I like to think of myself as open-minded and a share-alike kinda guy, which is why I don’t get Paul’s response the other day. Luckily like-minded people exist, and Stewart was kind enough to come through for me and provide a whole slew of new Vista screenshots.
And not only are these open source, royalty free, do-what-you-please, can’t-steal-if-you-wanted-to screenshots. They’re also not resized and compressed like Paul’s are, so it’s kind of a win-win situation for all. So now I can exchange Paul’s shots with these, and Paul can go back to rating games with his own head. Win-win.
I’ve also uploaded all the screenshots to a flickr set on my own account where I’ll be commenting on them as soon as I get the time.
PS: You can get Vista Beta 2 for yourself and create even more screenshots, as long as you hurry!
Paul’s a ************ prick!
I wonder if he asked EA for those screenshots of the burnout game.
Anyhow this also shows his attitude is perfect for reviewing microsoft products as he’s obviously in bed with the company.
(Edited by Michael)
What a fecking a-hole. “Oh no, please don’t steal my preeeeecious screenshots”.
Come on guys. I mean think of all the time Paul dedicated to those shots. First he had to install Vista, if installing XP is anything to go by that took considerable time. Then he had to open various windows, media player, start menu. Press print screen several times. Paste into Photoshop, or whatever. Resize/crop, save for web, upload to his host, and then publish on the web.
I mean it really is SO unfair of Mike to steal all his hard work and his creative efforts of determining the correct size for each pic and the difficult task of deciding what to call the file name.
Paul is everything that is wrong with the web.
WHAAAAA WHAAAAA!!! You stole my screen shots. Get over yourself.
Is this thread already turning ugly with all the namecalling and bashing? Michael better close down the comments for a bit :-)
Yeah seriously guys, let’s keep it in a civil tone. If anything I’m still very much interested in the whole discussion of why it’s okay to quote text by not okay to ‘quote’ images. So rather than make Paul you favorite badguy of the week, throw some knowledge down on that one.
And yes Rane, to answer your curiosity, had this been late at night, I would have turned off the comments for the night.
Not problem Mike, don’t mind helping the community out by taking some rather simple screenshots of Vistab2.
As for taking a lot of time, not really, it took about an hour to install Vista (I ran into a problem with the hard drive I was trying to use being locked to my old modded Xbox – silly me forgot to unlock it before i removed it from said Xbox leaving me with a large paperweight), without that problem its about 45 minutes to install. And then its a case of taking some shots and firing them into PS then saving them and uploading to flickr.
I have photos of the install screens if anyone wants them uploaded to my flickr site I can do that for ya?
Oh dear, oh dear. What a mess this whole thing has turned into.
Rather than continue with this rather futile ‘yes-no’-debate, I decided I would bring something useful to the table. Michael got me thinking about copyrights on the web, so I did some research.
The thing about copyrights, as with many other legal matters, different countries have their own legislation. I’m not a law student, so I apologize in advance for any misinterpretions that may follow. I live in Finland, and at least compared to the States, we have a more “relaxed” legal system when involving material on the internet (there aren’t that many million dollar lawsuits :) ..)
Anyway, at Finlex.fi, our goverment’s online legislation database, it’s stated that with photos, the person who has taken the photo own the copyright, unless there is a specific target, like for example your friend. Then it’s slightly more complicated. With text, the same thing applies – the writer owns the copyrights. I emailed a friend of mine who’s studying law at the University here, so she’ll tell me if I’ve missed something important.
So what’s my point, you ask? My point is that since the screenshots in question at Paul’s site, and here at Binary Bonsai, weren’t taken by either party (am I right?), but by Microsoft themselves, naturally MS owns the copyrights for all the images. And as they are screenshots that are public, ‘advertising/promoting’ if you may, a new operating system that will be released sometime in the near future (possibly), they may be distributed freely. The real credit of course, goes to Microsoft for originally taking the screenshots in question, if I understood this whole scenario correctly.
So if Paul or anyone else for that matter, wants a reason to bitch about, the only real issue would be about crediting the other for the pictures. This is also another thing that makes me giggle, since Michael very clearly writes in his Vista-review (it’s the second line of text) that:
“(screenshots from Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows, where you will find not only more screenshots, but also Paul’s insightful commentary on the status of Windows Vista Beta 2)“
Someone please explain to me how this isn’t understood as crediting another? Unless Paul (for example, since we’re still on the subject) is looking for a blowjob and his name on a park bench, I would deem this reasonable credit. Geez! A simple “Thx Paul” would’ve sufficed all the same, in my opinion.
I’d like to equally thank Michael AND Paul for both taking the time to write about Vista, since I still haven’t taken the time to download the sucker and test it out for myself. So you share the same screenshots, who gives a toss. Your own opinions are the ones that matter in the end.
Thing is, the UI still doesn’t look any better than it did.
But Michael did not originally say that, it said something simple like “Supplied by Thurrott”
Personally I am not fond of Thurrott, I have corrected several of his articles, to which he has politly responded agreeing but then didnt change all of his (now known) mistakes. He also is very bias, but can be a welome contrast to all the Mac hype that goes around, esp. from sites like TUAW who are actually pretty sickening in their sycophantic articles
However lets look at it rationally, they are his screenshots, like it or not. The law is pretty clear that he owns them and has automatic copywrite. Personally I think you should have either asked first or found someone to give you some had Paul said no.
In the light of the way things went I think Michael should have just pulled them at the start and appologised. I dont think the whole thing needed to become some weird drawn out bashing of Thurrott, esp. considering how easy it is in general.
Karri, I believe that Paul made the screenshots himself. If I walk down the street and grab a photo of a cool Mercedes car driving by, and then publish it on my webpage, surely Mercedes doesnt own the right to that photo? :-)
The one point I haven’t seen anyone make is that the reason you can quote from someone else’s copyrighted work is because the quote is not the full work. For instance, if I posted a quote from a magazine article, that would qualify as fair use. But if I posted the entire contents of the magazine article, that would qualify as infringement.
What I’m getting at is what when Michael says that posting the screenshots is the same thing as quoting, he’s ignoring the fact that the direct analogy would be to post a portion of the screenshot – by posting the entire image, he not quoting, he’s reprinting in whole.
(However, I’m just playing devil’s advocate here – personally, I think it’s rediculous of Paul to claim that screenshots are somehow custom work. It’s not a picasso, it’s a screenshot.)
What I’m getting at is what when Michael says that posting the screenshots is the same thing as quoting, he’s ignoring the fact that the direct analogy would be to post a portion of the screenshot – by posting the entire image, he not quoting, he’s reprinting in whole.
Well that depends on how you view an image. In the same way that the entry above contains many paragraphs, the image part of Paul’s entry contains many images…
Surely there needs to be a copyright notice on the page displaying the image or actually on the image itself before there’s copyright?
The footer of the page with the thumbnails has a copyright notice but as the images themselves are direct links with no notice then I feel they’re public domain.
Michael could easily have not mentioned where they were from and used them but he did the decent thing and linked back to the original source.
I do think Paul was slightly heavy handed in his request to have the pictures taken down and was quite rude in the way he said it; however I don’t think it’s fair for a lot of people to bash him for this. His site can give pretty good information at times despite the slight bias.
Sorry, I was out of order. I blame it on me beeing up waaaay to early not beeing fully awake ;-)
I’m confused. If Michael had taken a screenshot of Thurrott’s site with the screenshots, then posted his own screenshots of Thurrott’s screenshots, who would own the copyright to them?
Well well, I thought Paul Thurrott was a sensible guy, but apparently I was wrong.
After all you did give him credit for the screenshots, so it really isn’t theft. I can understand if he won’t just let you use his screenshots, but then he could find a more friendly way to do so.
What he was doing was just arrogant and stupid! Shame on you Paul, how can a grown up man act like a child in that way?
??
Is this actually intersting to anyone? who cares… we’ll all soon hate vista and everyone will be dying in anticipation of the next amazing creation…
everyone needs to get off the chair and join the rest of the world instead of living your life vicariously though your computer and it’s OS. A computer is just a tool like a toaster – use it to make our life better but don’t live for the damn thing.
go outside and play now…
no, seriously. now who is paul thurrott?
Well Fingus, I’m pretty sure that most of us do have a life away from the computer, but when we are at our computers we like to discuss computer related stuff – Like OSs (the plural of OS?) – and we really like to diss people who we don’t think act fair ;) :P
Personally I’m actually looking forward to Vista – I’m a Windows guy (how dare I say this in the middle of a crowd of Apple geeks? :P).
Paul Thurrott is a guy who reviews Microsoft products.. his review site is winsupersite.com
SPIRI, if Paul was acting arrogant and stupid, i’ll definately say that the reply from Michael was just as arrogant and stupid. As far as I remember, Paul asked to “please remove my screenshots” and I dont quite consider that as being arrogant or stupid.
Yeah Rane, he does say please, but I think that other parts of his behaviour is arrogant and stupid.
Like “he has the balls to rip off my screenshots, describe them as being “supplied” by me (as if worked together on this project)”
I think that’s a weird way to behave – instead of just contacting Michael and asking him to remove the screenshots, he post it on his blog. I think that it would have been more suitable to contact Michael, and then if Michael didn’t remove the screenshots it would be alright to make a “story” of it.
The way of accusing Micheal of theft I think is arrogant too, it is not theft. Michael did credit Paul, so it can’t be theft.
SPIRI, can you find a contact link or an e-mail adress anywhere on binarybonsai.com? I might give up to quick but i sure cant find any – so it makes sense that Paul would write in the comments of the thread.
I actually thought that “rip off” sentence was clean enough – i’d sure get quite irritated if someone used my images without asking first + then reply to me in a wiseass way when asked to remove them.
You are right about the e-mail adress, I can’t find one either. So it is understandable that Pual didn’t send an e-mail, I’ll grant you that :)
I also agree with you about the point that Michael perhaps should have contacted Paul before he used the screenshots.
But I still don’t think that it’s stealing, and I think that Paul could have told Michael in a more polity way to remove the screenshots, then he could have gotten angry if Michael didn’t do it…
Paul’s first comment was:
Paul
He is using the word “steal” which I think is wrong.
Well we all have different opinions. The music industry also use the words “steal” and “theft” when referring to people downloading music from the internet. In this case I really dont see the difference, if Paul had used other words like “grab” or “copy”, when fact still is that the screenshots were taken and used without asking. I guess that my point is that Pauls first reaction was quite normal and more friendly than hateful, deserving a better reply than it got :)
I can see your point :). Though I don’t like the music example, I can’t really see the parallels. But never mind :).
And as mentioned I agree with you that Michael should have asked before using the screenshots, but I still don’t like Paul’s reaction. But as you say we all have different opinions :).