A Kodak-owned photo assignment agency is requiring its participating photographers to relinquish all copyrights and moral rights to all assignment images—including outtakes. Photographers must also assume all legal risks of their assignments. And they risk not getting paid if clients don’t like the images they produce.
Last year while I was on tour in Australia with my novel Walkaway, I sat down for an interview with legal scholar Rebecca Giblin (previously), whose Authors’ Interest project studies how we would craft copyright (and other policies) if we wanted to benefit creators, rather than enriching corporations; we talked about the power and limits of copyright to benefit authors, and how other policies, like antitrust, are crucial to getting authors their fair share.
National Geographic has reached 100 million Instagram followers—and it tried to celebrate with a one-day photo contest that amounted to a massive rights grab.
In September 2018, the European Parliament voted in favor of the highly controversial EU Copyright Directive, which aims to “harmonize” copyright law across Europe. But critics argue the law could destroy the open Web, and now Google is showing an eye-opening look at what its search results could soon look like.
Photographer J Salmeron of Metal Blast sparked a huge outpouring of support from other photographers and creatives last week after he shared how he was blacklisted by the band Arch Enemy while trying to protect his copyright. Now the clothing business at the center of the controversy has closed up shop in response to all the “hate and threats” it has received.
With the explosion of social media and photo sharing, personal pictures commonly go viral and make their way onto major news websites, sometimes without the photographers’ permission. But a judge has just ruled that media companies can’t simply steal social media photos whenever they see fit.
Rightsholder groups argue that Article 13 is necessary because Google is underpaying the artists whose work appears on YouTube (and other tech platforms are underpaying for their use of entertainment materials). This is a debate that is muddied by a lack of transparency on all sides. There are no reliable numbers on:
Squarespace can’t stop photographers from contributing to Unsplash, but the partnership helps amplify a destructive message: We will build our business off the backs of free content.
The internet is still a bit like the Wild West when it comes to copyright. There’s the occasional sheriff wondering around enforcing the law, but for the most part, it’s every man for himself. With so much material on the internet, it’s almost impossible to think that everything and everyone can be regulated and checked when it comes to copyright infringement.
Since its inception, in 2001, Google Image search did not show much love to those who created photographs. In fact, when subsequently sued for recreating and publishing thumbnails of images on its result page, it fought back and won. A victory that forever helped devalue pictures thereafter.
Google is taking another big step in protecting photographers’ copyright through the Google Images image search engine: it just added image rights metadata to the photo search results on Google Images.
The American Genius reports that California/Nevada-based photographer George Gutenberg claims that Zillow scraped photos from Multiple Listing Services (MLSs) and went beyond using the data syndicated to Zillow. This allegedly led to Zillow obtaining Gutenberg’s copyrighted photos and using them without permission on their for-profit website.
South African photographer Graeme Williams was attending the opening of the Johannesburg Art Fair earlier this month when he was shocked to see his own photo on a gallery wall with credit being given to African American artist Hank Willis Thomas.
Lobbyists for “creators” threw their lot in with the giant entertainment companies and the newspaper proprietors and managed to pass the new EU Copyright Directive by a hair’s-breadth this morning, in an act of colossal malpractice to harm to working artists will only be exceeded by the harm to everyone who uses the internet for everything else.
A federal appeals court in New York has reinstated a long-disputed copyright infringement claim against Associated Press (AP) and the National Football League (NFL), after the seven photographers involved in the case argued that a lower court erred in dismissing their claims.
A Virginia federal court sparked quite a controversy among photographers last month when it ruled that copying photos found on the Internet is fair use. Now a European Union court has just issued a landmark ruling that states you can’t simply republish a photo because it’s freely accessible online — you need the photographer’s permission first.
Petitioners claiming to be the legal heirs of photographer Vivian Maier are once again back in court, this time with 300 pages of genealogical evidence to support their claim, according to attorney (and former photographer) David Deal. “There’s no doubt” they are blood relations to Maier, asserts Deal, who did most of the research and helped prepare the petition, which was filed last month in an Illinois probate court in Chicago.
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