In response to September 11th and London Bombings, the UK drafted a series of Terrorism Acts, giving their officers certain rights they thought would help fight terrorism. This included a section (58a) added in 2008 that made it illegal to photograph or film a police officer if the footage was likely to be useful to a terrorist. The police’s interpretation of that section has since changed, but not before that “if” caused some newsworthy controversy.

This short animated documentary covers that controversy from the point of view of one of the act’s victims, Gemma Atkinson, who was assaulted by police in 2009 because she was filming them searching her boyfriend. It tells the story of the subsequent legal battle she went through trying to get the act changed and hold the police officers who were unnecessarily rough with her accountable. Read more…

Who owns public art illegally placed onto private buildings? That’s a question that came up recently after a famous Banksy work in London was ripped out of the side of a building, shipped across the Atlantic, and put up for auction with an estimated final price of over half a million dollars.
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It’s not every day that a camera company goes public, but that’s what GoPro is reportedly trying to do.

Reuters, which broke the story, reports that the company is planning to raise $300 million to $500 million in an initial public offering sometime in 2013.
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This past Monday, stock photography behemoth Shutterstock filed documents with the SEC to have an IPO and list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. The process requires Shutterstock to reveal its financial details, so the document provides an interesting look at how the company ticks and the state of the stock photography industry.
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“Global Rainbow” is an outdoor art installation by Yvette Mattern that consists of seven high powered lasers projecting a bright rainbow across the night sky. The rainbow was originally displayed in New York in 2009, but has since appeared in cities across the UK. If you’re lucky enough to see the project in real life, be sure to take some photographs — it’s not every day you get to enjoy rainbows at night.
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This video shows a social experiment in which disposable cameras were left unattended in various public locations with a simple message: “Take a Photo”. Hidden cameras were stationed nearby to observe how people responded to the cameras, and to provide some behind-the-scenes footage to how the various photographs were captured.

After the widespread looting that occurred in the UK recently, a guy named Mrog Deville was inspired to distribute photographic art to the masses. Through his project This Was Found, Deville makes prints of photographs, frames them, and then leaves them in various locations where you normally wouldn’t expect to see art. His hope is that either the works will be left untouched at those locations for the public to view, or that people take them home to treasure privately. Finders can also visit the website to report the print as being claimed.

This Was Found (via Resource Magazine)

Google’s new Photovine mobile photo sharing app for iOS is now out of private beta and open to public signups. Here’s how the iTunes download page describes it:

Photovine is a fun way to learn more about your friends, meet new people, and share your world like never before. It all starts with what we call a photovine: a group of photos around a single, shared caption. Start a new vine with a photo and caption of your own or add your photo/take on someone else’s vine.

It has a long ways to go before it can catch Instagram, which is currently the 800-pound gorilla in this space. Instagram has already passed 7 million registered users, who have uploaded more than 700 million photos. Google has a pretty big reach though, so products launched by the company can get really big, really fast — just look at Google+.

Photovine (via TechCrunch)

This past week, BP has received a lot of  attention for its release of “official” images that later turned out to be very poorly photoshopped. So far, three badly altered photos have been called out. Aside from the inevitable backlash and disappointment from the public, the photo has taken on a life of its own as an internet meme. People have been adapting their own versions of the helicopter scene, replete with geek jokes and bizarre photoshopping. Here’s one amusing example: Read more…

The New York Civil Liberties Union has teamed up with amateur photographer Antonio Musumeci in a lawsuit that challenges a federal ban on photography. Musumeci, a software programmer, filmed the arrest of a protester outside of the Manhattan Federal Court last year, and then was himself arrested.

Musumeci was standing in a public plaza when he was arrested, but he says a Federal Protective Service inspector told him that it was illegal to take photos. The inspector then made Musumeci sit on a sidewalk for 20 minutes while his camera and memory card were confiscated. He was then ticketed for “violating the regulation barring photography.” Though his ticket was later dismissed in court, his memory card has not been recovered.

The man returned to take footage at another protest, during which he deliberately stood on the public sidewalk, but says he was threatened with arrest once again.

Now the NYCLU has picked up Musumeci’s case to challenge the ban on photography near federal property by suing the Federal Protective Services, FPS Inspector Clifford Barnes, and the Department of Homeland Security.

Executive director of the NYCLU wrote in a statement:

“In our society, people have a clear right to use cameras in public places without being hassled and arrested by federal agents or police… We understand the need for heightened security around federal buildings, but the government cannot arrest people for taking pictures in a public plaza.”

New York law enforcement has a track record of misdealings with photographers after a 2009 arrest of an off-duty metro employee.

But if the UK Parliament’s recent reversal of the controversial Section 44 is any indication, the NYCLU’s lawsuit may stand a chance in US court.