Neowin.net

Have to admit, i did roffle at that

I also have to admit that ive done the same (not the same picture obviously) to people hotlink.

the guy pays for his bandwidth, and personally i think he should claim against microsoft for bandwidth usage :p

Yeah, I've unsubscribed from Niall and posted my response here:

http://brandonlive.com/2006/12/07/niall-ke...y-unsubscribed/

immature response to a immature response.

I think MS will never hotlink again. Some of you that say this type of thing is immature are just trying to be the older, wiser, and look good type of people. Imagine you make your own OS and someone steals it from you (the code) changes something and call it their own without giving credit. You'd be ****ed.

Besides it doesnt affect you. I see its pointless to unsubscribe but oh well. You're the stupid "mature" adult so I guess you're right.

rIaHc3 - I have no problem with him taking action if he thought he had rights to the photo (turns out he really doesn't).

However he didn't need to take action against the readers of that blog as he did. One commenter's 12-year-old daughter encountered this. That might seem funny to you or Niall, but her father certainly didn't think it was.

Finally, it wasn't "MS" that linked to that photo ON FLICKR (you know, a photo sharing/hosting site), but rather one blogger who happens to work for MS. There are thousands of bloggers at MS and many of them will never hear of this occurence. So saying you think "MS will never hotlink again" makes it sound like we're all plugged into some hive mind or something.

This particular guy probably will be more careful about trusting the sources he uses to not pull childish pranks on his readers - but I think the only lesson in all of this is that Niall Kennedy is a jerk.

WHAT A LOOSER.... Couldn't he just email Microsoft and ask them to take it down. They should now take him to court over tarnishing their blog. I would.

...Never reading that blog again...

Did you actually read his article? It wouldn't do any good to contact MS even if he could. I like this quote:
"Photo swapping is a definite way to grab the attention of the site misusing your content. The Goatse meme is particularly apt for cases of direct or attempted IP theft."
It may have been immature and possibly not an ethical thing to do (matter of opinion), but it is not illegal and it appears that it was effective.

MS was in violation of the Creative Commons by-attribution non-commercial license. If anyone would go to court, it would be MS for violating his IP rights.

Then why did you waste your time posting a comment?

You do care.

No, I still don't care.

It's rather immature, if the original post had a problem they should've contacted Microsoft and resolved this in an adult fashion.

This is rather attention seeking and thus, I don't care and I don't care to see this sort of rubbish on Neowin or the internet.

lol

This rubbish is the internet.

The lad has a point, Z3r0

Funny that it filtered it www.[goatse].cx considering that the site doesn't even exist anymore.

Funnier that everyone calls it "goatse" when it's "goatse . cx" ... clearly "goat sex" ... "goatse" makes no sense...

neither does 'pwned' but it has become a part of internet vocabulary.

the correct term is to 'goatse' someone.

Heh, yeah, an ass indeed.

No, he's the guy who developed Technorati, Pricegrabber and NexTag. He also worked for MS.

Doesn't make him more mature, does it.

Why should he have to remove his own pictures to stop MS from illegally using them?
Stop blaming this on the Flickr guy...

But not for very long. I think maybe I'm starting to see why.




Are you referring to Niall as "the Flickr guy?" You're assuming that Niall's original claim that he owns the rights to the photo are in fact legitimate. Looks like it's not.

And who else is to blame? He's the one that knowingly exposed hundreds of his former employer's readers to a disgusting and offensive image for no reason other than spite and attention. So stop defending him just because you got a cheap laugh out of it.

Well, yeah, that's probably what annoyed the user in the first place.

Flickr is especially known to feature CC material and it's easy to find out what licenses the images use, so it's pretty sloppy on Microsoft's part.

Not really - it's sloppy on Niall's part since apparently he didn't own the rights to the image in the first place. So he has no business putting it under a CC license.

Nope - not without a release from Dean Hachamovitch (and Microsoft).

Why should he take down his material because others are violating the license? That logic makes no sense at all.

He was taking down his material either way... Better to have it be a 404, IMO. Then he could re-upload the image to his album with a new URI and everything would have been fine. Oh, and maybe send an email to the bloggers about it.

No, and MS isn't losing any bandwidth on me downloading XP from a P2P network... What kind of silly argument is that?

It's the usage rights to the property that's violated.

According to Flickr the picture is under a Creative Commons license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

This means it can be displayed, remixed or shared freely, as long as the author is acknowledged. All he had to do was ask them to acknowledge him (an error on Microsoft's part not too initially); but instead he chose to be a jerk about it. He's shown he's totally unprofessional. Lets be honest though, he did it to get himself some attention anyway.

I'm no legal expert but I'm certain the usage rights on Windows XP are different to those of an image on a free hosting website.

no. copyrighted material and intellectual property is the same regardless. Just because Microsoft own xp, it doesnt make copyright stronger.

I guess you can see who are the Microsoft fanboys from these comments...

If only law was so simple as you make out, perhaps more people would represent themselves.

Yes, he does. He was the photographer, ergo he produced the material.

But he has photographed copyrighted products and persons, so...

So that means even CNN cannot take photographs of Bill Gates or the Zune device without paying money to Microsoft?

Nope.

Bingo!

And i still lol'd, regardless of how much goatse puts me off my cheerios.

"I'd buy that for a dollar"

Then i'd never have to leave neowin.net!