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.

This is a major step forward for the copyright legislation, which was introduced by a bi-partisan group of senators from Louisiana, North Carolina, Illinois and Hawaii. As of now, defending your copyrights means taking your case to federal court—a complicated and expensive proposition. If passed, the CASE Act would remedy this by establishing a small claims tribunal within the U.S. Copyright Office, making it much easier and cheaper to defend your copyrights in court.

If you’re a 500px member who hasn’t logged in to the photo sharing and selling service for a while, you may be asked to agree to an updated Terms of Service document upon logging in. The latest agreement is causing an uproar (and a new wave of account deletions) among many photographers, but it doesn’t appear that anything has changed from a legal or rights standpoint.

Translated: If Mango/Liebowitz’s final judgment is less favorable than the ~$1,000 Democracy Now! offered under Rule 68, then Mango is on the hook for all of Democracy Now’s legal fees incurred after that offer was made. That is likely to be many thousands of dollars. As Booth Sweet notes, many courts have said that Rule 68 doesn’t apply to copyright cases, but in Cote’s latest ruling she says it does, and tells Liebowitz to post a bond for $50,000.

Getty Images has announced that it will be transitioning all of its creative stock photography offerings to a Royalty Free licensing model and ditching Rights Managed licensing entirely—a move that will be more convenient for customers, but worse for photographers.

Adobe’s motivation for addressing this problem seems sincere, and they undoubtedly have many smart people thinking about the issue. Hopefully they will be able to persuade a critical mass of companies to join the initiative and develop and deploy the technologies needed to make it a success.

Two former photographers for the New York Times have filed a lawsuit against New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, accusing the department of copyright infringement after NYC Parks “unearthed” a long-lost trove of photos from the 1970s and then wildly publicized them without permission.

Earlier this week, supermodel Gigi Hadid‘s lawyers successfully got a copyright case against her dismissed despite the fact that most people thought this was a clear cut case of infringement. The important question for photographers now is: how did her lawyers manage to pull this off?