Discussion Board

Privacy Rights

Andrew Kantor was a newspaper reporter and was confused with what pictures he could legally take so he conducted some research and found out the following facts:
You can take pictures of anything you can see in public even if it is on private property. (There are exceptions to what you can publish. It’s apparently against the law to take pictures of bridges in NYC. (I didn’t know this when we took an awesome picture of the Brooklyn Bridge, but we were in New Jersey so I don’t know that might be okay.
Publishing is a bit different. If the person did not expect privacy, then it’s probably going to be ok to publish the photo. If you needed a telephoto lens to capture someone in private, then you can’t publish the photo. If the picture is embarrassing to a typical person, you can’t publish it. For example, if you took a picture of someone in the bath tub you can’t publish that one! If the picture puts the person in false light, you can’t publish it. For example, if you put a photo of your teacher on a drug site that can’t be published.
You can’t sell a picture of someone else without their permission. (The exception to this is for news like newspapers, websites, or magazines.)
Here’s another exception: If you take a picture of a cute baby and it does not matter who the baby is, then you can sell the picture. Is the value of the image based on the identity of the person pictured in it? If not, you can probably sell the picture.
You can’t sell images of copyrighted things like Coca Cola, but you can sell a picture of a girl drawing with a Crayola crayon if the subject is the girl and not the crayon.
This was interesting to me because I saw a really cool old barn and I stopped to take pictures of it. The owners came out and gave me very strange looks so I left without a good picture. I was not on their private property so legally I could have taken the picture.
Kantor, A. (2009). Legal rights of photographers. Retrieved July 4, 2010, from http://www.andrewkantor.com/useful/Legal-Rights-of-Photographers.pdf

I found an article about copying old family photographs. Apparently many copy shops have been sued for reproducing copyright works and then have had to pay extensive damages for infringing copyrighted works. Businesses may face liability if they reproduce a work even if they did not know the work was copyrighted! That is kind of frightening. If a wedding photographer takes the picture, he/she owns the copyright unless he/she transfers, in writing, the copyright to another person. I recently got a release in writing so I could use a twelve-year-old Glamor shot picture of my daughter for her middle school yearbook. It was such a cute picture because she was three and all decked out. She wanted it for her yearbook page so I called Glamor Shots & asked for a release for the yearbook. It was very easy.
There are times when you can reproduce a photograph because of “fair use”, but a copy shop can still choose to not copy the picture. A federal court can determine whether a particular use is really fair use.
Can I use someone else's work? Can someone else use mine?( 2009). Retrieved July 4, 2010, from http://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/faq-fairuse.html