Posts Tagged ‘ Copyright Law ’

Legal Head Scratcher: Does Whoever Controls the Shutter Button Control the Copyright?

August 12th, 2014. By LucyC

Don’t think there’s a lawyer on this one (yet) but talk about a case where you really have to figure out when a person is a person (no matter how small?—couldn’t resist…).

So, who saw this coming? The monkey, perhaps? An Indonesian monkey took a selfie with a wildlife photographer’s camera, and it’s raising some interesting copyright law questions, specifically—who owns the image?

David Slater, the British wildlife photographer whose camera was used by the monkey while he was on assignment in 2011, believes that he has ownership of the image. The backstory—he was setting up his camera equipment to photograph a crested black macaque monkey, according to The Huffington Post, when the monkey grabbed Slater’s camera and began taking photographs, including a pretty good selfie.

Of course the selfie is posted online and goes viral (wonder if Monkey has a Facebook page?). Not surprisingly, Slater assumes he owns the copyright to the selfie. Uh, apparently not, according to Wikipedia.

What?

Yes—Wikipedia has posted the picture on its site as well as on Wikimedia Commons, an arm of the Wikimedia Foundation that posts photos that are in the public domain and therefore free to use, the Huff Post reports.  When Slater requested that Wikimedia take the photo down, arguing that the copyright belongs to him, and that he should be paid for the use the photo—every time it’s used—as is normally the case—Wikipedia said—“No”—won’t take it down, can’t make us, the picture belongs to everyone.”

Wait just a banana-picking moment there sunshine…

HuffPo spoke with attorney Josh Bressler, who specializes in intellectual property law. He said the “author” of a photograph is the person who has “contributed the expressive content.”

The nitty gritty, according to Bressler, is that a monkey is not considered a person under the law, and only a person can be an “author.” Legally speaking, only humans and corporations are “people.” Animals, on the other hand, are considered property, not people.

Hence Wikipedia’s stance. Wikipedia spokesperson, Katherine Maher, emailed the following statement to HuffPost:

“We take these assessments very seriously, and researched both sides of the argument. We didn’t think the monkey owned the copyright—instead, our assessment was that there’s no one who owns the copyright. That means that the image falls into the public domain.

Under US law, for example, copyright claims cannot vest in to non-human authors (that is, non-human authors can’t own copyrights). It’s clear the monkey was the photographer. To claim copyright, the photographer would have had to make substantial contributions to the final image, and even then, they’d only have copyright for those alterations, not the underlying image.

Because the monkey took the picture, it means that there was no one on whom to bestow copyright, so the image falls into the public domain.”

But the monkey couldn’t have taken the picture without Slater’s camera—doesn’t that count as a significant contribution? And, btw, if animals are deemed as “property” then where’s the monkey’s owner? Does that person—I guess the island of Sulawesi?—technically “own” the image?

And ok—this gets better—so when you’re out at a bar—it’s happy hour and your sober friend takes pics, on your camera, of you and your bud’s sloshing back a few and making idiots of yourselves, the pics are on your camera—but you, being too drunk to actually take a groupie yourself, didn’t take them. In theory, your sober friend ‘contributed the expressive content’, right? So when the pics go viral via Instagram, do you have any claim to them? Things that make you go hmm…

Well, in this case, Slater reportedly spoke with HuffPost, stating that he is “aggrieved” by the situation and is urging people to stop using Wikipedia. He thinks the editors at Wikipedia “have a communistic view of life.”

“It’s potentially being run by people with political agendas,” Slater said. “The people who are editing it could be a new Adolf Hitler or a new Stalin … They’re using whatever suits their agenda.”

I’d say he’s pissed. As a creator myself, I can’t blame him. In our digital age, where copyright is a very hot commodity and one for which FB and the likes are prepared to risk hefty lawsuits, you have to love the irony here. Copyright is big bucks. So—if the picture belongs to everyone—i.e. the public—does the public also stand to profit by it?

Tags: Copyright Law, monkey selfie
Posted in Crazy Sh*t Lawyers See, Emerging Issues | No Comments »

Origami Yourigami? Origami Lawsuit Targets Copycat Artist

June 26th, 2012. By AbiK

Been to Michael’s craft store lately? Origami is big. Forget paper airplanes—now kids come home from school with origami floral bouquets for mom and origami heteroptera (look it up). But for one artist—origami artist Robert Lang—origami isn’t some grab-some-copier-paper-and-get-folding thing; it’s serious art. And, he’s darn good at it. So good that folks know his work—and that can make any work that looks like his, even if it uses a different medium—look like copycat work. And that’s the crux of what’s becoming known as the origami lawsuit.

Origami artist Robert Lang has filed a lawsuit against abstract painter Sarah Morris alleging that she used his work—more specifically his crease patterns—in creating her own work. Without his permission.

For those you who are only novice origamists (is that even a word?), if that, a crease pattern is a computer-generated and quite complex pattern that an origami artist uses as a map of sorts to show where all the paper folds will need to go. Child’s play it is not.

According to a report at KPCC, Morris’ work veers more in the direction of graphic design, which is mathematical in nature; so Lang’s work, his crease patterns, caught her eye and intrigued her. And she “took a bunch of crease patterns, changed some lines, added colors to the shapes and turned them into very large paintings.”

Morris’ large paintings became a series that was shown entitled “Origami” in 2007. You can see some of that work at Live Auctioneers.

Needless to say, some of Lang’s admirers saw Morris’ work. And they felt a tinge of familiarity. And they let him know it.

You get where this is going: infringement lawsuit.

However, at the heart of this lawsuit will be the extent to which Morris’ work is considered transformative. As the report at KPCC notes, when it comes to art, an artist can use a copyrighted image if it satisfies the transformation ‘rule’—the work has to transform the copyrighted image into something new.

And “something new” is a bit of a vague notion—it’s fairly wide-open to interpretation. So we’ll see what happens.

Tags: Copyright Infringement, Copyright Law, Origami Lawsuit, Robert Lang, Sarah Morris
Posted in Emerging Issues, Intellectual Property, lawsuits | No Comments »