As reported by GamePolitics, the lengthy rant by twistedsymphony seems to have brought up a very interesting observation. ICE, a government agency whose purpose is to police Intellectual Property violations is in itself violating intellectual property (IP) by using photos of mod chips and related items taken dirctly from websites and/or advertisements.
If twistedsymphony is right in his statements, the IP enforcement agency is bragging about its operation with IP:
There is some cruel irony that none of the [photos] provided are actually owned by ICE or the DHS but are rather copyrighted images created and owned by the modchip manufacturers and stripped straight off of their websites.
They even went so far as to blatantly black out watermarks placed on the images by the legitimate owners and then had the audacity to state that to use any of the images you’d need to get their permission. I got a good chuckle out of the fact that the media attached to the press release about squashing copyright infringement include blatant copyright infringement itself. But who’s going to police them?
While GP’s certainty on the situation is unclear, we’re more than sure we’ve seen those pictures displayed on various mod-chip related websites, including the one shown above which can be found readily available on the Swap Magic 3 website. One thing certain though is that ICE’s photo line-up does not appear to have originated from the evidence room. Many look as if they’ve seen Photoshop once or twice and some look to be marketing images (see picture above). The blacked-out image watermarks also raises some eyebrows.
That being the case, the following statement by ICE on their website seems to be a tad-bit misguided:
Use of appropriate byline/photo/image credit of “Photo Courtesy of ICE” or “Image Courtesy of ICE” is requested.
