TL;DR: Keep the original image-URI (or any other) that is pasted in the composing form and show it right by the image/media. I have concerns about copy-/publishing rights issues.
One of the really cool features of discourse is the easy placement of pictures in the compose form by hitting CTRL-V when you CTRL-C’d the image URI. However, there is a little thing that’s is missing: The original URI where the picture came from.
I’m having concerns, that pasting an image in the compose form and publishing it actually violates some laws in different countries. Actually, here in Austria (or Germany likewise), when someone posts something with an image in it that isn’t his/hers, you as owner of the community are responsible for the likelyhood of infriging copyrights.
However, there is a way around it: If you as the owner of the community website act as a publishing/media company, you can mostly avoid being held responsible, as long as you publish the source next to the image. (There are some additional rules too, but discourse can’t do anything for that anyways).
As far as my knowledge goes, when you are pasting the image-url, discourse picks up that address, parses it and replaces it with the actual image. It shouldn’t be a problem to change the onebox a little bit to display the original URI as well.
I would love to see the original URI i pasted in the composing form right by the image in the preview.
That being said, there is a precedent for keeping track of source links when downloading remote images as well, perhaps by storing it in the a href somewhere, or in the post’s meta data.
@erlend_sh Disabling “download to local” would cause broken image links, that’s actually (in my opinion) not really what somebody wants. If that posting gets years old, I still want to know to what the author referred to by actually seeing the picture he mentions. (It happens on other websites all the time, and it is annoying).
@mcwumbly I actually have no idea how you got that link attached to the picture. If I had to guess, I would say meta.discourse disabled the “store local option”. But, like I said in my opening, this wont really help you if you get accused for copy/publishingrights infridgement (at least not here in Austria).
An <a href....> would easily do the job, maybe there is still room in the options somewhere… And maybe, if discourse can check for broken links from time to time, that would be a great opportunity to reduce the size of the local picture and mark it with something link “original content removed” … just an idea…