Because professional photography agencies and organizations have been rattling law suit and copyright infringement sabers, photofinishing labs are beginning to not print digital photos that they think may have been done by professionals. In other words, if you take a really nice, professional-looking photo with your digital camera, and send it to Walmart.com to be printed — you may be presumed a criminal and your printing denied.
Amateur photographer Zee Helmick encountered that problem when she went to pick up photos she had ordered at a Wal-Mart near her home in Henderson, Nev. She had taken the photos of her son that morning to use as head shots for an audition for a TV commercial. She had used her photo-editing software to add his name, information about him and even her own copyright to make the image look more polished, Helmick said. She uploaded the 8-by-10-inch photos to Walmart.com, which prints photos sent to the site at a nearby store for customers to pick up.
At the store, Helmick said a clerk told her, “We can’t release the pictures to you.”
“What’s wrong?” Helmick asked.
“We can’t release the pictures to you without a copyright release form signed by the photographer,” the clerk replied, according to Helmick.
The clerk refused to believe her, nor would they take a signed statement saying that Helmick had taken the pictures herself.
While it’s true that professional photographs can be scanned and then sent to a photo finisher to be printed — in violation of the photographer’s copyright (and I’ll be you didn’t really realize that those school photos of the kids, or the shots that the photographer took of your wedding, are actually copyrighted), the presumption that something that looks professional means that it was stolen is pernicious.
The Professional Photographers of America sees education of consumers and photofinishers as key to preventing unauthorized copying. The trade group sent a wake-up call to the photofinishing industry when, in 1999, it sued Kmart Corp., alleging that the discount store violated federal copyright law by copying images without the permission of the copyright owners.
In 2000, Kmart settled the case by paying $100,000 and agreeing to implement procedures to guard against the unlawful copying of professional photos.
The fact is, amateurs can take — or send in for processing — much better photos than ever before, Photoshopped to look professional. And, unlike in the old days, when you’d have to send in an entire roll (or five) for processing, in the digital age, you only need send in the best.
Just make sure it isn’t too much of a best. Otherwise, you may get called a crook.
(via BoingBoing)
How long does copyright exist? And what happens to a photographer who goes out of business (or dies)?
We’ve run into this problem several times in tryhing to get old pictures copied from the 1890’s or early 1900’s (great-grandparents and the like). Sure, they were done professionally. But do thos photographers exist? Do the negatives?
On the plus side, with ever cheaper home-based printing, scanning, etc., we’ll soon be able to bypass the WalMarts and the others…but of course that’ll just mean the creation of the equivalent of the RIAA or MPAA to come after us for “illegally” copying photographs.
Sigh.
Copyright seems to extend further and further and further (however long Disney needs Congress to protect Mickey Mouse).
Where a photographer goes out of business or dies, those IP assets presumably go somewhere.
A major problem is copyright for “orphaned works” — where the copyright owner is unknown or unreachable. The increasingly litigious nature of IP law and increasing legislative throw-weight exerted by IP organizations means that the presumption is that unless there is positive clearance by someone (even if that’s impossible), copyright will be violated.
Feh.
Copyright, like anything else that is owned, goes to the estate of the deceased. I believe photographs have a copyright of the lifetime of the creator plus 70 years. (See http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html) If this is correct, then if the photographer in question died before 1935, copyright has expired.
There are complications in copyright law that I don’t fully understand. There are copyright renewals, which I suspect don’t apply in this kind of case, and copyright also changes if the item is published. I don’t know whether or not printing a copy of a photo and selling it to a client constitutes publication in this context. Finally, copyright doesn’t go to the creator if the item in question is a “work for hire”, and I don’t fully understand why photographs don’t fall under that category.
I am not a lawyer, so the above is NOT legal advice, etc. etc. etc.
With regard to Wal-Mart and other photographic services acting to enforce others’ copyright, they are clearly trying to avoid the risk of legal liability. They are perhaps overzealous in that attempt (at least in the case described above), but it seems to me that it must be morally acceptable for a person or company to try to avoid such risks. So, it seems to me that the problem lies in the system that creates those risks, not in the people trying to avoid them. While I’m no advocate of complicating the law since I think lawyers already have too much power in modern society, it seems to me that copyright and patent law do not make the right distinctions, particularly in respect to modern computer technology. It might even be argued that copyright law doesn’t make the right distinctions with respect to older technologies like photography. If I thought congress could do a decent job of it, I’d say that copyright law should be rewritten, but since I have little faith that congress can do the right thing, I don’t know what should happen.