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.
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.
Photographer Jill Greenberg has settled her copyright infringement claim against Clorox and its ad agency for an undisclosed sum of money, attorneys for the photographer announced. The parties reached the settlement in June.
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.
If you don’t properly register your copyright for an image that you publish to Facebook, Instagram or another social media platform, you may be limiting your ability to collect damages from someone who steals your photograph. Why? As we explain in our story called “Social Media Copyright Registration: Don’t Get Burned,” U.S. copyright law gives photographers three months from the first date of publication of an image to register the copyright. Unless a photographer registers within three months of first publication, or prior to an infringement that takes place after that, they cannot sue copyright infringers for statutory damages of up to $150,000 per image plus attorney’s fees. Instead, the photographer will have to prove actual damages. That requires coming up with evidence that shows how much an infringer earned using an image—an arduous and expensive process.
In the last couple of years, lawyer Richard Liebowitz has really made a name for himself in copyright trolling circles. He’s quite aggressive, and even got a huge profile written about him at Slate, in which it notes that, unlike many trolls who…
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
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.
Just a day after Shutterstock revealed declining profits, a Getty Images email sent to its contributors worldwide made its way to social media and public forum. In it, Getty explains that it will soon transform all remaining rights-managed images into Royalty-Free and cease accepting new ones. “”We have confidently concluded that the RM creative image licensing model no longer meets our customers’ needs,” writes the Seatle giant, “especially given the flexibility demanded by digital marketing and the increasing reuse of imagery, and it actually reduces our overall competitiveness.” In other words, rights-managed is too complicated and no longer adapted to the marketplace.
At Adobe MAX 2019, Chief Product Officer Scott Belsky announced the Content Authenticity Initiative – a nascent and ambiguously defined way for attribution to travel with an image and allow consumers to know, in the words of Adobe VP Dana Rao, that “the c
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.
“Following the well-known Shepard Fairey case, courts have diminished the rights of photographers in their works, both by reducing the elements potentially subject to copyright and expanding the application of fair use.”
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
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.
One of the foundations of photo agencies is to provide its customers with safe, secure, properly vetted visual content. In exchange for a fee, clients of photo agencies are offered images they can use in full blissful confidence. Or so you thought.
Earlier this week, supermodel Gigi Hadid’s lawyers successfully got a copyright case against her dismissed despite the fact that most people thought this
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?
Renowned photographer Nadav Kander was recently surprised to find one of his portraits used without permission on the cover of a magazine. When confronted
Renowned photographer Nadav Kander was recently surprised to find one of his portraits used without permission on the cover of a magazine. When confronted with this, the magazine’s explanation was that the image was purchased as a stock photo — a stock photo of the copyrighted photo in an exhibition.
The artwork did not violate the photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s copyright, according to a ruling that sided with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
The artwork did not violate the photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s copyright, according to a ruling that sided with the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
By settling, Time effectively ends appeals in the case, which has implications for how publishers display copyrighted images hosted on social media or other servers.
Photographer Justin Goldman has reached a settlement with Time Inc., one of the nine defendants in a copyright infringement case involving the common practice of publications “embedding” Tweets in articles. The settlement effectively ends any further appeals in the case, which has implications for how publishers share and display copyrighted images hosted on social media servers and other websites.
Photographer Jason Grow is demanding payment from an advocacy group that used one of his portraits in a politically charged fundraising ad without permission, and will sue for willful copyright infringement if the group ignores a May 8 deadline, according
Photographer Jason Grow is demanding payment from an advocacy group that used one of his portraits in a politically charged fundraising ad without permission, and will sue for willful copyright infringement if the group ignores a May 8 deadline, according to his attorney, Andrew D. Epstein.
A U.S. Court of Appeals has reversed a lower court’s finding of fair use in the case of Brammer v. Violent Hues. The lower court had rejected photographer Russel Brammer’s claim of infringement after his photo was used without permission to promote a film festival.
Today’s media is ruled by a handful of corporations with enormous market power. One thing that makes these companies so valuable is how few people they employ, relatively speaking, for each dollar earned. A New York Times analysis last year found that Facebook makes just a hair under $635,000 in profit for each of its 25,000 employees. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, makes about $158,000 per worker. (At Walmart, it’s $4,288.) These calculations often get spun as representing a victory for automation and algorithms—machines, rather than humans, creating value. But the truth is, these media companies have billions of people working for them—they’re just not on staff. Whenever you post a photo on Instagram, write an Amazon review, or skim through complaints about potholes on your neighborhood’s Facebook group, you’re helping generate profit for the world’s richest corporations. A growing movement is making the case that you ought to get paid for it.
