Netflix Stole My VHS Cassette Photos for Its Stranger Things Boxed Set

Megalith

Megalith

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Netflix has been selling a Collector’s Edition box set of Stranger Things that incorporates pictures of a VHS tape, and according to this author, it was stolen from his website. He had no idea this happened until some kind netizens contacted him about it.

I am hoping that by making this public posting, at least this injustice is documented, with the hope that it catches the eye of someone responsible enough to look into the matter and offer appropriate compensation. When and if that happens, the record will be updated accordingly. Image licenses can frequently run up to $600 per image depending on use. In the case where people are not contacted beforehand, an additional penalty is considered customary.
 
He has a point... a company going after people for copy-write/IP infringement should at least ask for permission before using images from the internet.

Using images for your own hobby site etc is one thing, once you start selling something you should know better to at least ask. Worse case scenario go to a Library and check out a VHS tape or something.

Its not a horrible offense, someone just assumed the image was generic enough to just use (who knows maybe legally it is). The image is probably worth $100 or something.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
As Bugs would say "What a maroon."

He never had IP rights to the images he used in the first place to create the VHS tape image.

Money Grab is Grabby
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First off, it's not "IP", it's a copyright. Second, yes, he did. Why? Because he didn't "use" the images, he photographed the cassette tape himself, just as a professional photographer would, who also has a default copyright on any photos he/she would take.

Creig said:
And then the maker of the VHS tape sues him for publishing unauthorized images of their copyrighted product.
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Nope, that's not how it works. You think that you can't take a photo and have default ownership of the photo for someone's copyrighted product? Tell that to Road & Track magazine's photographers. Do you think GM and Ford own the rights to any images a photographer takes for the magazine? You don't need permission to take a photo of something (unless it's a restricted area, like inside a government facility).
 
I'm not clear on IP laws, but it seems if that he took the picture with his camera, put a copyright claim on his picture, posted to his website, he should retain the rights to it.
 
Verge said:
Get an effin job.


Jeez americans are lazy.
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Too bad he lives in Sydney, Australia. Otherwise he would fit right in with the rest of the free loaders here.

I just like the fact that the Netflix employee/contractor was equally as lazy. VHS tapes are all over the world still, just go visit Mexico or a 70 year old ladies yard sell. Get out into the world... the Internet is making people lazy.
 
This is interesting on a whole lot of levels.

Fact is we know he did take that picture, of a real object.

Next, is said object "generic" so that a creator can enforce copyright.


For example, i can not use certain items as props in a movie, because of copyright on those props. I have to pick from a "public commons" prop list. No kellogs cornflakes for my background, i can to use a box with a picture of generic cereal(which could be corn flakes) with no logos.
I can not take a picture of a vette, and sell it.

So the question is, is a blank cassette tape generic, if it is, the story holds up. Yes the company hired to make the box art, just googled "cassette tape high rez" and yanked it from google photos. The company could have just went to shutterstock and paid for a image, or took a picture themselves, or 3d rendered it, or paid for a 3d rendering...
 
What? I read that article and he's complaining that Netflix took his photo that he took of a VHS video cassette tape. UMM, he doesn't own the copyright to the picture of a generic video cassette tape. The question is, is his picture of a VHS cassette tape copyrighted?
 
Its not an original work..... Wheres the Copyright infringement.....


A thank you from Netflix might have been nice.

I blame my generation for copy and pasting our way to a quick victory
 
At first I though maybe he had made a faux VHS box art of Stranger Things and they stole that. Nope, just a stock image of a blank VHS tape

They can afford to pay him a reasonable sum I suppose
 
if he sues netflix it could carry on for years all the while netflix buries him in litigation costs.

it'll bankrupt him.
 
This is fake.. pay attention to the damn details of the tapes.. ribs on top and bottom of cassets.. count them.. front and back has more colums on the netflix tapes 12 vs 8 front, 14 vs 9 on back (counting from bottom of spool window down). They are different tapes. Also, first picture has a the netflix tape has a partial Thump/shadow on it, the guys does not. Not to mention the pictures are taken at different angles than his picture (see first picture vs second picture) The list can go on. Just because the spool real was in the same location does not change that. This is just someone trying to make a buck and thinks he outsmarted them.. NOT!
 
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It's truly disturbing to me how many people seem to think it's perfectly justifiable for companies whose profits are measured in hundreds of millions of dollars to fuck over an individual...

*I will clarify: It doesn't matter if this guy has a leg to stand on or not, I see people saying "who cares, he just took a pic of a VHS cassette". Yep, he took a pic and a multi-million dollar company stole that image. If it's so fucking trivial, then why didn't they just have someone take a photo of a VHS cartridge?
 
nightanole said:
This is interesting on a whole lot of levels.

Fact is we know he did take that picture, of a real object.

Next, is said object "generic" so that a creator can enforce copyright.


For example, i can not use certain items as props in a movie, because of copyright on those props. I have to pick from a "public commons" prop list. No kellogs cornflakes for my background, i can to use a box with a picture of generic cereal(which could be corn flakes) with no logos.
I can not take a picture of a vette, and sell it.

So the question is, is a blank cassette tape generic, if it is, the story holds up. Yes the company hired to make the box art, just googled "cassette tape high rez" and yanked it from google photos. The company could have just went to shutterstock and paid for a image, or took a picture themselves, or 3d rendered it, or paid for a 3d rendering...
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Wow. There's so much incorrect here, it's scary. :(
 
Creig said:
And then the maker of the VHS tape sues him for publishing unauthorized images of their copyrighted product.
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Right, now JVC is going to sue him for taking pics and publishing specs of VHS tapes, which I believe they own the IP on.
 
Please explain to me what kind of nut job has the time and or energy to examine photos of VHS tapes and can match said tapes from a Netflix release to some other nut jobs webpage of VHS tapes. You know because we all memorize every line of every item we see.

LMAO
 
HeadRusch said:
Right, now JVC is going to sue him for taking pics and publishing specs of VHS tapes, which I believe they own the IP on.
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JVC does not own a copyright on the design of a VHS tape and never has. The IP rights that they owned were a design patent. Purely functional items rather than artistic ones must be covered by a design patent and not a copyright. For example, the shape of an IPhone was covered by a design patent for which they sued Samsung and won. However, the term of a design patent expires in 15 years. The patent has long since expired (VHS came out in 1970). Furthermore, JVC released the specifications and IP to the VHS long ago to make it an open standard. It was one of the ways that VHS won out over Betamax... thus even in 1970 JVC was letting anybody make VHS tapes using their design. I'm surprised that most of you seem unaware that the VHS vs. Betamax thing with the open standard (free to copy) winning out over Sony's closed platform (Betamax).

Although some of JVC's strategy was traditional, they won this important contest playing by unconventional rules. First, they gave away their proprietary technology by licensing VHS specifications to competitors and thus making this an open standard... These decisions led JVC to build a large installed base more quickly than Sony's Betamax.
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See: http://besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/impact/f96/Projects/jchyung/
 
zetachi said:
Please explain to me what kind of nut job has the time and or energy to examine photos of VHS tapes and can match said tapes from a Netflix release to some other nut jobs webpage of VHS tapes. You know because we all memorize every line of every item we see.

LMAO
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This is getting embarrassing. There are way too many posters here who have absolutely no understanding of copyright law and think that protecting your copyright (no matter how "trivial") makes you a "nutjob." If you're a programmer and wrote some proprietary code and I came and copied your code into a product and sold it, would you be okay with that? Or would you think that you somehow deserve some compensation for your code? What if you only wrote two lines of code? Do you still deserve something? Or are you just a "nutjob" because you memorized some proprietary code.
 
CptTrips said:
This is getting embarrassing. There are way too many posters here who have absolutely no understanding of copyright law and think that protecting your copyright (no matter how "trivial") makes you a "nutjob." If you're a programmer and wrote some proprietary code and I came and copied your code into a product and sold it, would you be okay with that? Or would you think that you somehow deserve some compensation for your code? What if you only wrote two lines of code? Do you still deserve something? Or are you just a "nutjob" because you memorized some proprietary code.
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I believe there is quite a bit of difference between someone writing proprietary code and someone taking a photo of a generic VHS tape. I don't profess to know the intricate workings on the laws of copyright law, especially when it pertains to the internet and/or international claims but its a generic photo of a generic VHS Tape. So If I take a photo of an apple (fruit not phone) and post it on my website and someone uses that picture of an apple I'm entitled to compensation?
 
zetachi said:
I believe there is quite a bit of difference between someone writing proprietary code and someone taking a photo of a generic VHS tape. I don't profess to know the intricate workings on the laws of copyright law, especially when it pertains to the internet and/or international claims but its a generic photo of a generic VHS Tape. So If I take a photo of an apple (fruit not phone) and post it on my website and someone uses that picture of an apple I'm entitled to compensation?
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I don't understand why you think if something is "generic," it somehow invalidates their work. If I just call that proprietary code "generic," can I copy it now?

And yes, if you take a photo of an apple and someone uses that photo, they are violating your copyright. It's YOUR photo of an apple. Sure, someone else could take a similar photo. But they didn't. They used YOURS. That's infringement. Another programmer could write very similar code to yours that does the same thing, and that's fine. But if they COPIED YOURS, that's infringement.
 
what I find odd or suspect is his letter stating that he knows its his photo and that he knows that Netflix altered the photo. So Netflix went to all that work to alter the photo to hide the fact that they stole his photo of said VHS tape?
 
zetachi said:
what I find odd or suspect is his letter stating that he knows its his photo and that he knows that Netflix altered the photo. So Netflix went to all that work to alter the photo to hide the fact that they stole his photo of said VHS tape?
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I looked at the photos, they are indeed his. No, Netflix did not make the alterations. They company they hired to do their DVD box design did. No, they did not alter the photo to hide the fact they stole his photo, they altered it to fit correctly on the DVD case. The problem isn't the alterations, it's that they used his photo without his permission. And made money off it. That's one of the biggest problems.
 
zetachi said:
what I find odd or suspect is his letter stating that he knows its his photo and that he knows that Netflix altered the photo. So Netflix went to all that work to alter the photo to hide the fact that they stole his photo of said VHS tape?
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No, netflix resized it and stretched it etc.
 
The person who pilfered the photo probably thought it wasn't identifiable. It's not copyright infringement if nobody finds out. :)
 
Verge said:
Get an effin job.


Jeez americans are lazy.
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At least we aren't so lazy that we can't read a blog post written by an unemployed Australian.

article you failed to read said:
I’m frustrated that despite my photos being used, I’m not getting any compensation whatsoever. I’m frustrated that I have to spend time chasing when I could be spending time doing something else. I’m extremely frustrated that the piece of art they have produced resides on a box set which I cannot even hold in my own hands, as it’s US-only. I’m half-way around the world in Australia, so did they think they could get away with it?
...
I’ve been unemployed for a while, on holidays for a while, making do as best as I can. I’m a one-man-band operating a personal blog that doesn’t even make AU$1/day after all the hosting and domain fees are considered.
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CptTrips ... You've got far more patience than I do dealing with the ignorant people in this thread. (y) I'll just repeat my previous comment... it's scary.
 
I saw this story the other day and laughed about it because I really think these people taking "photographs" are going way way too fucking far with the complaints. It's not like this guy set up a studio with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of photographic equipment and paid a staff of peons to set everything up just perfectly to snap that pic oh-so-perfectly or anything, it's a god damned VHS cassette tape and it could have been any of the half a billion images of one floating around easily accessible on the Internet at any given moment.

Seriously, the guy just needs to shut it and move on, that's my personal opinion on the situation.
 
Tiberian said:
It's not like this guy set up a studio with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of photographic equipment and paid a staff of peons to set everything up just perfectly to snap that pic oh-so-perfectly or anything, it's a god damned VHS cassette tape
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And yet it was too much effort for Netflix's product designers to do it themselves.
They're paid to produce original artwork, not arbitrarily copy things off the internet.
 
Really is it just me that finds the whole thing bizarre? That some random guy who visits an obscure ancient tech website from Australia, recognizes that the VHS box used by Netflix to sell a TV show is the same one used on this website? Something is way to fishy.
 
Litfod said:
They're paid to produce original artwork, not arbitrarily copy things off the internet.
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But that's what everybody does nowadays, and no I'm not saying it's right or even legal to do it but everybody and I do mean everybody does it. Google does it constantly every time it posts search results: it's copying the text content from a webpage on a website and providing that as part of the search results, same as doing an images search. They're getting paid to provide the search results using the labors of others that produced the content that was searched in the first place.

Hell, even news websites are terrible for this nowadays: every time something happens these days what do we see but news sites posting articles that are full of tweets and other posts from other websites - commercial ones - where they not only provide a link back to the tweet or post itself but then they copy the content from the tweet or post and make that part of the article itself (just in case the tweet or post gets deleted, of course).

It's not beyond reason in today's interconnected world to say plain and simply if you post something accessible on the Internet it's practically fair game anymore for anyone to make use of it, like it or not.

MavericK said:
Stranger things have happened.
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Skirge01 said:
Nope, that's not how it works. You think that you can't take a photo and have default ownership of the photo for someone's copyrighted product? Tell that to Road & Track magazine's photographers. Do you think GM and Ford own the rights to any images a photographer takes for the magazine? You don't need permission to take a photo of something (unless it's a restricted area, like inside a government facility).
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If he has the right to retain ownership of a photo of a product he doesn't own... don't others have the same rights with regard to images of his own publicly displayed photos? After all, they didn't simply 'steal' his pic, what they did involved some editing. Where is the line where something becomes an original work of art?

Ultimately, the real owner is whoever is willing to spend the most in court.
 
Tiberian said:
I saw this story the other day and laughed about it because I really think these people taking "photographs" are going way way too fucking far with the complaints. It's not like this guy set up a studio with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of photographic equipment and paid a staff of peons to set everything up just perfectly to snap that pic oh-so-perfectly or anything, it's a god damned VHS cassette tape and it could have been any of the half a billion images of one floating around easily accessible on the Internet at any given moment.
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Sure, it could have been. But if this guy is right, the one Netflix chose was his, and this is a clear case of copyright infringement. You may think it's over the top, and so might I, but the law is clear enough.

If he didn't register his photos, though, it might be a moot point anyway, as he won't be able to press charges. This "moral copyright" BS he keeps going on about is kind of funny, on the one hand, and kind of sad & confusing. What the hell does he think he's going to achieve by arguing weird moral rights with a corporation?
 
DeathFromBelow said:
If he has the right to retain ownership of a photo of a product he doesn't own... don't others have the same rights with regard to images of his own publicly displayed photos? After all, they didn't simply 'steal' his pic, what they did involved some editing. Where is the line where something becomes an original work of art?

Ultimately, the real owner is whoever is willing to spend the most in court.
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The objects in the photo are immaterial. He took the photo. Netflix stole the photo, allegedly. It's his rights over the use of the photo he is invoking.

If Netflix took his photo and edited it, what they have created is a derivative work. Creation of derivative works is one of the 6 rights covered under what we commonly call "copyright."
 
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