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Apple is reportedly flexing its legal muscle in several countries around the world in order to secure intellectual property rights to images of actual apples, the kind that you eat.

Senator Josh Hawley has introduced a bill that would cap copyright on intellectual property to a maximum of 56 years, with no extensions. If passed, the bill would also retroactively apply to existing copyrights.

A recent patent filing by Apple suggests that the company is working on a new periscope-style camera module design that offers better optical stabilization with the use of mirrors.

When it comes to filing and obtaining patents from the US government, no Japanese company is as active as Canon. For the 10th straight year, Canon has ranked 1st among all Japanese companies in terms of patents awarded. Its 4,055 patents from 2014 also ranks Canon 3rd overall among all companies.

Want to learn the basics of US copyright law without having to spend eons going through imageless websites and backbreaking textbooks? Check out Bound by Law. It's a comic book that translates abstract and confusing copyright laws into easy to understand "visual metaphors."

By the time you're through with the 72-page comic, you'll know quite a bit about the basics of copyright law, including fair use, infringement, and public domain.

Is Amazon attempting to patent an age old photography lighting technique? A recently published patent seems to suggest that, and it's getting some photographers up in arms.

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.

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.

It wasn’t too long ago that Kodak filed multiple patent infringement lawsuits against Apple in a scramble …

Perhaps lost amidst the excitement over new cameras at CES 2012 earlier this month was the SD Association’s unveiling …

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.

When we shared the story of how monkeys hijacked photographer David Slater's camera and unwittingly snapped some self-portraits, we asked the question "doesn’t the monkey technically own the rights to the images?" Techdirt, a blog that often highlights copyright issues, went one step further and dedicated a whole post to that question.

A Texas-based photographer named David Langford received quite a surprise earlier this year when his friend tipped him off …

Last week we reported that a photographer was in hot water after photographing public art and selling …