FRESH

Hacker News

Blogger defeats photographer's copyright claim

96 points by speckx

by doctorzook

4 subcomments

This seems... troubling to me.
Essentially, the judge found that this qualifies as fair use because (a) publishing this with commentary is "transformative" even through "Defendants used the exact, unaltered [photo] in the blog post"; (b) "the blog post is not focused on the [photo]"; and (c) "there is no indication that [the use] impacted or has potential to impact the market or value of the Photo".
As an amateur photographer, this doesn't give me warm fuzzy feelings about posting anything I shoot online. By the reasoning here, a company (as in the commercial site here) can use my photos so long as the use is incidental and doesn't earn them too much money -- or at least impact my revenue, which is currently $0.
Heaven help me, though, should I misuse a corporation's copyrighted works, even purely personally.

by arjie

3 subcomments

> I was struck by the fact that the blog post had 43 views. With such low stakes, how did this case make it to federal court and reach summary judgment???
Yeah, fascinating that a 43-view blog post would go all the way to the federal court like this. Surely the plaintiff often has people give up and pay because they fear the case? Otherwise the economics of chasing down copyright violations of this scale surely don't make sense.

by kmoser

6 subcomments

Lots to comment on but this stood out:
> “A lawsuit like this heightens the demand for Generative AI replacements.”
Most generative AI corpora were arguably trained on copyrighted material, making the output potentially infringing.

by nerdsniper

0 subcomment

Wow:
> Remarkably, the opinion doesn’t mention the statute of limitations at all, even though the original post had been published no less than 14 years earlier (I’m crediting the 2011 blog transfer as a possible republication). This silence reflects that the statute of limitations doesn’t functionally exist in online copyright law any more. Each new view/download nominally constitutes a new infringement, in which case the SOL resets to the most recent visit to the post.

by gedy

2 subcomments

Image in question: https://static-assets.artlogic.net/w_1600,h_1600,c_limit,f_a...

by mchusma

0 subcomment

by leephillips

0 subcomment

The language of the article is strongly biased in favor of people stealing artwork: “photographers should stop suing bloggers for copyright infringement!”
The plaintiff gets scolded for not trying to settle. But, by the article’s own account, the defendant ignored emails from the plaintiff!
Photographers should not stop suing if that’s what it takes. People should stop stealing.

by tancop

2 subcomments

another day another reason why copyright should be for commercial use only (yes that means piracy will be legal). you can throw out entire categories of bad faith cases. art stealing companies still have to pay up and its easier to get what you deserve as an artist when the courts not filled with a backlog of useless low value claims.

by mock-possum

2 subcomments

> there is a dearth of evidence on the record that Messiah knowingly failed to credit the Photographer when she posted the Parker Train Photo on her blog ... Messiah merely found the Photo on Google Images by searching “army fashion,” saving the file on her computer without altering the Photo or the filename, and then publishing the Photo on her blog. She testified that at that time, she looked for a watermark, could not find one, and had no knowledge of the Photographer. She also testified that the filename, “Melvin-Sokolsky5.jpg,” was provided by the source website and she did not know it referenced the Photographer.
That’s a bit rich, isn’t it? Why did she not simply search the file name, nevermind reverse image searching the photo itself? Since when is ignorance an excuse - especially in a case like this, when claiming ignorance/negligence could easily cover for deliberate intent?