This is not only a question of law but of the idea of prevention: should banks not be able to lock their doors or I have a wall around my house? People steal and to hamstring ourselves by throwing this entirely into an academic realm while Rome burns is senseless.
I am not advocating prevention myself but a way to make sites pay for using my photos without me using hundreds if not thousands of dollars and days on end to just go after one person – in other words, there is no rational mechanism by which I can protect myself. With newspapers and magazines it was a different thing as they were professionals with certain standards and easily found and pinned down if they stole.
Now you have sites where a page can disappear at the first sign of alarm after they have already benefited from stolen material and the owners, where?. Law must change to reflect this fact by streamlining itself and adapting to this new reality. Trying to enforce copyright with dead tree laws will not work and you can’t hold them off simply because you now get something free you never did before and like it.
Defending this theft is the same thing as saying we all have the “right” to everything someone else has created to make money. Often, having the right or patent on a thing is the sole reason money is made. A writer here on PJM wrote that his auto articles are routinely stolen and re-posted and there’s really nothing he can do about it; that site should be shut down until an explanation or payment plan is forthcoming. We need small claims internet court. Once some examples are made, the net will police itself.
