How do you go about demanding payment from a local newspaper if you discover that they’ve infringed upon your copyright? Blogger Duane Lester of All American Blogger recently found an article of his reprinted nearly verbatim, typos and all, by the Oregon Times Observer in Oregon, Missouri. He then decided to pay a visit to the newspapers offices with a letter in hand to demand payment from the editor face to face. The video above shows how the confrontation unfolded.
Back in 2006, a pornography publishing company named Perfect 10 attempted to sue Google over copyright infringement, claiming that the thumbnails displayed on Google’s image search did not fall under “fair use.” Ultimately, the Supreme Court wouldn’t even hear the case, allowing the ruling that thumbnails are fair use to stand and handing Perfect 10 yet another loss (they’ve sustained many in this area). Read more…
Users of both Flickr and Pinterest will be happy to know that the two companies have decided to collaborate. Because of the high volume of Flickr photos that end up pinned (often without any credit), the companies have decided that it would be in the best interest of photographers and users alike to add a “Pin It” button on the Flickr site. In this way photographers who allow their photos to be pinned are properly attributed, while Pinterest users can now share photos with a few easy clicks
In case you missed our earlier post, let’s get you up to speed: in the internet age, the argument is that you don’t own anything anymore. This is relevant because yet another copyright infringement lawsuit has made its way across our computer screens, this time between a student photographer and the Colorado University newspaper The CU Independent that printed and distributed his now famous falling bear image. Read more…
In a world where sharing a photo is strictly a matter of getting another copy made and mailing it, or getting it published, copyrights are pretty easy to keep track of and these laws hold up pretty well. Sending a physical photo to your grandmother goes like this: you either put the picture in an envelope and send it, or you get a copy made yourself and send that.
Sending your grandmother an email photo, though, might involve copying your photo five or six times; first to Google’s servers, then to another server, then to an ISP’s CDN, then to AOL’s servers, then to your grandmother’s computer. As far as you’re concerned, this feels exactly like dropping an envelope in the mail. As far as copyright is concerned, it’s a choreographed legal dance.
And so these sites have to get your permission — a license — to copy and distribute the things you post. Just to function as advertised, they need your permission to “use” and to “host,” to “store” and “reproduce.” What they don’t necessarily need is the right to “modify” and “create derivative works,” or to “publicly perform.” That is, unless they need to make money. Which of course they do.
Copyright laws get pretty specific. A photographer can not only give a green light on a work, he or she can license a work for use only during specific years, or in a specific area, or for a specific publication medium (i.e. print vs electronic); and now it looks like massive publisher Pearson Education is in trouble for breaking these sort of terms one too many times. Read more…
I’ve got a little story for you today, and a valuable lesson for photographers everywhere. On the Monday before last, a post that I wrote the week before started to go viral. I was receiving more traffic than I had ever experienced before, and from sites that I had never heard of. Fantastic. Only, along with the good news, we have some bad news. Read more…
During the past week, a new meme called “Texts From Hillary” has been taking the web by storm. It involves two photographs of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton checking her phone on a flight while wearing sunglasses. By combining the images with other photographs and witty captions, the creators imagined what her texts conversations with other famous individuals might be like. Not everyone found the meme hilarious: the Washington Post writes that photographer Diana Walker wasn’t amused when she first saw her images being used:
[...] the incident underscores the conflicts between photographers, who want to control their work, and the wide world of the Internet, where everything seems free. “There needs to be a dialogue about this,” she says.
And she wishes that people who want to grab photos from the Internet and use them for their own purposes would make an effort to contact their original creators. “Before they used it, how about a call to me?” she asked. But, she admits, that might have resulted in no such memorable meme. “I’m not sure I would have said yes.”
However, the site’s creators soon added a credit line for Walker with each photo and the photographer — along with Clinton herself — is now “amused and taken with the idea that this picture is all over the world.” Read more…
Here’s a lawsuit you might want to keep an eye on: in late 2010, photographer Richard Reinsdorf sued shoe company Skechers for violating the licensing agreement for a number of images he made for the company between 2006 and 2009. While the lawsuit itself isn’t anything unusual, the price demanded by Reinsdorf is: he wants $250 million. Read more…
Photo-sharing site Pinterest, the new darling of social media, has a copyright infringement cloud hanging over its head. The fact that anyone can upload and share copyrighted photographs through the site has prompted many sites — most notably Flickr — to ban “pinning” for copyrighted works. Up to this point, Pinterest has tried to avoid legal trouble by having a Terms of Service that places all the blame for copyright infringement on its users, but a new solution may be on the horizon: mandatory captions. Requiring users to comment on pinned photos may cause the sharing to be protected under “fair use” because it becomes the subject of “commentary”.
