twitter must disclose the email addresses of a Twitter user who posted a photo in violation of the moral rights of the copyright holder, as well as those who retweeted the original tweet.

© Asahi Shimbun

©2024 GPlusMedia Inc.

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Good.

It's about time Twitter (and other social media companies like Facebook) were held to account for not properly policing their platforms.

If they can't do it themselves then there needs to be some kind of independent body overseeing all the content they allow to be published.

That sounds like an impossible task, but the social media companies should be forced into doing it if they want to continue operating such large publishing spaces - or risk being broken up into smaller, more manageable chunks.

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No. It is a stupid decision, made by people who do not understand technology.

Image previews on Twitter only show the central part of the image, and you have to click them in order to see the full image. A photographer was angry because this means that retweeted previews of his photos obscure his copyright info (until clicked on).

Why temporary obscurement of a copyright notice, due to the way the platform works, should be seen as infringement on the part of the retweeter is beyond me.

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@PerformingMonkey - Then Twitter (in this case) needs to adapt their system so that copyright information is clearly visible and accredited where necessary even during preview.

That might be in the form of a ‘non obtrusive’ caption beneath the image, or maybe the form of a more obtrusive generic watermark over the whole preview.

Im sure they can do this quite easily using the meta data. A Tweet or Retweet searches the meta data of any image or video when attached and returns the copyright information (if such information is included), and displays it as a small caption under the file preview.

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Then Twitter will give those lists of 200 000 persons that retwitted and the court will do what ?

Then Twitter (in this case) needs to adapt their system so that copyright information is clearly visible and accredited where necessary even during preview.

They need black magic. Sure there are ways to search and identify data/images/videos already on the net to a certain extend (there can be modifications blocking identification). It's not totally impossible documents published elsewhere, books, tv shows, etc, it's just that you need months to check ... But what about all the unpublished documents ?Only their author and the "thief" knows they are copyrighted.

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......Need more info, context to try to understand what this quote is on about.....

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@coskuri - I agree it’s a tall order, but it’s the company’s responsibility to make sure its platform follows laws. If it can’t do it - because it’s become too big and the genie is out of the bottle - then maybe it’s time to break the company up into smaller more manageable parts.

Regarding your point about ‘taking months to check the net for copyright infringements’ - I didn’t mean that. I meant that there should be a check on the specific metadata of the attached file, and any copyright information attached to that specific file should be returned and displayed as a caption.

If there was no copyright information in the metadata, then no caption would be attached to the Re/Tweet.

Doing this, at least Twitter has made a genuine effort to try and clearly mark a file as being copyrighted.

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The easiest way around this would be to just show the entire image in the preview (though our litigious photographer friend might still argue that the copyright info would be too small to be readable).

Actually, I do find the partial image previews rather annoying, particularly when an image shows text. It's annoying to have to click on the image just to read the full message.

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