Since I have these arguments all the time at work, it’s good to see someone presenting the rightsholder/union viewpoint for once. As a professional, I have to take their views on board (usually in the form of several pages of signed and sealed legalese), which is why it’s so galling to see any number of two-bit amateurs gleefully uploading material that I can’t clear through legitimate sources – and then have to deal with e-mails whining about “well, THIS site offers it, so why don’t you?”.

I once took an inordinate amount of pleasure in nicking another site’s video grabs because he’d accompanied them with pompous copyright warnings – but pertaining to his site only: there was no mention of the actual rightsholder. And since I did have a contract with said rightsholder, I was on far firmer legal ground – though I restrained myself from sending a “so sue me” e-mail as that would have been going a bit too far (I also restrained myself from telling the rightsholder about the other site, for the same reason).

Mind you, this can backfire – after finding an impressively high-quality still of Rupert Everett in ‘Another Country’ through a Google Image search (again, this was legally legit from my perspective), my browser started filling up with popups of some pretty graphic gay hardcore porn, and I had to shut down my PC to stop them – and then ring our IT department to explain that this really was in the course of legitimate research and that I wasn’t a secret gay porn addict. Not that my wife would have batted an eyelid, but workplaces can be a bit funny about this sort of thing for some inexplicable reason.