Copyright & Legal
Graphics Detective (GD) in Belgium has developed a strategy for chasing online infringements that photographers may want to check out. There is no cost to the photographer unless there is a settlement. In the event of a settlement Graphics Detective pays the photographer 50% of whatever it collects.
In a Photo District New interview entitled
“Too Big To Sue” Getty Images General Counsel Yoko Miyashita and VP and General Counsel Lisa Willmer explain why Getty Images is not suing Google Inc. in the US for copyright infringement. This is a must read for everyone engaged in the image licensing business.
Getty Images has filed a competition law complaint with the European Commission against Google Inc. The complaint follows Getty Images’ submission in June 2015, when it joined as an interested third party in support of the European Commission’s existing investigation into Google’s anti-competitive business practices.
It is getting harder and harder for photographers to protect their copyright. With PicScout, TinEye, Google Image Search and other reverse image search solutions it is easy enough to locate uses of specific images online. But, it can be very laborious to search one-by-one for particular images in a large collection, and it can be costly to have someone like PicScout do it for you.
As revenues have declined in recent years due to declining sales for the use of images in print, and increasing use of images on the web at much lower prices, many French editorial agencies have found it necessary to reorganize. Jean Michel Psaila, CEO and owner of
Abaca Press says, “The market has changed. We used to get €200 for print use. Now we get €5 for online use.”
While there has been a great deal of discussion recently about the possibility of Congress creating a small claims process for visual arts, several visual artist groups, representing hundreds of thousands of creators, have joined forces to propose key components of potentially forthcoming small claims legislation. Collectively, the groups represent photographers, photojournalists, videographers, illustrators, graphic designers, artists, and other visual artists as well as their licensing representatives.
In the UK photographers can receive royalties when someone photocopies a page from a magazine or book that contains their image. In December the EPUK discussion group reported that REX Features, a UK editorial agency purchased by Shutterstock a year ago, misrepresented its right to collect certain monies from
DACS on behalf of some of its photographers and falsely reported to the photographers what it had received from DACS. The full story is available
here.
All drone operators must register their unmanned aircraft with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) by Feb. 19, 2016. Registration begins on December 21, 2015 and is free for the first 30 days. While the registration fee is only $5.00 the government is encouraging as many owners as possible to register quickly.
Congresswoman Judy Chu (CA-27), Congressman Tom Marino (PA-10) and Congresswoman Barbara Comstock (VA-10) have introduced H.R. 4241 – the Copyright Office for the Digital Economy Act or the CODE Act. This comes after months of discussion with various stakeholders, including several joint Member roundtables.
Since 2013 the House Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Congress has been engaged in a comprehensive review of the current Copyright Act. It has held 20 hearings and heard from 100 witnesses.
Nancy E. Wolff, Counsel for the Digital Media Licensing Association (
DMLA) has written a very clear and detailed explanation of Why and When image creators need releases that was recently published on the American Society of Picture Professional (
ASPP) website. Anyone planning to license pictures of people, and in some cases object and other property, should be familiar with this information. Read the article here:
http://aspp.com/the-law-releases-101-why-and-when-you-need-them/
Jacqueline Mahoney, an Associate with the McDermott Will & Emery law firm has reported that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has reversed a district court decision and found that Minden Pictures, Inc. has the right to sue John Wiley & Sons, Inc. for the unauthorized use of stock images belonging to the photographers the agency represents.
Every year millions of images are photocopied and used by commercial organizations around the world without any direct compensation to the image creator. Often this is because there is no practical way to track such usages, or because the creator cannot be easily identified. Nevertheless, commercial organizations recognize that they have an obligation, and a liability, to compensate creators for such uses.
TechDirt reports that photographer Art Dragulis took a photo of
Swain’s Lock along the C&O canal in Maryland and uploaded it to Flickr. Roughly four years later, he discovered Kappa Map Group was using his photo for the cover of its Montgomery County, Maryland atlas. He sued for copyright infringement. And he LOST.
When Rights Mananged images are represented by multiple distributors it is possible for agencies that had nothing to do with an initial license to collect a fee for secondary uses. Consider this situation.
Alan J. Goldstein, a professional photographer located in Silver Spring, MD has commenced a legal action against Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, Inc. ("MRIS"), located in Rockville, MD, for violations of the Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The legal action is Case # 8:15-cv-2400 (TDC) (D. Md.).
The interests of the multi-billion dollar social media sites and photographers may finally be coming together thanks to DMCA and
imagewiki. The safe harbor provision of the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) says, “
Online Service Providers (OSPs) cannot receive any financial benefit directly attributable to infringing activity.” Thus OSPs cannot place ads on user generated content unless they can identify the image’s owner and use policy.
ASMP has responded to the
April 24, 2015 U.S. Copyright Office Notice of Inquiry, which set out to review “how certain visual works, particularly photographs, graphic artworks, and illustrations are monetized, enforced and registered under the Copyright Act.”
The deadline for responses to the
Copyright Office’s April 24 Notice of Inquiry is rapidly approaching. ASMP needs more information from photographers about the problems they have encountered in protecting their copyright.
Suppose there was a smartphone app that automatically sent every image capture to the cloud and stored all the metadata including date, time and exact location down to within 100 feet or less of where the picture was taken. (Also imagine if camera manufacturers built that into cameras.) It's coming!
LMKtag (also
Lamark) has developed a relatively inexpensive system to embed tags, invisible to the naked eye, in digital images files. These tags link back to a LMKtag database that contains the image creator’s name and contact information as well as whether the image is available for licensing. The database can also include caption information and other metadata about the image and the creator can adjust this information at any time.
Maria Pallante the current Register of Copyrights and Director of the United States Copyright Office testified before the House Judiciary Committee on April 29th and offered a number of ideas for modernization of the copyright office. You can access the entire testimony
here.
The U.S. Copyright Office has created a
Fair Use Index to assist creators and user in understanding what is considered “Fair Use.” Fair use is a longstanding and vital aspect of American copyright law. The goal of the Index is to make the principles and application of fair use more accessible and understandable by presenting a searchable database of court opinions.
Recently, I was asked to comment on whether a photographer under exclusive contract with a stock agency that licensed the work as Rights Managed could simultaneously post the same images on one of a series of social media sites.
In order to earn significant money from licensing stock images it is almost mandatory to make the images available through more than one large stock image distributor. But having images with multiple distributors also makes it almost impossible to determine if there has been an infringement. While it is easy enough to determine if an image has been used on the Interne, it is often almost impossible to determine if the image was legally licensed.