Let me state for the record that I went to college for photography.  I’ve even been paid for photographic work.  I have more than a passing acquaintance with copyright law.  I mostly take pictures for fun these days.  There’s the odd time where I’ll make a couple of bucks from my skills but that’s not too often.  I take copyright seriously but I also keep it in perspective.

Copyright  law remedies tend to measure the “severity” of an infringement based on some kind of a test of harm caused by the infringement.  Some uses of a copyrighted work are not deemed to be an infringement.  These cases are called “fair use”.  Imagine a teacher projecting a picture taken by  Ansel Adams on the screen so that his composition could be discussed.  This is a fair use.  There are other fair uses like when only a few seconds of a video or audio recording are used.

The recent ruckus over at flickr has prompted me to do a bit of research.  I found this  nice description of the limits on exclusive rights as it applies to US copyright.  The Cornell Law School page lists four factors that are considered when applying fair use to a copyrighted work.  I found the fourth factor the most interesting:  ”the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.”  In the case of the flickr images only a small version of the image is used.  It is my contention that the use of these images does not impair the copyright holders marketability of their image.  I could probably even argue that by appearing on my site I’ve increased the copyright holder’s ability to market the image.

In every case thus far the request has come from a talented amateur.  By that I mean the quality of the images produced are pretty good but they are produced as hobby.  I have nothing against shooting for a hobby and if you can make money from it great!  My issue is if you are not attempting to make any money what is your monetary loss  by having someone put one of your images on their website?  To be clear the images I use are attributed to the photographer and link to the photographers photostream on flickr.  Most photographers find out about the site because they’ve had visitors to their photostream that came from my site.  There was a interesting post on flickr that discussed using pictures from flickr to decorate your house.  Mr. Gallo made a similar argument to mine.  He also suggest that some photographers relax a little.

Maybe one day this tempest in a teacup will make more sense to me.  Until then I’ll just keep dealing with the requests as they come in.

I came across this story via the Location Meme blog post entitled The Aliens of Lower Merion County.  Location Meme sourced an article that discusses a class action lawsuit filed by a student who was reportedly reprimanded for “improper behaviour at home“.  Isn’t that his parent’s job?  How did the school find out about this?  They took a picture of the improper behaviour via the school’s computer and showed it to the student.  The school district has since shut off this feature.  Here is a link to the school district’s announcement.

About 8 years ago I worked on a project for the Ojo Video Phone.   You sometimes see the characters on NCSI using this phone.  When I first met with the folks that made the phone they gave me a little demonstration of the phone.  I noticed that the phone had this decidedly low tech feature – a door over the camera.  I asked why low-tech was used instead of say and LED. It turns out that users were generally freaked out by the idea that a camera could be spying on them.  I guess they were right!  I wonder if you took a survey how many people would report that they stick something over their computer’s built in camera?