Canipre — short for Canadian Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement — is a Canadian anti-piracy company that has joined hand-in-hand with film studios and record companies to track down those who steal and share stolen content over the internet. On the surface there’s nothing wrong with this, what is wrong is when an intellectual property advocate is found using photos without permission, which is exactly what happened to Canipre a couple of days ago. 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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One chapter in the saga of Kodak’s escape from bankruptcy has come to an end. The company announced today that it has completed the sale of its valuable imaging patents for $525 million to a group of Silicon Valley companies. The deal involves more than 1,100 patents related to the capturing, manipulating, and sharing of digital photographs.
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Perhaps lost amidst the excitement over new cameras at CES 2012 earlier this month was the SD Association’s unveiling of a new Wi-Fi data transfer standard. This new specification should make it easier for other memory card manufacturers to jump into the Wi-Fi-capable memory card game — an arena currently dominated by Eye-Fi (and more recently Toshiba).
Eye-Fi is, predictably, not happy with this latest development. The company is itself part of the SD Association, but has chosen not to back the standard. In a blog post published last week, CEO Yuval Koren argues that any company implementing the new standard would violate Eye-Fi’s patents for technology that took “tens of millions of dollars and several years” to create.
(via Eye-Fi via Engadget)
Image credit: Eye-Fi card by sphynge
At what point does inspiration turn into plagiarism? That’s the question that popped up last year when Rhianna was sued by David LaChapelle over scenes found in one of her music videos, and it’s the same issue with a lawsuit recently filed by photographer Janine Gordon against photographer Ryan McGinley. Gordon claims that 150 of McGinley’s images — including some used for a Levi’s ad campaign — are “substantially based” on her photos. In the three pairs of disputed images shown above, the ones on the left are by Gordon and the ones on the right by McGinley.
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A Texas-based photographer named David Langford received quite a surprise earlier this year when his friend tipped him off about a photo of his being used on vehicle registration inspection stickers in Texas. Turns out an estimated 4.5+ million stickers used a silhouette created from a photo of his from 1984 titled “Days End 2″. Langford is now suing the state to stop further use of his photo on the stickers — designed by prison inmates as part of a contract between the Department of Criminal Justice and the Department of Public Safety — and to collect damages and attorney fees.
Suit centers on silhouette cowboy (via The Online Photographer)
