This weeks Episode of "This Week in Law" covers Photography Copyright, the ins and outs. Denise Howell along with her guest co-hosts Carolyn Wright, Connie Mableson and Evan Brown discuss copyright from three perspectives; the casual user, the photographer and bloggers.
You would think, at this point in time, that the Photography Copyright line differentiating what is legal and what might cause liability would be clear, but it isn't!
Pinterest for example easily allows users to post other's work with no knowledge of programming or coding. Many sites such as 500px make it so easy to share photographs, that they give you the code to share other photographers work your own site.
Even on this site, developed using SquareSpace, provides us with a Widget to display my Favoite photographs off of Flickr, photographs of other photographers that I think are exceptional and worth being seen by us all. Flickr provided the APIs (Application Programmers Interface) to SquareSpace so they could create the widget which we get to use.
These sites don't generally present the full high resolution photographs and most link back to the original photograph on the photographer's page who owns it, but it isn't clear that this is completely within the current copyright law. These are GREAT tools for the photographers who would like to spread the word about their work but does this open up the blogger or website designer to liabilty law suites?
Much of this will eventually fall within idea of "Fair Use" but until then many aspects of Copyright Law are still gray and vague.
This is important for just about everyone, don't miss it! If you are bandwidth impaired try this link which has been setup for Mobile use but will work fine on your big PC or Tablet.
Wednesday, December 12, 2012 at 9:46PM | 