On May 19, two California photographers filed a class action suit alleging that Instagram is liable for inducement of copyright infringement, contributory copyright infringement, and vicarious copyright infringement due to the platform’s implementation and promotion of its “embed” function. The complaint begins: “This case is about Instagram’s scheme to generate substantial revenue for its parent, Facebook, Inc., by encouraging, inducing, ...
Shortly after the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Warhol v. Goldsmith, I wandered deep into the tall grass, PJs tucked into my boots, thinking about the fair use analysis in the difficult context of fine art. And then the Supreme Court delivered Justice Breyer’s opinion in Google v. Oracle, which, among other transgressions, broke a cardinal rule by ...
The Bernie meme has been a lot of good fun and probably the kind of release valve many of us needed by the time we arrived battered, exhausted, and relieved to watch a peaceful Inauguration Day. My personal favorites are Bernie Merch Table, Bernie Yalta, and Bernie Chicago. And by now, almost everyone knows that Sanders’s campaign team had sweatshirts ...
In my recent post about the McCloskey photograph, I said that courts tend to favor a photographer’s right to capture and distribute an image, even in situations involving fairly substantial privacy invasions in order to obtain photographs of limited news value. What I had in mind was the kind of paparazzi who aggressively pursue celebrities (especially women), and I was ...
On April 14, Eric Garder, writing for the Hollywood Reporter, published a story under the headline: Court Rules Photographer Gave Up Exclusive Licensing Rights by Posting on Instagram. There is nothing technically wrong with that headline—and Gardner did not, I believe, misrepresent any facts in his article. But when I saw photographer Doug Menuez share this story on Facebook the other ...
