Copyright & Legal
The European Commission has sent a Statement of Objections to Google alleging the company has abused its dominant position in the markets for general Internet search services in the European Economic Area (EEA) by systematically favoring its own comparison shopping product in its general search results pages. The Commission's preliminary view is that such conduct infringes EU antitrust rules because it stifles competition and harms consumers.
Most Rights Managed stock images can be used in many different non-conflicting ways by a variety of customers. The theory behind RM licensing is that the fee charged to use an image should have some relation to the value the customer receives from the use. RM photographers are encouraged to carefully negotiate, and spell out in detail in a license, the rights and limitations of each use. It is assumed that an honest customer will then track its usage. If the customer wants to make additional use of the same image the customer will then come back and negotiate an additional license. Is that working?
In preparation for the
BAPLA Focus on Copyright event in London on May 14, 2015, BAPLA is surveying its membership on the standards and pricing members employ for Web, Social Media and App use.
Under the title “Imagestate Media Partners Limited – In Liquidation” the Joint Liquidator in the UK reported on 6 March 2015 that Imagestate had been liquidated.
Clear Arts – ImageProtect (
www.imageprotect.com) an image tracking company has successfully negotiated a six figure damages settlement for copyright infringement of images belonging to Lived In Images, Inc. against Buzzle.com, an online content farm.
Lived In Images, Inc., is a stock photo archive specializing in home, garden, and interior design pictures.
Photographers with a limited number of images that they market directly from a single online site may want to check out the Australian company
Searchmyimages.com. For a reasonable monthly fee photographers can upload their images to this site. Searchmyimages will then constantly search the web for these images and informs the photographer when and where uses are found.
Have you gotten tired of reading all the “terms and conditions” on the social media sites? Or have you just given up and assumed they are OK. If you really read (and understand) all the terms on these sites is there any time left to engage on the sites? Is there any time left to take pictures?
Will Adobe offer a tool that makes it possible for its Illustrator and InDesign customers to discover if the images they find on microstock sites (particularly Shutterstock or iStock) are also available at Fotolia where they can be purchased for much less?
The Copyright Office has released the official 1,288 page version of the
Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition (the “Third Edition”). It is available on the Office’s website at
http://copyright.gov/comp3/.
Panoramic Images has been awarded $403,500 in a copyright infringement case against educational publisher John Wiley & Sons. The publisher was found to have used 6 images outside the scope of the license agreement. The case was heard before a jury in the Federal District Court the Northern District of Illinois.
Many photographers who thought they were being good Net Citizens when they made their images available with Creative Commons Licenses and allowed anyone to use the images for free have recently received some nasty shocks. Microsoft and Flickr have decided to use those images to enrich themselves. Forget about any benefit to the creator.
A couple weeks ago I was talking with a well known picture researcher. He said, “I wish all these copyright cases were over!” He pointed out that every time someone files a copyright suit he gets a new list of people whose images he can’t use when searching for images for a new project. Is there some way to protect your rights and still license a reasonable number of new images?
Register of Copyrights Maria A. Pallante has released a public draft of the
Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices, Third Edition (the “Third Edition”). This is expected to be the first major revision of the law in more than two decades. The draft presents more than 1200 pages of administrative practices and sets the stage for a number of long-term improvements in registration and recordation policy.
Seattle photographer Christopher Boffoli has sued the popular image-sharing site for failing to remove his images after he sent the site proper DMCA notice.
Yesterday, I made an attempt to explain what is happening in the UK with regard to making it easier for consumer to use images that are truly “orphaned,” or if it is just difficult to find the name of and locate the creator. (
See story) Today, I had the following exchange of emails with Andrea Stern, Director of MOCA: Ministry of Copyright Cultural Creators’ Assets in the UK.
As of October 1, 2014 authorized legal entities in the UK will be able to collect payments for the use of your photographs even if you are not a member of the organization. This is known as Extended Collective Licensing (ECL).
Did you know that it is illegal to license for commercial use pictures of hundreds of the most popular, beautiful and interesting venues around the world? In many cases it is also illegal to use such pictures for editorial purposes.
Recently, Tyler Olson discovered by searching Google that one of his images (
http://netropolitanclub.com/) had been used on over 1,640 web sites. However, all these uses were not the result of multiple sales, but of a single sale to the Netropolitan Club.
In the case of
Grant Heilman Photography, Inc. vs. McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. before Judge Michael M. Baylson in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania a jury has found in favor of Grant Heilman and awarded them the amount of $127,087 for the unauthorized use of a total of 53 images.
A group of photographers, visual artists and affiliated associations have reached a settlement with Google that ends four years of litigation over copyrighted material in Google Books. The parties are pleased to have reached a settlement that benefits everyone and includes funding for the PLUS Coalition, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping rightsholders and users communicate clearly and efficiently about rights in works. Further terms of the agreement are confidential.
Computerworld reports that following a
lawsuit from Getty Images, Microsoft has temporarily removed the beta of the
Bing Image Widget from its website. However, for those people who uploaded the Widget prior to the Getty challenge the Widget still works.
Reuters reports that Getty Images claimed in a lawsuit filed in federal court in New York on Thursday that a new Microsoft product that allows website publishers to embed digital photographs on their sites is a “massive infringement” of copyrighted images.
With its new Image Embed tool
Bing is making free use of photos to promote and advertise its site. See the little Bing logo at the bottom left of each picture display. Bing is now able to advertise its brand, free of charge, on an other site that uses Image Embed.
After my story on
Bing Image Widget yesterday I decided to do some more searches for photographers and stock agencies to see what I could find. The results are revealing. I started with “John Harrington photography.”
Microsoft's Bing has created the
Bing Image Widget making It possible for any Bing user to imbed, free of charge, on their web site of blog any images found in a Bing Images search. Here's a simple demonstration of how it works.