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

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

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

With src-img, a javascript bookmarklet that you drag to your browser’s bookmarks bar, all images on a page are overlaid with a ?¿ link, as in the screenshot at the top of this post. Clicking the ?¿ opens up a Google Image Search on the image (here’s an example from the image above, with a copyright violation I’ve just now found…). It streamlines the whole process.

In short, the idea of a sliding camera sling isn’t an amazing new invention. It’s just a really good idea that’s been around for a while and has been iteratively developed. Neither we nor our lawyers believed that the USPTO would grant a patent for the claims related to this concept. It was a surprise, then, when our competitor was granted a patent covering the concept on November 1st, 2011. To say that we’re disappointed that the USPTO couldn’t find the prior art around the idea is an understatement.

Raw File | Wired.com

Wired.com photographers have the enviable job of shooting the coolest stuff and most intriguing people in the technology world. Now we’re giving away many of those photos to you, the public, for free.

Publishing house Archant has been accused of rights-grabbing after it introduced a new contract for photographers working on its local newspapers

The US Marshals in Nevada have been authorized to seize $63,720.80 from it in cash or assets to pay the fines and fees owed for one of its failed legal actions

Is Bob Dylan–that champion of the poor, the tired, the oppressed–a brazen rip-off artist and infringer of photographers’ copyrights? And if so, who’s going to stop him?

The courts decided that the copyright remained with the photographer

All this is very bad news for photo thieves. For years they’ve heisted images with impunity: the chances of being caught were low, and if caught the default defence was “I found it on Google and didn’t know who the owner was”. But that excuse disappears with the now easily viewable metadata, and the chance of being caught has moved from remote to likely, going on inevitable.

The National Portrait Gallery has announced a portrait competition that has stirred the outrage of at least one photographer (who told us about it) because of the rights transfer terms of the contest rules.