In a copyright dispute with So Delicious this past week, photographer Theron Humphrey chose to follow in Brandon Stanton’s footsteps and give the infringers a positive way out of the situation. Instead of getting the long arm of the law involved, Humphrey suggested that the offending company instead donate the money he was owed to charity. Read more…
NYC-based street photographer Brandon Stanton’s work has attracted quite a few eyes since he launched his Humans of New York photo project in 2010. Among those eyes were marketing folk at the clothing company DKNY.
Stanton and DKNY had a copyright infringement scuffle yesterday that resulted in DKNY donating $25,000 to the YMCA.
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Grammy Award-winning Jazz singer Esperanza Spalding is currently in the midst of a legal battle with photographer Kevin Ryan over the cover art on her 2012 album Radio Music Society (pictured above). The cover shows Spalding sitting atop a vintage boombox that is actually a sculpture made of pictures attached to a wooden box.
Spalding and her people chose to use the piece on the cover after discovering it at Brooklyn’s Galapagos Art Space. The issue is that they neglected to credit or license Ryan, who was the photographer behind the photos on the box. Read more…
Today is Data Privacy Day, and all of the major social websites have come out to play. Facebook is launching an “Ask Our Chief Privacy Officer” form, Google explained its approach to government requests for information in a blog post, and Twitter launched an entire website dedicated to transparency in all things data privacy related.
That last one is particularly interesting to us, because that website includes detailed copyright notice stats, putting copyright infringement on Twitter into raw numbers. Oh, and did we mention, copyright notices are by far the most common requests submitted to Twitter — over three-and-a-half times more frequent than government info requests. Read more…
Copyright law is in place to protect artistic expression, not individual ideas. That was the crux of the reasoning behind a recent federal appeals court ruling that saw no infringement on the part of Sony. In the court’s opinion, Sony’s photo (right) was not nearly similar enough to Donald Harney’s (left) and “no reasonable jury could find ‘substantial similarity’ between Sony’s recreated photo and Harney’s original.” Read more…
The issue of publishing social media photos of breaking news without their owners’ permission is in the news again. After a helicopter crashed in central London last Wednesday, the London Evening Standard found a photo snapped by a witness named Craig Jenner and shared on Twitter. Unable to obtain permission from Jenner prior to its paper going to the press, the Evening Standard went ahead and published the image on its front page.
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Getting your photography removed from an offending website or Facebook page can be a hassle, and if you’ve never done it before, learning the proper process for any given situation can be a downright pain. Fortunately, there are awesome people out there who don’t mind helping out their fellow photogs.
That’s where James Beltz from PhotoTips and his new blog PictureDefense come in. What he’s done is set up a free website where you can go and get step-by-step instructions on how to get your copyrighted photos removed from almost any type of website. Read more…
In one of the first major tests of intellectual property law involving social media services, a judge has ruled that news agencies cannot freely publish photographs posted to Twitter without the photographer’s permission.
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The last few days have been rough on BuzzFeed, as a Reddit outcry has gained more and more traction regarding some light painting photos the website used to create ads without seeking permission or giving credit. Read more…
Photojournalist John D. McHugh was sick of having his photos stolen and infringed upon the moment he posted them online. And even though he can, of course, put watermarks on his photos in Photoshop, he found himself wondering if maybe he couldn’t come up with a better way. Enter Marksta, an app that allows you to watermark photos right on your iPhone before posting them to Facebook, Instagram, and other places where they may be easily stolen.
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