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Using watermarked pictures without paying is actually illegal yet i am fully on board and welcome this behavior.
Digital goods are infinite and therefor should be free, physical resources to survive are expensive enough as they are.
The only reason i know this is spiffing brit had to buy the stockphoto picture he was using and gave them his own watermark to stay legal.
damn i just googled the legality and it seems you're right. i thought the watermarked versions would be fine to use since it's advertising the site... i guess i hope for "fair use"
I would argue that adding your own edit to a stock image would be considered a "parody" of the original, therefore legal to use.
The parody argument might actually hold up.
Oof
Digital goods are infinite but the cost to produce them is real. If stock images were free there wouldn’t be very many of them.
I do understand what you mean.
I am not saying that the people who create digital goods don’t deserve a living. they do, all contribution to society is valid and every human deserves a humane life.
I am just morally against economic commoditization of digital goods on the web using the same currency people use to buy food and healthcare. No amount of fortnite skins and adobe licenses can compare to the value of a single small piece of bread for a starving child.
Stock pictures shouldn’t exist, when i was young uploading a picture online meant it was now free for the taking by anyone and there was absolutely no shortage of those. Now it seems whenever you search for something basic like “transparant vector image of a set of stars” all your top results are watermark and require some amount of money or data. These are the kind of images i can easily make in photoshop myself but i didn’t need to because thousands of others already did.
The diverse, creative sites for humans and by humans which used to fill my “online sources” when making school reports have seized to exist and made way for “by t, for profit” models instead.
That’s such a silly argument. Nobody is forcing you to buy Fortnite skins when your kid is starving. Monetary incentives are how the things people want get created. Yes, there would still be plenty of content on the internet if we banned monetization of digital goods but it would be overwhelmingly incoherent and low quality.
It would also destroy the livelihood of millions of people. What about their children? Do they not deserve to eat?
Edit: I should add that it would be more reasonable for you to say “food and healthcare should be available to everyone”. That’s not an unreasonable statement.
My ideas are on the opposite side of the spectrum.
The internet and software we have today is already a very low quality, there are ads everywhere which create a sensory hellscape for neurodivergents on the spectrum like me.
The only way i can still use the internet is trough an advanced filter. I cannot use youtube anymore and rely on a script to download from channels automatically. Discord used to be ok but is now stuffed with so much nonsense that is constantly pushed in my face i think of leaving it too. I left reddit for the same reason.
Even color codes are being copyrighted. Photoshop requires a subscription to use pantone colors and files that previously used those colors get altered to no longer use them. Its sick. Enshitification is real and increasing.
The best parts of the web are foss, its what makes lemmy superior to reddit.
There is a really simple but admittedly very radical solution to not needing to destroy anyones livelihood. Its called object the notion that people need to “earn a living” no one is alive by choice, everyone is in the same boat trying to survive. It makes no sense that we owe anyone anything for the privilege of a decent life.
Society wont collapse, there will still be people contributing. I know i will. I love my job, i get to help people with my expertise, the worst part is that my health somehow depends on it.