How NSA spooks spaffed my DAD'S DATA ALL OVER THE WEB Shock, horror, scandal! America's NSA secretly took data from my website for its fiendish PRISM web-snooping project - and it ended up blasted all over the internet! Top-secret slides detailing the massive electronic surveillance programme were leaked last week by ex-CIA techie Edward Snowden. A close inspection of the …
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"I see, it's the victim's fault. You mean like the classic, "She shouldn't have worn that short skirt!" defence?"
Very good point - round here it's usually "If they're running Windows/have an unsecured wireless point they deserve anything bad that happens to them." Hope your other upvoters aren't guilty of that little bit of hypocrisy ...
"Get all of the PRISM servers taken offline until they pony up for the rights to use it, or immediate removal of the artwork with compensation for having used it already."
Good luck with that.
Laws aren't there to give the weak rights against the powerful; they are there to keep the weak in their place.
Yup, it appears to be he http://www.hd.org. Now, that wasn't hard to find was it?
I would try to get yourself firmly on their watch list if I were you. You will experience a massively more reliable internet service because all your data will be re-routed via the NSA's fast and efficient servers instead of whatever random pathway of least cost your ISP usually uses.
Send in the choppers and guns then give them a thorough body search to make sure they are not hiding any hidden copyright infringement, after all nothing to hide, nothing to fear.
However we will be using the man with the largest hands in Britain to conduct the body searches :)
"However we will be using the man with the largest hands in Britain to conduct the body searches :)"
Don't forget that the person doing the cavity search needs to wear protective gloves. Please, allow me to suggest the ones with a sandpaper like texture. Workers safety is of the essence!
To be fair to the NSA, this web site does appear to offer up the images for free if you check the home page:
http://gallery.hd.org/
"Hi: Welcome to the Gallery!
FREE for your Website, PC and Projects!"
And the prism photo is just underneath.
And hopefully if I suck up to the NSA a bit, they'll cut me some slack and not tell the wife what I was up to on the internet when she was shopping yesterday.
Um, from the article: "the original image is hosted on my online gallery for free-to-use pics, although there are caveats (such as a requirement to credit and link to us)".
IOW, the gallery to which you're referring belongs to the author of this article, and the NSA have failed to adhere to their terms.
If you've got references, that's the one the author of this post can use to go after them on!
Technically the copies the NSA has aren't copyrighted and aren't published, they are secret. So their use of the logo while ill advised, can slip through on a hyper-technicality. That is, until they actually assert a copyright over it. Once they've done that it's game, set, and match to the original copyright holder.
At least in the US, copyright is just that; by having *copied* the image at all (even if not for publication) and not following the terms, they've violated, at least, the terms the copyright holder set forth. I believe that makes them liable for infringement, although conflicting messages on the website weaken the claim. Still, I'd be asking the EFF and/or ACLU if they were interested in using the suit somehow. I imagine it could be a useful tool in their kit, and a generous donation by the author to allow them either to represent him, or, in the extreme, to transfer ownership of the copyright.
Not sure how all that works when crossing the pond, though, and IANAL.
One last thing.
They're still public domain materials, as works of the government or persons working for the government carrying out their official duties. Being secret doesn't change that, and especially doesn't affect copyright violations. Remember, all classified material becomes declassified after 50 years. It belongs in the public domain, and without a very substantial national interest in keeping it secret, the public has a right to it (hence it enters the 'public domain').
At least, that's my guess.
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I get the feeling their apparently vast server array will gobble it all up and report back "that's a nice snack, when's the main course?" :/
The software has probably already identified the exact piece of text everyone's going to be transmitting so they can easily ignore identical copies floating through the electronic ether.
The trollthensa.com site should have been programmed with a heap of sentences that are completely innocent yet contain certain key words/phrases and each visitor to the site gets a random set of sentences to distribute, compounding the level of data the NSA has to collect from the people sending out the phrases across the net.
As said in the article, the picture is free to use, as long as requirements are met, so I don't know what could be done, rather than request that either the requirements be met or payment be made in lieu of credit and a linkback.
The more interesting thing to me is that the NSA must have paid somebody to create that logo, so this may have interesting repercussions for that individual or company.
On the behalf of the NSA and the American people, I would like to apologize for our agency's misuse of your family's intellectual property. We will be contacting you shortly to negotiate a license for this image as well as appropriate compens..........Eh, screw it. We'll just have you disappeared and erase all signs of your website. Would you like pine scent or lemon on the black bag when we scoop you up?
Most Sincerely,
The NSA
Hizonner: In the case of Aggrieved Copyright Owner versus the USA... Hey, where's the plaintiff?
Counsel for the Plaintiff: I am afraid we are going to have to withdraw the suit, Judge. When I went round to the plaintiff's home this morning to bring him to court, all I found was a huge smoking crater.
Hizonner: Well, no plaintiff no case sure enough. Let's adjourn for lunch.
you "stole" it from pink floyd and they "stole" it from the egyptians and the egyptians stole it from the big headed alien in the sky! the nsa flipped the image over and put in some text. that's good enough to make it a new work. if you don't like it, tough %^#@ you &^%$. :) have a nice day.
From his site :
Apparently used in the NSA PRISM logo.
Download small medium full - FREE to download and use! (c) Adam Hart-Davis
(Natural Science): prism and refraction of light into rainbow 2 AJHD.jpg
D=1998-04-08 [Apr 8, 1998]; S=85kB, 642x850; T=JPEG image [MIME:image/jpeg].
Too bad .. it would have been nice to sue the NSA for copyright infringement .. better luck next time guys
Time for a few pints .
I suspect that the Dad's image of the prism isn't the only data that they've been copying.
PRISM bait: bb be 98 f3 1e ef 89 c3 29 79 76 7a 7a c1 bc 73 b9 52 ff e0 b4 ad 90 1b d8 b3 99 66 b4 22 68 70 b6 d0 f7 01 2c 42 d5 47 ce 3a 8c bc 65 5c ba d7 0d 04 20 f0 c8 ef c9 68 89 e0 cf 21 a6 62 84 41 1d 09 51 34 74 19 fb 08 58 1a ef 89 7d 47 06 89 49 b2 89 d7 c4 e4 9a d1 fc 64 96 6f fb cf bd 18 60 4a c2 d8 ab 06 61 ad e8 1d 5f 1e bd 43 5d d4 25 6f 79 5c a5 62 32 51 9b 85 a9 c8 ae f9 88 be 26 42 bd c8 c9 32 26 6c e5 2d c1 d8 62 0d 53 2a 6d 71 22 b3 1b e6 e0 0d 5a 53 81 af 1d 3e b5 74 ea 1b ab 88 7c 62 57 bd 9c d2 40 fd 01 d4 99 ac 3d 20 91 06 3a 4a dd 02 c5 7f 07 30 a1 58 ad 7a d7 c3 57 80 f4 37 3e da fd a2 fc 07 a4 de 80 92 91 1d db 84 b6 a5 4d f3 11 58 f8 5c b2 0d 66 df 13 33 9d e2 a4 6d 90 13 c0 48 ee fb 13 40 c7 1e 6b a8 aa 57 a7 7a 8a bd 2d eb 4b 37 a5 83 b5 82
Actually when the story first broke I did find myself wondering about the PRISM logo, just not about the photo. What I thought ... odd ... was that this high-secrecy outfit and project would have a logo at all. Logos are for publicity materials, right? Why publicize top-secret projects? What artistic director has clearance high enough?
And then the news items came such as the reporter who was already trying to find out what he could about PRISM because of overhearing it discussed in the lounge after a black hat conference. That implied there was an entire class or stratum of society for whom top-secret projects are a dime a dozen - within that class of persons you would surely need an advertising budget.
More evidence of a state within a state.
I prefer to think of your Dad as the presenter of "Local Heroes"
"Hullo! This week on Local Heroes, we're in Penge!" or something like that. An excellent programme.
(Aaaagh! My eyes. Make the glowing bike go away.)
Much better than the contemporary version of "Tomorrow's World" - that was already being neglected in the same way of everything else sciencey, fiction or non-fiction, on the BBC viz Dr Who, QED, Horizon.
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The only one they seem violate is point 1.
The screen grab shows they've used your logo, but have you considered they may link to you (ie. in their use the logo is a clickable link to your site), and or they provide acknowldgement somewhere in their app/site, that just doesn't quite happen to appear on the screen grab.
This is clearly giving them the benefit of the doubt, and if so make Edward Snowdon the man you want to go after, but a) good luck, and b) I'm sure he's a few other things to worry about first.
Back in the day my wife was looking for someone to open a museum exhibition and contacted Adam Hart Davies. She worked at a local authority funded museum and was doing an exhibition on how technology had changed since WW2. AHD wanted a 4 figure fee to open the exhibition, well beyond a regional museums budget so she asked the author Robert Rankin to do it instead at my suggestion. He was delighted to be asked and did it for the price of a room in a travel lodge overnight, and a couple of pints of similar from the stout yeoman of the bar. His speech was wicked too.
Hilarious, like when senator Lamar Smith (the original drafter of SOPA) infringed copyright using someone's photograph in his personal website. It was a creative commons picture, but failed to attribute the author. I bet he did not even know those liberal licenses existed.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120112/11042717390/lamar-smith-caught-infringing-photographers-copyright.shtml
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