The subjects of copyright, images (and videos), publishing, advertising, bandwidth and server space have raised their heads again.   So perhaps time for an update / reminder on some of the complexities.   In general, Webmaster, Admins and moderators are aware of these issues and where not, we can chat about them and learn detail.  Also in general, members tend to get it right 99.99% of the time - at least to the morals of the law / guidelines, and the 0.01% of "oopsies" - one or two posts a month - tend to be accidental over-site a quick "hey" soon sorts it out.  I love what we have created here, however we need to be aware of the issues around.

Copyright

Everything has a copyright status. You might forget that when you see so much sharing on social media - buttons to encourage it, but the copyright laws remain, and they are complex and vary country by country which for a public readable web resource can be a bit of a nightmare.  There is a general acceptance that some form of copyright is fair and reasonable in protecting the originator of [whatever] who has invested time, skill, emotions and perhaps money into their work, and should have an environment in which they can gain reward for that.  There is a general ability (acceptance) to quote short elements in "critical review", and for copyright holders to declare something "public domain" which in most cases comes automatically at some time in the distant future.  I could go into the special case of Peter Pan and Great Ormond Street Hospital - the works can be shared as they are now public domain, but in the UK royalties are required to be paid to the hospital on performance of the play.  A case that's not transport related, so let's not go off on that tangent except to note it as an example of the complexity of copyright, licensing, royalties, etc!

Images and videos have a copyright status too, and if they are embedded within an article or piece of text, that can be different to to the article.  You'll see this in many social media articles where there's a separate copyright / source detailed on pictures. It means that the image is there because the publishers of the article have licensed the picture or obtained permission to use it, but it likely does not mean they have bought a license which allow it to be shared wider.

As part of your Coffee Shop sign up agreement - copy at https://www.passenger.chat/r1761.html - you have agreed to respect copyright and to indemnify the forum owners in the event of a formal complaint or legal action taken based on the content of your messages - and that (of course) includes quoted material and images.  Images and live video are an especial concern - de facto, they give rise to far more complaints, issues and concerns.  With these concerns, we want to help members, and any posts you make that link to images not hosted on our server will are displayed only to logged in members unless you explicit state their copyright status.  You can state that through the tags described at
https://www.passenger.chat/r31486.html.  If you don't include any of these copyright tags in your post, the image will not be published - not seen in public - only seen by members. This is done to help protect you as best we can from accidentally making public an image which is not yours to legally share and which could get you into trouble.

Our approach on this member's protection is not unique - other fora do a similar thing.  Which means that if you post images on one of those other forums, you'll see them, and indeed if you share links to them here you may see them here too, but other readers who are members of the Coffee Shop but are not members of that other forum will not see them. Erring on the side of caution, if you like.

This caution and member's protection does have one side effect that you may not realise. It means that if you are a member of other sites that host images (including other fora) and you post the images or links to them on that other site on the Coffee Shop, they will appear AOK in your own viewing of your post here, but others may not.  And Coffee Shop members who look to visit/see the images via the other site  are likely to be guests there, and encouraged to sign up to view the content you have directed them towards.

At the Coffee Shop, we are pretty free in what we allow you to post.  However, your agreement does preclude you, in words you have agreed to, from advertising. Often, the general interest overrides this but the case of a post which takes members to another forum with strong overlaps with ours, and solicits them to sign up with a rival, has caused serious concern with moderators and admins. It's advertising the competitor, and indeed offering an encouragement to sign up there, to our loyal members here. Cheeky!!  The view, though, is that this was not an intentional attempt or encouragement to poach members - most of whom are so exceptionally loyal, and having explained this and how it's come about we're moving on / and putting it down to experience.

Members do - and I'm sure will continue - to "advertise" external sites, many of which these days are behind paywalls. Can I please ask members, though, to display a degree of consideration for the Coffee Shop team's sensitivities and our wider membership when directing people to sites with overlapping content which require them to engage via some sort of registration in order to see that content.  Far better - provided there is appropriate copyright clearance - to share the content / images in a location that does not require registration with a "rival".

Images

The Coffee Shop is not a (general) image hosting site - for static ("pictures") images or for moving ("video") images. We do not have the software, bandwidth, or the admin / moderator team for it to be practical. If we tried all we would be doing is spinning our wheels when many other sites and mechanisms from which you can embed are available - no need nor desire nor business case to compete with them.  That said, we are aware that there are fewer image hosting sites than there use to be, and that some / many of them add watermarks to pictures.

Looking back, it's a surprising long time since we updated our "how to" on images - so here's a bump / reminder of the page - at https://www.passenger.chat/r21265.html and that includes links back to even older posts talking about various services.

In summary, you can "hotlink" images from your own domain / sites. You can hotlink from a public service and are welcome to do so provide that they are going to be visible here without that other site requiring readers to become a member there so see them.  And you can add images and certain other formats to your posts as attachments, which are then viewable by members here.

Server space and bandwidth

Our history database - all 350,000 messages and their attachments - take up around 105 Mbytes of server database space. That's a small amount of space - the images which I host here on another domain for my own use are over 7 G bytes. The archive document mirror takes up over 8 G bytes,  On our receptionist server, the Coffee Shop takes a further 10 G bytes of storage, more than a half of that being for cached information from the worker server - maps, timetables, passenger flow and individual station pages, and commonly served images which don't change.

Please multiply each of those figures by 2 at least to account for "Father" and "Grandfather" backups taken regularly and automatically. Some more dynamic elements are backed up frequently and we keep selected older generations for a while too so that if something goes wrong and we don't spot it for a while, we can still recover back beyond the point of failure.  There are also multiple levels of backup of the server software itself, and growing logfiles which I truncate from time to time. And there's much more on both servers than just the Coffee Shop.

There is plenty of space on the servers for you to keep posting to your heart's content. There are various maxima / limits but these are rarely hit in regular use.

There is also plenty of bandwidth for your normal use. These days, specialist servers which advertise their presence in any way attract a vast number of requests from all sorts of automata and at times from malicious hacking attempts, and we are no exception.  We do have directive files to tell well mannered automata where they may go, and there is also a layer of checking where we turn away incoming requests that have certain characteristics.  A third set of dynamic checks keeps an eye out for "splurged" requests, and our server turns off these splurges when it sees them for a while to give itself a chance to recover.

With so many public messages in our databases, and with the content viewable in a multitude of ways, guest automata requests are huge in number - 210,000 requests yesterday to our receptionist, of which 62,000 were passed on to the worker server and an unknown number ( at a guess between a further 20,000 and 40,000 ) contacted the worker's databases without troubling the main worker code.  These numbers are down - a factor or 3 to 5 times compared to when certain automata are crawling,  and the 62,000 is way down from figures closer to a million when we see an intended (or unintended) denial of service attack.

 
Although I have pinned this thread so it can easily be found, I've not locked it so that comments, questions, discussions are not only welcome but encouraged.

 
Oops, I haven't a clue as to how I apply a tag to an image.

Mark

 


Image is shared Creative Commons (by poster) (?)



Image copyright Reserved (by poster) (?)



Image is in Public Domain (?)

I have followed the first image (after the image tag closed with [CC] to say I have shared it under collective commons - if you click on the extra link it gives you, you get details of how you can reuse it

I have followed the second image (after the image tag closed with [CR] to say I have shared it here but retain copyright and I might get miffed if you share it further.  Nothing to stop you asking if you may.

I believe the their image to be in the public domain - so it has a [PD] tag.  I am trusting that belief from the research I have done and as a courtesy and help I can tell you I got it from .     The date on the image file suggests it's over 65 years old and copyright in Poland lasts for the life of the photographer plus 70 years - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_copyright_duration_by_country - slight risk taken then and if anyone knows different on this photo, please let me know!