The Vivian Maier Dilemma

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Vivian Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was a nanny living in Chicago and New York during the 50's and 60's.  She was also a photographer whose work involved sizable numbers of photos taken of street scenes.  She was not publicly recognized as an artist until after her death and upon the discovery/purchase of her storage locker which contained over 150,000 unprinted negative, hundreds of rolls of un-developed rolls, along with a few thousand that had  been printed (leaving open the question of what she wanted produced).  Subsequently, the negatives were acquired by a handful of entrepreneurs, and select works are now being exhibited and sold as prints.  What is left out of this story is that she died largely without funds of her own, and that she died without any heirs.   The storage locker was sold because no one paid the storage fees.  So who owns the copyright in these photos? Vivian died in Illinois a couple...
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Tattoo Copyrights

Tattoo Copyrights

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Can I Copyright my Tattoo? A while back someone asked me about writing a blog post on copyright law and tattoos. After thinking about it, I realized that the issue is one that provides a great opportunity to illustrate (no pun intended) some core concepts about copyright law that are often misunderstood by the general public and sometimes by creatives. At issue is who owns the copyright in that tat on your forearm. After all, a tattoo is really no different than other creative work and as long as it is an “original work of authorship” (Most likely) and “fixed in a tangible form” (most defiantly), US law states that the subject matter is subject to copyright protection. A person who originally creates something generally has the exclusive right to control how that “expression” is used by others – they can give it away, sell it, or just prevent anyone else from using it. Tats are no different. When a tattoo artist...
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Does the Twitter ToS dedicate everything you post to public domain?? – NO!

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I use to say that it was a myth that if it was on the Internet it was free to use. While still a myth, photojournalist Daniel Morela may have reason to question whether this in fact still true. Morla was recently sued by Agence France Presse (AFP) for “antagonistic assertion of rights” for accusing AFP of violating his copyright in several photos taken following the January earthquake - Morela has counter sued for copyright infringement. AFP has asked for summary judgment that it did not infringe on Morela's copyrights (complaint). AFP's claims are interesting because, in part, they note that since Morela used Twitter to distribute the photos (which he did not - he used Twitpic), the Twitter Terms of Service (ToS) granting Twitter the right to distribute the photos should be extended to AFP as well. Besides the fact that AFP appears to have little understanding of the facts of their own case, this reading of the Twitter ToS...
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