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You may recall Blockai, a startup dedicated to helping photographers protect their work and ensure that creativity is given proper legal protection. Blockai has rebranded and relaunched as Binded. Binded is the world’s first copyright platform and it is run by a talented team, including co-founder and CEO Nathan Lands,...
Facebook strips metadata from photographs and images when you upload them. The popular social site has not officially commented on this, but there are some potentially good reasons for their doing so. The site is used by over a billion people per day and many of them upload photos with potentially private information,...
Image theft is a serious problem that affects many photographers. I've personally been the victim as the index image to the right was being used on someone's Flickr page, with the user claiming to have taken the image using an app that they created. In my case it was a moral issue, but in more serious instances, people...
As photographers, many of us care about copyrights. We want to protect our work and be financially compensated if someone were to misuse our creations. However, as easy as it seems that should be, registering and protecting copyrights is far from simple. Large organizations can abuse photographers -- and other artists --...
Following recording artist, producer and actor Prince's untimely death on April 21st, there was an outpouring of emotions in the media and across the internet. Not surprisingly, a lot of fans and media outlets shared images and videos, many of these perhaps without permission of the rights holders.
Photographer...
Belgian photographer Ezequiel Scagnetti found himself in a difficult situation over the past weekend. Scagnetti was subjected to harassment and people flooding his photography business with negative reviews all because famous pop star Harry Styles stole one of his photos and posted it to his Instagram account.
Styles,...
Back in 2011, nature photographer David Slater set up his camera for a female Celebes crested macaque to use (although his story of what exactly transpired has changed over the years). The monkey proceeded to use Slater's camera to capture self-portraits that news media outlets eventually picked up on. Wikimedia Commons...
The National Press Photographers Association, more commonly referred to as NPPA, has announced it’s working on writing up official comments to submit to the United States Copyright Office in regards to protecting the copyrights of visual work.
The drafting of the official comments will be done by NPPA attorneys, who are using years of experience...
Vivian Maier is probably the most famous street photographer who saw no publicity during her lifetime. Working as a nanny for about forty years, Maier is said to have taken more than 150,000 photographs, mostly in Chicago and New York. But it was only after her death in 2009 that her...
Software giant Microsoft is notorious for taking heat from all sides over controversial aspects of its products, and has often had to pay hefty penalties in the past. The company's latest quarrel is with Getty Images, who is suing Microsoft over alleged copyright violations by its Bing Image Widget tool.
The Bing Image Widget is a software tool...
Unless you've been living under a rock these last couple of weeks, you've doubtless heard the story of nature photographer David Slater vs. Wikimedia. Slater published a photo in 2011 which was picked up by news media around the world, and shortly thereafter, by Wikimedia Commons, the free, online media repository...
It has not been a great week for relations between photographers and rock bands.
Earlier this week, a story surfaced about a tiff between photographer Rohan Anderson and post-hardcore band The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, who had posted one of Anderson’s photos of the group to their Facebook page...
An appeals court has overturned a lower court decision, confirming that images registered for copyright in large groups meet the federal requirements for copyright, even if each photograph doesn't have a title, photographer, and description listed.
This ruling comes as part of a drawn out legal battle between Alaska...
Piracy is a big and oft-used word these days, especially when it comes to the internet. Another word often used in conjunction with 'piracy' is 'intellectual property.' If you're making a living from creative work such as photography, music, or similar art forms, then seeing your work being used without your consent, without proper attribution, or...
Many of us enjoy selling framed prints of our own photographs, but what do you do when one of them turns up for sale at an auction? Is it right that the original buyer can sell it, or is it still your property? It's a thorny question at the heart of an imbroglio over the recent sale of a collection of photographs in...
We've heard of classic photos being auctioned off -- such as this signed Alfred Eisenstaedt print of the famous "Kiss in Times Square" photo -- but this is the first time we've heard of the copyright to the images being sold as well. That's what's happening with 3,700 unpublished color and black-and-white negatives shot...
BuzzFeed is something of an unstoppable juggernaut of viral media, encouraging users to share the site's posts all across social media. But one photographer is not only taking issue with BuzzFeed using his work without permission, but also for encouraging it to be shared, and is suing the website for $3.6 million.
After last week's horrific attacks at the Boston Marathon, and the subsequent revelations of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as prime suspects, people scrabbled to gather any and all sources of information about what had happened during the explosions and who these young men were. And because of this, image rights seem to have been widely ignored for the purpose of either tracking...
The fallout from Instagram's terms of service controversy last month could be worse than expected, a new report contends. According to AppStats, a statistics tool for Facebook applications, Facebook's Instagram has lost nearly half its daily users since an uproar over a proposed revised terms of use statement swept the...
On Tuesday, we reported that popular photo sharing service Instagram was preparing a controversial update to its terms of use and privacy policies that -- among other changes -- would grant it sweeping rights to user-generated content. Just a day after the new policies were announced, Instagram faced a huge backlash from its user community,...