A newly leaked document by the Federal Aviation Administration may offer a first look at upcoming regulations for drones, and the laws discussed appear to be somewhat favorable for photographers who fly camera drones.
Japan has confiscated the passport of a photographer who was planning to travel to Syria, saying that the move was necessary to protect the man's life. It is reportedly the first time the country's government has ever taken such action.
If you'd like a long and fruitful career as a street photographer, Saudi Arabia might not be the most welcoming place for you to pursue it. Shooting public photos and sharing them online is becoming more and more popular in the Middle Eastern kingdom, but many practitioners are unaware that the country's strict cybercrime law could bring down huge fines and even jail time for their snapshots.
If you're anywhere near the University of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Arizona this Sunday while the Super Bowl is going on, you should keep your camera drone stored away. The FAA is warning the public that the Super Bowl is a "No Drone Zone": fly your drone anywhere within 30 miles of the stadium during the game and you're breaking the law.
Here's a strange legal rumble that just hit the courts: software giant Adobe is suing clothing giant Forever 21 for pirating copies of Photoshop.
Yesterday we reported that a DJI Phantom quadcopter operator had accidentally crashed his camera drone onto the lawn of the White House at 3 in the morning, causing a security panic among those tasked with ensuring the President's safety (later reports suggest the man was drunk).
DJI wants to make sure this type of incident never happens again: the company is issuing a mandatory firmware update that will disable its camera drones in Washington DC's no fly zone.
A photographer has filed a copyright lawsuit against Nike, accusing the global athletic brand of ripping off his photograph of Michael Jordan to create its iconic "Jumpman" logo for Air Jordan merchandise.
Renowned Belgian artist Luc Tuymans has been found guilty in a plagiarism case after basing one of his paintings on a photo by photojournalist Katrijn Van Giel. Tuymans has been ordered to cease exhibiting and reproducing his painting, and will be fined €500,000 (~$580,000) if he does not comply.
Update: There have been new developments. Please see below.
There's a new bill passing through the Arkansas State Legislature that may be concerning to photographers who operate camera drones. The bill is titled, "Concerning The Use Of An Unmanned Vehicle Or Aircraft That Captures Images; To Create The Criminal Offenses; To Provide For Civil Liability," and it criminalizes certain camera drone usage and the possession of photos captured during that usage.
Hello fellow photographers. My name is Joshua Resnick. I am a stock photographer, but what I am going to tell you potentially affects all photographers. I wanted to bring to your attention a lawsuit I am involved in that I think could put the whole industry at risk if things don’t go well.
I am being sued in federal court for hundreds of thousands of dollars by a model I worked with in January 2013. This is a model that I paid, and who signed a release allowing me to sell her images through stock photo agencies. Why I am I being sued? It revolves around images that got misused or were just outright stolen and the model is blaming me for it.
The world is going to pieces and people like [Ansel] Adams and [Edward] Weston are photographing rocks! -- Henri Cartier-Bresson
What better way to conjure up a longing for freedom than to evoke the name of that avuncular figure of American photography Ansel Adams. It’s a name synonymous with photography, with stunning landscapes that leave one with an unbounded sense of liberty. So why not use Ansel’s name to grace a bill that sets forth to “restore the first amendment rights of photographers?”
The Federal Aviation Administration is notoriously strict about the use of aerial camera drones for commercial purposes. Much of the commercial imagery you'll find online was captured "illegally" without the permission of the agency.
Yesterday, realtor Douglas Trudeau of Tucson, Arizona became the first real estate agent in the country to be given permission to use his drone for his property listings.
A new "Ansel Adams Act" introduced in Congress could have big implications on photographers' rights across the United States. The bill aims to "restore the First Amendment rights of photographers" by removing restrictions on taking photos in public places.
Earlier this month, National Geographic photographer Tomas van Houtryve had one of his photographs selected by TIME magazine as one of the Top 10 Photos of 2014. It was a high honor, but also one that opened an unexpected Pandora's Box for Van Houtryve: his photos began appearing on third-party products on Amazon without his permission.
And that's not all: Van Houtryve says Amazon isn't responding to his requests to have the products completely taken down.
My name is Abe Van Dyke. I am a photojournalist who was arrested by the Milwaukee County Sheriffs department for being on Interstate 43 photographing protestors on 12/19/14 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This is my story.
A federal judge has decided that it's okay for police officers to befriend Instagram users with fake accounts in order to gain access to photos shared through the service.
A New York woman has been awarded $1.12 million in damages after being arrested back in 2009 while taking photographs outside a military base.
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.
On July 14, 2012, I received a desperate email from a photographer whom I had only met once briefly at a public appearance. He was terribly distraught, and nobody would help him. In his letter, he said that I was his last resort.
His name is Nelson Tang, and he is a very gentle soul, kind and soft-spoken, a new immigrant from Hong Kong with only a rough command of the English language. At the time, he and his wife were adjusting to life with an 18 month old son, she was a server in a restaurant and he worked for a non-profit. Financially, they were living paycheck to paycheck.
While covering the "re-occupation” protest in Mong Kok on Thursday night, an Apple Daily cameraman was arrested by police after he allegedly assaulted a police officer with his camera and then resisted arrest.
There's just one problem with this story, told to the press by police: it's not true. The video above captured by a South China Morning Post reporter paints a very different picture.
The FAA has been working on a set of regulations for commercial drone use for months now, and according to the most recent reports, the results of all that work are some extremely strict rules that include requiring a full-blown pilot's license if you intend to sell what you're capturing.
The South Korean government is threatening selfie stick retailers with fines of up to $27K and jail time over some of the group selfie products they're selling, and it's all because of electromagnetic radiation. Feeling lost yet? Us too.
Easy-to-use legal document app Shake has long offered a number of cookie cutter agreements that make it easy for photographers and other creatives/freelancers to get the signed paperwork they need to get the job done.
And as of today, they’re adding to their offerings with a new image and model release template that will be particularly useful for photographers.
According to an oft-forgotten clause in EU copyright laws, it is illegal to publish nighttime photos of certain public buildings in certain countries without asking permission from the owners of the buildings.
So why isn’t everyone who captures and posts images of iconic building such as France’s Eiffel Tower prosecuted then? Because the clause and accompanying law are rather vague, only accepted by certain states, and all-round confusing to interpret.
The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill is under fire after photographer Justin Cook found out that they not only used a photo of his without permission, but also denied that they could have possibly known such image was not free to use.
Earlier this year, we shared an interactive map showing where you aren't allowed to fly camera drones. The list is generally pretty simple: national parks, military bases, and 5 miles around major airports.
Here's another item to add to that list: major sport stadiums.
The movie industry has officially updated its anti-piracy policies to include the need to turn off ‘wearable devices,’ such as Google Glass and other wearable gadgets with cameras in them (e.g. wearable lifelogging cameras).
A Canadian judge has ordered Google to pay a Montreal woman for the violation of her privacy after she found an embarrassing photograph of herself on Google Street View. Google's automated cameras had captured the woman sitting on her doorstep, leaning forward with a portion of her cleavage exposed.
Rap mogul Suge Knight could be facing some serious jail time after stealing a photographer's camera. By "serious," we mean up to 30 years.
Back in August 2014, we reported on the legal battle between photographer Peter Wolf and a company called Capstone. Wolf had received three patents on a method of distributing sports photos online. The problem was, the patents described common workflows that countless photographers use around the world.
The latest development today will have those photographers resting a bit easier: the courts have ruled that the patents are invalid because they aren't inventive enough and because they simply describe convention steps that many people use.
Understanding your legal rights as a photographer can often be confusing and overwhelming. From copyright infringement to fair use to DMCA, there are a number of legal concepts that every photographer should be familiar with. Here are eight important legal cases that are illustrative of these concepts and the importance of registering your copyright.
If there’s one time you really shouldn’t steal an image and (poorly) Photoshop it, it's probably while campaigning for a Senate seat. Colorado Republican candidates Tim Neville, Tony Sanchez and Laura Woods recently learned this lesson the hard way.
What would you do if you found your photograph misused, not by a celebrity or a company, but by the head of government of a country? That's the question facing Cambridge, Massachusetts-based photographer Bimal Nepal.
Nepal, a photojournalist whose work has appeared in National Geographic, recently found his photograph shared without permission by the prime minister of India.
In a bill meant to bring California's privacy laws into a drone-heavy 21st century, the state just signed an act into law that will make it both illegal and very expensive for anybody seeking to invade someone else's privacy by taking photos of them with a camera drone.
Nearly $2 million in cameras and production equipment were stolen from three Fremont, California businesses over the weekend. Thieves broke into the offices of Black Magic Design, Mac House Productions, and Core Microsystems, grabbing pricey high-end gear and hauling it off by the boxful.
The US Drug Enforcement Administration and one of its agents, Timothy Sinnigen, are being sued by a woman who claims they used the photos on a seized phone of hers to hijack her identity and create a fake Facebook profile though which they hoped to bust an alleged New York drug ring.
Update: The company has responded to our request for comment and fixed the issue. See full update at the bottom.
Dick Smith is a leading tech retailer in both New Zealand and Australia, but as an anonymous reader showed us this morning, they might have goofed up in a big way in a recent ad they posted on their Dick Smith NZ Facebook page.
As you can see from the screenshot above, they seem to have 'appropriated' an iStock image as the background... without even taking the time to remove the watermark.
While browsing through my image search results on PIXSY (a new service that finds and invoices image theft for you), I was surprised to see my picture for sale on Etsy (above). My immediate reaction:
What an ugly mousepad. I’d never print my photo like this.
The seller seems to be stealing thousands of photos. How could Etsy let this happen?
Who had the nerve to think they could do this?
So my picture was the party and I wasn’t invited. I decided to see what I could do to notify the seller and contact Etsy about the problem.
A New Jersey resident was arrested last Friday after allegedly firing a shotgun at and successfully hitting a drone that was taking photographs of a nearby home undergoing some renovations.
Ever wonder what it would cost you to run afoul of Yellowstone's anti-camera drone rules? There's probably not a chart hanging up anywhere, but if you're a Dutch tourist and you crash a DJI Phantom into the Grand Prismatic Spring -- the world's third largest hot spring -- the bill will come out to $3,200+.
If you've been following photography news -- and given you're reading this we'd say there's a good chance that's the case -- you've probably heard something along the lines of "Texas just legalized upskirting photography!" And while that's not entirely untrue, the facts are a bit less sensational.
We've heard of many lawsuits where an artist outright steals an image from a photographer -- that can get pretty ugly -- but what about an artist hiring another photographer to recreate an image that is pretty much identical to the one they wanted to use, but weren't allowed to?
That's the crux of a lawsuit between celebrity photographer Bonnie Schiffman and musician Rod Stewart, who, it seems, recreated an iconic photograph of Schiffman's after she refused to let the artist use it.
It's not unreasonable to expect that almost every person reading this has seen 'nanny photographer' Vivian Maier's work. Whether in galleries, online or in the much-talked-about documentary 'Finding Vivian Maier,' her photos have now made their way around the world many times over and she has been named one of the greats of 20th century photography.
But if you hold a deep appreciation for Maier's work, we suggest you get your fill while you can, because a legal battle is threatening (and, in fact, succeeding) to pull Maier's work from the public eye... potentially for years.
A recently-released product by Microsoft that allows content creators to embed digital images on their websites is being called a “massive infringement” of copyright images in a lawsuit filed by Getty Images against the computer giant.
There's a new law in the works in The Philippines that may soon make it illegal to photograph strangers without their permission... even if they just appear by chance in the background of your photos. According to a government official, even selfies with people appearing in the background would be a no-no.
Yellowstone is no longer taking a slap-on-the-wrist, "we'll let you off with a warning" approach to people who violate the park's ban on camera drones. Egged on by several incidents since the ban went into effect, the park is starting to file criminal charges against violators that could mean $5,000 fines and/or 6 months in jail.
Photography drones are facing a perilous atmosphere of distrust and legal chaos. In these circumstances, even small mistakes can have big consequences. A shift in public sentiment against private drone usage could easily result in the application of restrictive regulations, or perhaps even conditional bans.
Rooftopping -- taking photos from the top of tall structures, often illegally trespassing to get there -- is a favorite pastime of many daredevil photographers, but it's also dangerous and could land you in a whole heap of trouble, as one Russian tourist is quickly finding out.
In the world of patents, some money, a lawyer and the carefully crafting a few hundred words can go a long way -- for better or worse.
One such example is the case of Peter Wolf, owner of Photocrazy, a company that takes photos of sporting events such as triathlons, then offers prints to the participants by matching their race number to an internalized, searchable database.
And although this concept has been around for quite some time in various forms, EFF reveals that Wolf managed to get three patents on this generalized idea and is now attempting to squash other, smaller operations that use a similar method.
It's a tale as old as time: 81-year-old photographer in East Sussex takes pictures of bachelorette parties, bachelorette parties don't seem to mind but strangers call the cops on him, cops say he's being 'antisocial' and ask for his name, he refuses, they threaten to arrest him.
Okay... maybe not as old as time, or even normal, but that's what happened to one photographer in the UK and it seems the cops may have actually had the right to arrest the man in this particular scenario.