Category: Copyright

Thomas Hawk:

A few of my photos seem to be in Amit’s photostream as well.

My response?

Personally I could care less.

My photos are routinely used without my permission all over the internet. I just don’t care.

Check it out here.

The AP threatened to sue Brian C. Ledbetter for reproducing their photos without authorization. But they didn’t ask permission before they grabbed Ashley Dupre’s pictures.

Check it out here.

one thing’s clear: Fair use is a more muddled mess than ever.

Check it out here.

When a prostitute hired by former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer was identified Wednesday, news outlets eagerly published photos grabbed from her MySpace profile.

Can they get away with that?

Check it out here.

“It’s the archive that’s at stake,” Angelo Grima, senior vice president and deputy general counsel for the National Geographic Society, said during a panel on digital rights at the Magazine Publishers of America’s Magazines 24/7 conference at the Hearst Tower Thursday. “We’ll go to the Supreme Court if we have to, because our archive is that important to us.”

The litigation, now entering its 11th year, has seen more twists than a John Grisham novel. The 11th Circuit first ruled in 2001 in favor of Jerry Greenberg, a freelance photographer whose work had appeared in National Geographic (in 1962, 1968 and 1971) and then on CD. Subsequent cases in the 2nd Circuit ruled in favor of National Geographic. In 2004, a Florida judge awarded Greenburg $400,000 in damages; National Geographic appealed. Last year, a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit overruled the 2001 decision in favor of National Geographic, but Greenburg asked for—and was granted—a full court review.

Check it out here.

The courts have not spoken directly on whether images on a website are considered “published” for copyright registration. It may depend on whether your photos are posted behind password protected pages and/or are for sale, but considering them as published is the safest way to register your photos.

Check it out here.

cory doctorow in the guardian:

We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what’s fair and what isn’t at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.

Check it out here.

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Photo Attorney: Batch Processing of Your Photos for Copyright Registration and Adding Metadata

During my interview with Photo Talk Radio last week, I mentioned Bert Krages’ Photoshop Action to batch process your photos (reduce their file size) for copyright registration with the U.S. Copyright Office. He also provides steps to add copyright notice metadata to your photo files

Here.

From Wired:

First of all, documentaries are incredibly important records of our history and culture. They’re visual histories, and they’re increasingly based on copyrighted culture. Our book describes several instances in which the telling of that history has been thwarted by permissions issues. An example is Jon Else having to pay $10,000 for a four-and-a-half-second clip of The Simpsons playing in the background of his film (Sing Faster: The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle). The makers of Mad Hot Ballroom had to pay that same amount to EMI because a cell phone rings in the background of one of the scenes, and the ringtone is the theme from Rocky. These examples really resonate with people. They understand that these are instances where copyright is not working the way it’s supposed to.

Here.