Sure, one look at Lady Gaga and you can tell that she’s a little ridiculous. (A dress made of meat? Really? We still can’t get over this.) Now her latest media stint is hitting the papers – that is, Lady Gaga demands that photographers surrender ownership of their photos of her.
Sinking under legal bills, the Shaw Family Archives [SFA] has tentatively agreed to a 5-year, $3 million licensing deal with its arch-enemy–the estate of Marilyn Monroe–to pull itself out of bankruptcy
In a bizarre ruling, an English court has ruled that in favor of a commercial poster company that argued that a photo that showed a similar (but different) scene taken by a different person in a different place nevertheless infringed the copyright of a poster
Link: British Journal of Photography
Getty Images stands accused of intellectual property right infringement after it was successfully sued in a French court by the heiresses of iconic furniture designers
let’s not kid ourselves here. As much as Hollywood and media conglomerates want to protect their businesses, Google and Facebook want to steal it. Nobody is fighting for your rights. They’re simply deciding who will be in control of the copyrighted material you produce
British Journal of Photography
Freelance photographer Daniel Morel, Agence France-Presse and Getty Images are now moving for a summary judgment in the two-year-old case
Righthaven is pretty much dead. They’ve lost control over their domain (assigned to one of their victims, who has become a creditor of theirs, since the court awarded him costs), gone broke, and are just waiting for someone to dump them in a pauper’s grave
The initiative has been launched by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) in London, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), with the support of trade organisations representing visual arts and photography agencies. It aims to establish the practice of applying descriptions and the copyright status of the content as metadata, and to embed it permanently during the electronic exchange of digital photo, text, audio or video files.
Bad copyright law, enacted on the basis of flimsy, cooked statistics (or worse, purely anaecdotal “evidence”) is not serving to enrich artists, though it is funneling enormous wealth to their corporate publishers, studios and labels (especially the executive suites in those firms, where compensation in the tens of millions is handed out by firms that are “dying of piracy”). These laws are dismantling our culture, criminalizing our children and neighbors, attacking our cherished institutions, and distorting the progress of poor nations around the world
National Geographic’s My Montana contest features a pretty standard rights grab. It’s particularly sad to see National Geographic taking advantage of photographers in this way, especially since the organization has been so supportive of photography and photographers since the beginning of the craft