Copyright & Legal
In 2016 a massive flash flood raced down the main street of Ellicott City, Maryland. It was called a “thousand-year flood” given the unique characteristics that set it in motion. On May 27, 2018 the flow that supposed to only occur once every 1,000 years struck again. Photographer Max Robinson gets classic footage and Fox News uses it without permission.
The General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, that goes into effect on Friday, May 25, 2018 will require companies that do business in the EU to provide a form to the companies that they are dealing with. It is not clear if it is necessary to supply such a form to each and every individual that a company deals with. A survey by
CompliancePoint shows that 76% of U.S. businesses are not prepared for the enforcement deadline. (Check out
previous story.)
North American photographers and stock agencies may have heard about the new European Union GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) law that goes into effect on May 25, 2018, but figured “that’s something happening in the EU that I don’t have to worry about.”
Well, maybe not!
In 1968
Andy Sacks, a 20-year-old University of Michigan photographer covered Robert F. Kennedy’s campaign stop in Detroit for the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily. This is a story about how the photos he captured that day ended up getting used hundreds of times 40 to 50 year later and he received no credit or a reasonable share of compensation for their use.
When hiring an attorney to handle a copyright enforcement case the
Copyright Alliance has suggested five questions photographers should consider.
Does anyone know. who owns the copyright to image
607387712 of Marilyn Monroe on Gettyimages.com. Evidently Getty doesn’t. It seems that Getty has the rights to license the image for “Standard Editorial Rights,” but that does not include commercial use rights or print cover rights. Evidently it also doesn’t include the right to license a use for wall décor because Getty will not license the image for that purpose.
Some
Masterfile contributors report that the
BIA restructuring of the company last year hasn’t solved Masterfile’s financial problems. Once again the company is falling behind on paying current royalties on new sales. I asked Steve Pigeon, CEO of Masterfile, for clarification and an explanation of the problems. The following are his answers.
A visible watermark on your photos distracts from the impact a non-watermarked photo might have and may discourage people from using it. However, the real problem arises when the photo is actually licensed to a customer. Customers are only interested in using un-watermarked photos on their websites. When someone else sees the photo, and decides they would like to use it, they can easily copy and paste it to their own site.
Imatag offers photographers a better way to protect their images.
When it comes to pursuing copyright infringements the biggest problem for photographers is not finding unauthorized uses, but finding too many. Photographers can do their own searches using
Google Images or
Tineye. Once a use is found, the photographer must search his/her records to determine if the image has ever been licensed, and if so, the terms of the license.
All photographers and copyright holders in the U.S. are urged to contact their Congressional Representative and ask them to
Vote in Favor of H.R. 3945 – a bill to create a Small Claims Court! The bill is likely to be out of the House Judiciary Committee mark-up and ready for a vote the week of April 9th. Your representative needs to hear from you now! Grass-root support is imperative!
In a joint letter to the European Parliament Legal Affairs Committee these trade organizations
CEPIC,
EFJ,
EVA, and
Pyramide Europe are calling European legislators to urgently correct the theory of law used by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) involving the use of framing/embedding technology on the Internet.
Trying to decide how much you should charge for your image can be a bit like asking “how long’s a piece of string?” At
Copytrack we help photographers get paid for uses of their work. When using us a photographer receives around 360 EURO ($443) for each one of their images successfully licensed.
There is a dangerous movement afoot; the idea that registration of your images on the blockchain is a cheap and simple alternative to registration with the United States Copyright Office. It is not.
Since its launch in 2013
Unsplash has been providing a platform where photographers can upload their images for the enjoyment of others. The photographers allow anyone to use their images for free, for any purpose and without credit. While the photo library only contains 400,000 photos (compared to the 180 million on Shutterstock), the company says it’s had more than 48 billion photo views and 310 million photo downloads since launch. Currently, it is seeing 10 photo downloads per second.
Copytrack has completed its
Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and will be launching a Global Copyright Register (GCR) this summer that will work in conjunction with their Global Copyright Enfocement services (copytrack.com). With their Presale and ICO they have a total of 8,600 investors who have purchased around 16 million tokens. The purchase of images found on the GCR will be tracked in a Blockchain and paid for using cryptocurrency tokens.
Judge Forrest of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in
Goldman v. Breitbart News, LLC has ruled in favor of photographer Justin Goldman that embedding a tweet that contains a copyright protected photo
does, in fact, constitute a copyright violation. If the ruling is upheld, it could have a major impact on the way media and many other Internet users get some of their imagery.
After I published my article proposing the development of an
Image Creator Locator or ICL, several readers pointed out that the
Plus Registry is designed to accomplish the same goal. See here for how ICL differs from Plus in its aims.
Getty Images and Google have announced an agreement that includes a multi-year global licensing partnership, enabling Google to use Getty Images’ content within its various products and services. “This agreement between Getty Images and Google sets the stage for a very productive, collaborative relationship between our companies,” said Dawn Airey, CEO, Getty Images. “We will license our market leading content to Google, working closely with them to improve attribution of our contributors’ work and thereby growing the ecosystem.”
If you’re an image creator, or a stock photography customer and you’ve been thinking about getting involved with the new
KodakOne you might want to think again. The initial coin offering (ICO) of KodakCoin, that was supposed to launch on January 31st, has been delayed several weeks. In order to eventually license rights to images it will be necessary to use KodakCoins.
One of the biggest problems in the stock image business is unauthorized use. Many of those making unauthorized uses would be happy to ask permission and compensate the creator,
if they could just find them. When they find an image on a website other than the creators there is usually no information about who the creator is or how to locate him/her.
If you want to earn more for the images you produce, and for there to be less unauthorized use, maybe you should be praying that your images won’t get used by customers online. For many this may sound like heresy, or at the very least, ridiculous. Doesn’t everyone want more people to see and use their images? Consider this analysis.
In support of #SmallClaimsDay all U.S. image creators, stock agents (and friends of the creative community) are being asked to write their Congresspersons before January 17, 2018 and request that they co-sponsor H.R. 3945. By using this site (
http://copyrightalliance.org/get-involved/add-your-voice/ ) sending letters is quick and easy to do!
When I first heard about a blockchain based strategy for licensing stock images it sounded like it might have some potential. What photographer wouldn’t like to be able set the price for the licensing of his/her images, have customers pay those prices, and have most of the price the customer pays immediately credited to the photographer’s account. Sounds great.
IPStock, run by Geneva based company Intellectual Property Depository and Management (IPDM) that develops a unique fintech platform for visual digital assets, has announced the launch of pre-ICO for its blockchain registry of visual digital content copyrights.
Kodak have just started their new project “KodakOne” and already their shares have skyrocketed. In 2012 it was a different story as they were on the verge of bankruptcy, but they are slowly fighting their way back with their new idea. But what’s all the hype around the new project “KodakOne”?