This is an update on the story we
published last week concerning Carol Highsmith’s
copyright infringement suit against Getty Images and other defendants.
The additional defendants include Picscout, Alamy and John Does 1 to 100. The “John Does 1 to 100 are unnamed, as yet unidentified parties acting in active concert or participation with the named defendants as part of this course of conduct.”
The John Does could be any of Getty’s sub-agents or any agency that has obtained photos, either directly or in-directly from the Library of Congress, and then licensed those photos to a customer.
In the last week many Digital Media Licensing Association (DMLA) members have contacted the DMLA in an effort to get a clearer understanding of “what is public domain,” and whether they can license a digital file or sell a work of art that is out of copyright and in the public domain. Nancy Wolff, DMLA Counsel, has provided a detailed answer to this question in a blog post
here.
Ms Wolff points out that “Many DMLA members specialize in or include archival material in their image collections and make theses images available to publishers and other users and charge a fee. There is nothing improper or illegal about that. These archives or the collectors have made substantial investments in scanning, enhancing, keywording and making their copy of the public domain work easily searchable and usable.” The fee is more a research and service fee rather than a fee for the right to use the work.
If the end user had been aware of the existence of the work they might have been able to obtain a copy free of charge, or for a small copying fee. But most users are not aware of what can be found at the Library of Congress and need some help in locating appropriate images.
On the other hand, Getty Images efforts to charge users for public domain images it does not have the exclusive right to represent, and that the user obtained from an entirely different source, may be a different issue.