Law

Heads up: if you fly a camera drone commercially, the FAA's new rules just went into effect. Announced back in June 2016, the rules govern how small commercial drones must be operated.

A week after being slapped with a $1 billion copyright-related lawsuit, Getty Images has been served with another suit. This time it's by Zuma Press, an independent press agency that accuses Getty of infringing on over 47,000 photos.

Photographer Tim Berry of Practical Photography magazine recently decided to take his camera onto the streets of London, England, to exercise his rights to photograph in public places and to see how people would react to seeing a photographer at work.

Over in the UK, a police force's announcement this week is raising eyebrows among some photographers. In a statement regarding hate crimes against women, taking photos without permission is listed as an example.

Professional Photographers of America, the world's largest pro photography non-profit trade group, is launching a big lobbying campaign in order to see the creation of a copyright small claims system in the United States, something that's "vital to your photography business," PPA says.

Iran has arrested 8 models for posting Instagram photos in which the women are seen not wearing headscarves. The move is part of a larger crackdown against "un-Islamic" being shared in Iran through the social network.

Brazilian soccer legend Pelé, widely considered the best player ever, has filed a $30 million lawsuit against Samsung. He claims that the company used a photo of someone who looks like him for an advertisement.

The department store chain Lord & Taylor has agreed to settle charges with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for deceptive marketing on Instagram. The company paid popular users up to $4,000 to post a single photo of themselves wearing a dress.

Could your smartphone camera one day be turned on and used by the government for surveillance? That's what Apple is warning the public about as it continues to battle the FBI in court.

A long-time Los Angeles Times photographer was arrested on the side of a road yesterday while transmitting photos he shot of former First Lady Nancy Reagan's funeral motorcade.

Mickey H. Osterreicher is a lawyer who has served as General Counsel of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) since 2006. We had a chat with Osterreicher about his life and the state of photographers' rights.

One of the big stories in the photo industry this month was news that the US government is suing the camera superstore B&H Photo Video for discrimination and harassment of its workers.

After initially refusing the comment to the media, B&H yesterday published a statement about the lawsuit and offered its defense. The store calls the governments claims "not only inaccurate, but bizarre."

Things haven't been going well for B&H Photo Video, one of the biggest names in the photography retail industry. Just months after being slammed with accusations of mistreatment and discrimination and seeing its workers protest and unionized, B&H is now being sued by the US government for discrimination.

Recently I've been trying to get better at bracketing, where you take overexposed and underexposed photos and then merge them together. It can create a very neat effect when done correctly. It can also be abused, as many photographers tend to do, which results in unrealistic looking photography.

A few days ago, I was out playing with this feature in my hometown of Cheswick, Pennsylvania, to better understand it when I was stopped by police.

In a surprise decision in the US court system, a federal judge ruled last Friday that photographing and filming police officers isn't always protected by the First Amendment.

Groupon is being hit with a class action lawsuit that claims the deals company has repeatedly used Instagram photos without permission from the photographers.

The Federal Aviation Administration announced this week that this year's Super Bowl this Sunday will come with a "No Drone Zone." All drones will be banned in a 32-mile radius around Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, during the football game.

A Muslim woman has filed a lawsuit against the Associated Press and AP photographer Mark Lennihan over a photo of her wearing a headscarf while sitting in a Starbucks. The image was sold as a stock photo and used in an opinion column that asked Muslim women not to wear the hijab.

Flashback to last summer. July 2, 2015, the day after Canada Day. And the day I got kicked off a beach in Toronto for taking pictures...

Remember Melissa Click? She's the University of Missouri professor who sparked an outcry after being filmed confronting photojournalists and calling for "muscle" to remove them from a public area during an on-campus protest in November 2015.

Well, Click was charged with assault yesterday for her actions.

Photographers in Serbia are protesting and raising awareness this week in response to a new proposal in parliament that threatens the basic copyright of their photos.

A photographer has launched a copyright infringement lawsuit against Twitter, claiming that the social media company failed to remove a photo of hers that was posted without permission, and even after she sent multiple DMCA takedown requests to have the posts deleted.

French politician Jean-Marie Le Pen believes that an unflattering photo of him sleeping damaged his image in a recent election, and now he's suing the dancer that snapped and posted it.

It seems that there's finally some resolution in the curious legal battle between PETA and a photographer over whether a monkey owns the copyright to the viral selfies he shot back in 2011.

A federal judge in San Francisco said yesterday that he's planning to dismiss the case, ruling that the monkey cannot own the copyright to photos.

The University of Missouri has one of the oldest and most prestigious journalism schools in the country, but in November 2015, the school had its reputation tarnished by a viral video that showed student photographer Tim Tai and cameraman Mark Schierbecker getting blocked and harassed by student activists and university staff.

Over 100 of Missouri's lawmakers are now demanding that the assistant media professor, Melissa Click, be fired for her actions during the protests.

Artist Richard Prince sparked huge controversy last year by taking Instagram photos without permission, making extremely small edits to them, and then selling them as fine art for up to $100,000 each.

Now, one of the outraged photographers who had his photo used by Prince is suing the artist for copyright infringement.

Germany is known to have some of the strictest privacy laws in Europe, and sometimes the policies trump photography rights and copyright. The country's highest court just ruled that a photographer must delete "intimate" photos of his ex-lover -- pictures that were consented to when they were created and which the man had no intention of sharing.

44-year-old South Korean photographer Ahn Se Hong has won his lawsuit against Nikon over the cancellation of his 'comfort women' exhibition. The Tokyo District Court ruled last Friday that Nikon must pay Ahn ¥1.1 million (~$9,150) in damages.

France has passed a new law designed to combat anorexia in fashion modeling and unrealistic body images in fashion photography.

The FAA announced its drone registration process today, a couple of months after announcing the registry: if you operate a drone that weighs over 0.55 pounds and less than 55 pounds, you'll need to register it by February 19, 2016. There's also going to be a $5 fee.

Wary of sharing location data in photos? Get this: a burglary suspect arrested last week is accused of using geotagged photos from Instagram and Facebook to find female college students, break into their homes, and steal their underwear.

The city of Chicago has agreed to pay $100,000 to a photographer who was beaten by police officers during the 2012 NATO summit, causing the destruction of one of his cameras.

Ken Duncan, one of Australia's most famous landscape photographers, is publicly fighting for photographers' rights in Australia after being "nearly arrested" last Friday after being spotted by "Big Brother" while shooting on public land.

A 68-year-old UK man has won a lawsuit against Apple after having his precious photos accidentally deleted during a repair visit to the company's Regent Street Apple Store in London.

Canon USA has filed lawsuits against a number of camera gear retailers in an attempt to stop the sale of gray market camera gear. The gray market is when a dealer imports and sells unauthorized gear that was intended for another country's camera market. The cheaper gear is legitimate, not counterfeit, but it's unauthorized and usually isn't covered by Canon's warranty.

DJI has just announced a new geofencing system that will prevent pilots of camera drones from flying over restricted or unsafe airspace. The information will be continually updated so that authorities can restrict drone flights in response to major events.

In September, the animal rights group PETA filed a lawsuit against photographer David Slater, arguing that the monkey who took a series of viral selfies with Slater's camera in 2011 should be the rightful copyright owner.

If you thought that was strange, get this: the legal battle has now evolved into a dispute over the pictured monkey's identity and gender.

Earlier today, we shared a viral video of student photojournalist Tim Tai being confronted by activists while photographing the ongoing University of Missouri protests. One of the main people under fire for their actions in the video is Melissa Click, an assistant professor of mass media.

Cameraman Mark Schierbecker has just posted a longer version of his video (embedded above) that shows Click's role in the human media blockade more clearly.

The United States announced last month that it's creating a federal drone registry and will soon require that all drone owners register their devices in order to fly legally. While the move should help reign in the "wild wild west" that is the drone industry today, some are wary that over-regulation could hurt the rights of drone owners -- including the rights of the media to gather news.

In a piece we published back in September, drone owner Pablo Castro argues that his country, Colombia, has implemented "absurd, abusive, illogical laws" that make it virtually impossible for people to use their drones legally.

The company behind Polaroid cameras has filed a new lawsuit against GoPro, claiming that GoPro ripped off the design of Polaroid's cube-shaped action cameras by launching the GoPro Session back in July.

Back in July, we reported that 47-year-old William H. Merideth of Hillview, Kentucky, had gotten arrested for using a shotgun to shoot down a neighbor's drone that was flying over his property.

Merideth was just cleared of all charges after a judge ruled that the camera drone's flight was indeed an invasion of privacy.

For the past few years, people have been contending with more and more false copyright claims and ID matches on services such as YouTube. While these copyright claims often involve an audio match of copyrighted music, sometimes it is the visual content that is in question.

Whether it’s still photography or motion imagery, your visual content can be flagged, blocked, or removed due to a copyright dispute. If you have original content on YouTube, this could happen to you.

The Internet is teeming with copyright infringement these days, and there are various ways for photographers to get stolen photos taken down and paid for by the offenders. But what happens when the offender is a UN-designated terrorist organization?

That's a real situation that photographer Brian McCarty found himself with earlier this year. Known for his photos involving children's toys, McCarty found that ISIS had stolen and repurposed one of his toy photos for their propaganda.

The Obama administration announced today that it will be creating the first ever federal drone registry to reign in the wild wild west of drone usage. Drone owners will be required to register their drones with the database in order to fly legally, and those caught flying unregistered drones will face "consequences."