No Fair Use for Photo Used Without Required Attribution; The National Law Review, February 15, 2024

Timothy M. Dunker of McDermott Will & Emery, The National Law Review; No Fair Use for Photo Used Without Required Attribution

"The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit concluded that the copyright on a photograph of an entertainment icon was the subject of a valid copyright registration and that use of the photograph in an article missing the author’s required attribution language was not otherwise “fair use.” Philpot v. Independent Journal Review, Case No. 21-2021 (4th Cir. Feb. 6, 2024) (King, Wynn, Rushing, JJ.)

Larry Philpot, a professional concert photographer, photographed Ted Nugent at a concert in July 2013. In August 2013, Philpot registered the photograph with the US Copyright Office and published the photograph on Wiki Commons under a Creative Commons License specifying that anyone could use the photograph for free as long as they provided the following attribution: “Photo Credit: Larry Philpot of www.soundstagephotography.com.”"

SpaceX Just Retroactively Put Copyright Restrictions on Its Photos; Motherboard, December 11, 2019

Karl Bode, Motherboard;

SpaceX Just Retroactively Put Copyright Restrictions on Its Photos

"As SpaceX began supplanting NASA in humanity’s quest to explore outer space, Motherboard pondered in 2015 what would happen to the public’s unfettered access to space imagery data (images taken by NASA are in the public domain and can be used by anyone for almost any purpose.) Thankfully, SpaceX soon after made the important decision to offer mission images under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) License, allowing them to be freely shared and even remixed by anyone. This is the least-restrictive Creative Commons license in existence and allows anyone to use the photos for almost anything (you could, for example, make and sell a photo book or calendar of SpaceX images if you wanted to.)

But a little noticed change to the SpaceX Flickr account this week stripped away the CC0 license affixed to the company’s images, replacing it with an “Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic” license. That, in turn, imposed notable and potentially confusing restrictions on how those images can be shared and re-used."

The EU's latest copyright proposal is so bad, it even outlaws Creative Commons licenses; BoingBoing, April 11, 2018

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing; The EU's latest copyright proposal is so bad, it even outlaws Creative Commons licenses

"The EU is mooting a new copyright regime for the largest market in the world, and the Commissioners who are drafting the new rules are completely captured by the entertainment industry, to the extent that they have ignored their own experts and produced a farcical Big Content wishlist that includes the most extensive internet censorship regime the world has ever seen, perpetual monopolies for the biggest players, and a ban on European creators using Creative Commons licenses to share their works.

Under the new rules, anyone who allows the public to post material will have to maintain vast databases of copyrighted works claimed by rightsholders, and any public communications that matches anything in these databases has to be blocked."

Open Access and Academic Freedom; Inside Higher Ed, 12/15/15

Rick Anderson, Inside Higher Ed; Open Access and Academic Freedom:

"As they have gained momentum over the past decade, the open access (OA) movement and its cousin, the Creative Commons licensing platform, have together done a tremendous amount of good in the world of scholarship and education, by making high-quality, peer-reviewed publications widely available both for reading and for reuse.

But they have also raised some uncomfortable issues, most notably related to academic freedom, particularly when OA is made a requirement rather than an option and when the Creative Commons attribution license (CC BY) is treated as an essential component of OA.

In recent years, major American and European funding bodies such as the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, the Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and Research Councils UK have all instituted OA mandates of various types, requiring those whose research depends on their funding to make the resulting articles available on some kind of OA basis. A large number of institutions of higher education have adopted OA policies as well, though most of these (especially in the United States) only encourage their faculty to make their work openly accessible rather than requiring them to do so."

New Business Models Proposed In Debate On EU Culture And Copyright; Intellectual Property Watch, 6/9/10

David Cronin, Intellectual Property Watch; New Business Models Proposed In Debate On EU Culture And Copyright:

"Small fees for internet users could be used to pay musicians and other artists for the dissemination of copyright-protected work online, a Brussels conference has been told.

Following complaints that intellectual property rules are generally ill-suited to a world where digital downloading is becoming increasingly common, Green Party Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) hosted a discussion on 8 June about how easy public access to culture can be guaranteed in a way that ensures artists can make a decent living.

Philippe Aigrain, a founder of the French civil liberties group La Quadrature du Net, argued that the fundamental premise of any approach to charging for listening to music or watching films online should be that sharing files is a basic right. He took issue with major companies in the entertainment industry who have waged a long campaign against many forms of downloading. “Some big interest groups think the right to share is the root of all evil,” he said.

Aigrain recommended a new system whereby each internet subscriber would be charged a monthly fee of 5 to 7 euros and that this would generate a fund for paying artists whose work is shared on the internet. According to his calculations, such fees should yield between 1.2 billion and 1.7 billion euros each year in France alone – about one twentieth of the country’s “cultural economy”.

The income would then be distributed among artists based on surveys of a “huge panel” of individuals, who would anonymously give details of which files they had downloaded. For audiovisual work, one-third of the revenue generated would be used for remuneration and the remainder to support new productions. Yet the ratio should be reversed for music, considering that it is usually less expensive to record tunes than to make films, he added...

Maja Bogataj Jancic from the Institute of Intellectual Property in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana spoke of how “copyright is at war with technology.”

“Digital technology is the greatest threat to the copyright system but it is fair to say it is also the greatest opportunity for creation,” she said. The “Creative Commons” system – through which authors and artists can grant others permission to circulate their work on a non-commercial basis – has made the sharing of published material easier, she added. Some 350 million creative commons licenses had been issued worldwide by the end of last year.

“Creative Commons licenses are built on top of copyright law,” she explained. “They do not exist without copyright law.”

Austrian MEP Eva Lichtenberger contended that “culture and creative activity need to be supported in such a way that artists can have a dignified livelihood.”

She used colourful language to describe how the entertainment industry has kept a close watch on the European Union’s debates on intellectual property. “When we look at copyright and the reform of copyright so that it can be adapted to the twenty-first century, there is a veritable lobbying war going on. Lobbyists even follow you to the ladies’ room in order to continue discussions you have been having.”

Her French colleague Karima Delli noted that 1.6 billion people worldwide have the means to copy files. “This is the very basis for a shared culture; the internet should be the means by which we democratise culture,” she said. “There is no magic solution. We are going to have to try out new economic models to fight against the concentration of powers in many commercial systems applying to cinema and books, etcetera.”

http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2010/06/09/new-business-models-proposed-in-debate-on-eu-culture-and-copyright/

Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It’s a Desert for Photos; New York Times, 7/20/09

Noam Cohen via New York Times; Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It’s a Desert for Photos:

"At a time when celebrities typically employ a team of professionals to control their images, Wikipedia is a place where chaos rules. Few high-quality photographs, particularly of celebrities, make it onto this site. This is because the site runs only pictures with the most permissive Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use an image, for commercial purposes or not, as long as the photographer is credited...

Last winter the German Federal Archives released 100,000 low-resolution digital copies under a license so they could appear on Wikipedia. Recently a Wikipedia user, Derrick Coetzee, downloaded more than 3,000 high-resolution photographs from the British National Portrait Gallery — to serve, in essence, as the head shots for important historical figures like Charlotte Brontë or Charles Darwin.

The gallery threatened legal action against Mr. Coetzee, saying that while the painted portraits may be old and thus beyond copyright protection, the photographs are new and therefore copyrighted work. The gallery is demanding a response by Monday from Mr. Coetzee, who is being represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In an e-mail message on Friday a gallery spokeswoman, Eleanor Macnair, wrote that “contact has now been made” with the Wikimedia Foundation and “we remain hopeful that a dialogue will be possible.”

But none of this has made much of an improvement in Wikipedia’s photography. Any gallery of hideous Wikipedia photographs would include the former N.B.A. star George Gervin, who is standing stiffly in a suit in a shot that is cropped longer and thinner than would be typical even for a basketball player. The unrestricted photograph came from the office of Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who has been cut out of it.

As in Mr. Gervin’s case, the government is a prime source for public domain photographs...

“To me the problem is the Wikipedia rule of public use,” Mr. Avenaim said. “If they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright.”"

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/arts/20funny.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=wikipedia&st=cse