Rhiannon opened this issue on Jul 22, 2003 ยท 59 posts
dialyn posted Wed, 23 July 2003 at 10:06 AM
I think SnowSultan wasn't being serious about doing giant graphics. The only ways to absolutely protect your graphics are to not post or share them or to do such terrible ones that no one wants them. (I chose the latter route myself.) When I first got on the Internet, I thought everything was free because it was so easy to copy and save what I wanted. Why would they put it on the Internet and make it available to me if they didn't want me to have it? I know better now but a lot of people still have that mentality. I work in a library and I know people rip pages out of extremely expensive art books, and then they will say, "I'm a tax payer, you bought this book with my taxes, it's mine to do with what I want." That fact that they ruined the book for the use of anyone else makes no difference to these selfish people. If you have made copies from a magazine or book and shared those copies with your closest 15 or 200 friends (pretending you have the right to do so because the copier is right there and they wouldn't have it there if it wasn't legal to print endless copies), if you have scanned magazines, if you've downloaded music without paying for it, if you've downloaded images without permission of the artist, if you've taken little movie clips from the television or DVD or videotape and sent them from friend to friend without having the rights to do so, you've stolen from someone. And so have I. I'm not saying I've never done it or been tempted to do it. It is all so easy. So what makes us think someone won't steal from us? It's the mentality of the world we live in. And I doubt if any of the elaborate schemes I've read lately to protect the art will really do any good. As fast as someone comes up with an idea, someone else is gleefully thinking of a way around it. I know....I'm just being negative. But it's the truth.