Copyright & Legal
A jury has awarded photographer Daniel Morel $1.2 million in damages in his case against
Agence France-Presse (AFP) and
Getty Images for the unauthorized distribution of his images of the January 12, 2010 Haiti earthquake. At the time Morel received no payment from the agencies for almost 1,000 uses of his images.
Judge Denny Chin in Southern District of New York has ruled that Google Books provides a
public benefit and is a
fair use of copyrighted material. He ruled that the Google Books project doesn’t violate copyright law and dismissed the eight-year-old lawsuit against Google.
Microsoft, the world’s largest software maker and itself a massive consumer of image content for its products and services, has taken the bold step of promoting the theft of images online. Through its newly revamped Office product, Microsoft is replacing an image search functionality – one that routed the user to vetted sources for searching, transacting and integrating content into their online projects – with a general
Bing search. While Microsoft is certainly free to remove one piece of Office functionality and push users onto the Bing platform, the methods of how it is doing so underscores a blatant disregard of intellectual property.
On behalf of thousands of photographers and picture agencies CEPIC, the Center of the Picture Industry has submitted a formal antitrust complaint against Google’s use of third-party images before the European Commission. The complaint was submitted on 8 November 2013 and supported by an unprecedented coalition of European and US trade associations representing thousands of photographers and picture agencies worldwide.
Attorney
Edward Greenberg reports that
Andrew Paul Leonard, a professional photographer who specializes in creating images of microscopic subject matter using a scanning electron microscope (“SEM”) has been awarded $1.6 million in his copyright infringement lawsuit against Stemtech Health Service.
In business it often helps to try to walk in your customer’s shoes. The following is a situation that developed when a busy designer was trying to give his customer a quality product on a tight deadline (aren’t all deadlines tight these days), and keep the cost of the project reasonable and within the customer’s budget.
Getty Images has done a deal with
Pinterest that will track the use of any of the 80 million photos and illustrations on Gettyimages.com whenever they are posted on the digital scrapbooking site. (A little over 7 million of those photos are on the Creative section of the site.)
Stipple has introduced two new products: Stipple Mobile and Stipple Search. With Stipple Mobil you can create Stippled photos right from your phone. Easily add videos from your camera and YouTube; Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia profiles; and more to your photos. Photographers can instantly share everything on Facebook and Twitter.
On September 31, 2013, the Copyright Office
released the findings of its two-year study on copyright small claims. The report documents the significant costs and other challenges in the current federal system of addressing copyright claims that have a relatively low economic value. The report recommends the establishment of a Copyright Tribunal housed within the Copyright Office to adjudicate claims.
Frans Lemmens has a problem. One of his clients operates an iPad travel magazine called TRVL Magazine. They use a lot of his images. They encourage readers to share the images found in their app on Facebook. Frankly, readers would probably do this anyway whether they are encouraged to do so, or not. Also, in order to market their app this activity is probably critical for TRVL.
According to the New York Post Avril Nolan, 25, has sued Getty Images for $450,000 after discovering her unreleased picture splashed across a quarter-page color ad in the free newspaper am New York on April 3, 2012. Next to her face were the words "I am positive (+)" and "I have rights." Nolan is perfectly healthy, never had HIV and never signed a model release to allow her image to be used in any kind of advertising.
As of September 5th Facebook has modified its Terms of Use to allow the company to sell virtually anything that is uploaded to the site, including all your photos, your identity and your data. Facebook has explicitly removed the privacy protection from the commercialization rights.
Many Internet users seem to believe that it is OK to use any image they find online for wallpaper on their site. The next step is to grab a bunch of images they like and create a site that makes the images available to others for free wallpaper use. And, once they’ve gone to the trouble to create a site the site owners figure they might as well make a little money by selling a few ads.
The American Society of Media Photographers, joined by National Press Photographers Association (
NPPA), The Digital Media Licensing Association (
PACA), American Photographic Artists (
APA), This Week in Photography (
TWiP), Professional Photographers of America (
PPA), Coordination of European Picture Agencies Stock, Press and Heritage (
CEPIC), Graphic Artists Guild (
GAG) and American Society of Picture Professionals (
ASPP), has mounted a campaign to address the far-reaching Terms of Use of the image sharing service Instagram.
ASMP has published “
The Instagram Papers,” a very valuable analysis of Instagram Terms of Service. Every photographer who is considering posting images on Instagram, wants to retain control of his/her images and hopefully earn some money from them should be familiar with the information in this report.
Has someone grabbed one of your images and posted it on Facebook without your permission? On the Stockphoto blog
Stacy Walsh~Rosenstock recently outlined a simple procedure for getting your image off the offending page.
Alfonso Gutiérrez, President of CEPIC has provided some updated information on the CEPIC Image Registery (CIR) that Selling Stock reported on earlier
here and
here. See his report.
The UK’s
Copyright Hub has launched its pilot phase. It is designed to be a gateway to information about copyright in the UK and point those interested in the right direction to get permission to use a copyrighted work.
As a result of technological advancements, and the new image search techniques on the horizon, we are about to enter another paradigm shift in the way stock images are licensed. Delaying or ignoring this new trend in image marketing is not a viable option. It will move forward whether individual creators like it or not. The only option is to figure out how to adapt to this new reality in a way that will allow creators to continue to earn a living.
The biggest problem for the
CIR will be finding a way to let all the potential image users know it exists. It may be fairly easy to make the big publishing organizations aware of the CIR. They have been crying for a way to quickly determine if an image needs to be licensed and where to go to license it. But there is a long tail of small design firms and web developers that in the aggregate use a lot more images than these big users. It will be very difficult to reach all these small occasional users and make them aware of the CIR and its benefits.
Last month we reported on the storm over the
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act (ERRA) that was passed by the U.K. Parliament. Photographers were up in arms, but it turns out that many of the initial concerns may have been misplaced.
In the case of Pacific Stock, Inc. vs. Pearson Education United States District Judge Susan Oki Mollay in Hawaii has denied Pearson’s request for summary judgment with regard to Pacific Stock’s claim that Pearson had engaged in fraud and fraudulent inducement in its use of 59 images. Pacific Stock has also alleged that with regard to 151 images from 70 of its photographers Pearson exceeded the print run rights granted for the use of its images in Pearson textbooks.
At the CEPIC Congress in Barcelona on Wednesday June 12th there will be a discussion on a new initiative that could generate significant new revenue for image creators whose images are “crowd sourced” and posted without authorization to various domains on the Internet. This story examines the “Winston Project,” a system for collecting revenue for “Passive Image Use.” when a user uploads an image created by someone else to a “crowd sourced” domain, or when a user clicks on an image or shares it within the domain.
United Kingdom photographers are up in arms over the latest action by their government to make it legal for consumers to use their images without their permission. The
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act recently passed in the U.K. provides a way to legally use images found on the Internet when the copyright owner cannot be identified or contacted. Such images are known as “orphaned works.”
The Associated Press has scored a significant copyright victory in the case Associated Press v. Meltwater. While the issue in this case was about the “scraping” and re-purposing of copyrighted text it could have important applications for photographers whose images are grabbed and re-purposed by Internet sites. Meltwater’s fair use defense was struck down by the court.