New Copyright Law in the UK

Some assumptions in the article that i don't necessry agree with:

For the first time anywhere in the world, the Act will permit the widespread commercial exploitation of unidentified work - the user only needs to perform a "diligent search". But since this is likely to come up with a blank, they can proceed with impunity.
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Rapscallion said:
Some assumptions in the article that i don't necessry agree with:
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If you're talking about an image with the EXIF data stripped out, so you can only really search by describing the contents. How likely do you think it is that you'll find the photographer? Unless it's a really famous photo?
 
What's to now stop some thieving scum bag from taking any image and taking out the EXIF pretending it is an orphan work??

What redress has the copyright holder got when some scumbag claims this? The penalties for using someone's work need to be made far more severe, especially for those that are repeat offenders.

I think I'm just going to liberate the contents of tesco on the grounds it is an orphan work ;)
 
nobody taking this with a pinch of salt considering coming from the register??
 
Huge Watermark is possibly the only way to prevent image theft

Making it at least very difficult to steal any images,if done right

Les (y)
 
Searching legislation.co.uk for Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act comes up with no results, which is odd if the Bill received Royal Ascent last week.

Dave
 
Surely though, even with EXIF data stripped, if you can prove that you are the creator/copyright holder the law still stands firmly on your side for copyright infringement.
 
So this isn't good! I had a few lectures about copyright and image ownership a few months back and back then we were told that the future is uncertain and now this comes out, Kinda wishing (in a way) that I hadn't spent all of this time and money on college and uni studying photography for some thieving (insert word) to just rip my images off.

From what I have read it is still a little unclear, one question that I have though when I have to write my dissertation next year we have to reference all images is this now not the case of have i miss read and understood it wrong?

I can understand for the average Joe sticking images up on instagram every five minutes and their copyright belongs to instagram and similarly with facebook or so i was informed but for the professional that makes his or her living from photography does that now mean anyone can just 'help themselves?'

Ian
 
IanTurner said:
So this isn't good! I had a few lectures about copyright and image ownership a few months back and back then we were told that the future is uncertain and now this comes out, Kinda wishing (in a way) that I hadn't spent all of this time and money on college and uni studying photography for some thieving (insert word) to just rip my images off.

From what I have read it is still a little unclear, one question that I have though when I have to write my dissertation next year we have to reference all images is this now not the case of have i miss read and understood it wrong?

I can understand for the average Joe sticking images up on instagram every five minutes and their copyright belongs to instagram and similarly with facebook or so i was informed but for the professional that makes his or her living from photography does that now mean anyone can just 'help themselves?'

Ian
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From how I understand it (correct me if I am wrong) the idea of Orphan Works is that images that have no obvious owner can be used without a license. However the problem is nobody understands what is required to show ownership, will metadata work? or do we need full fledged watermarks?
 
jacob12_1993 said:
From how I understand it (correct me if I am wrong) the idea of Orphan Works is that images that have no obvious owner can be used without a license. However the problem is nobody understands what is required to show ownership, will metadata work? or do we need full fledged watermarks?
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To show ownership you have to register each and every single work with particular registration organisations from what the register article says.

There is only one at the moment so unless it is geared up for millions of hits there is no way of actually doing it realistically.

If everyone actually went and did it the farcial nature of this system would be shown up in hours.
 
jacob12_1993 said:
From how I understand it (correct me if I am wrong) the idea of Orphan Works is that images that have no obvious owner can be used without a license. However the problem is nobody understands what is required to show ownership, will metadata work? or do we need full fledged watermarks?
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That sounds right, so for example if someone chooses to use 'The decisive moment' image, which we all know who it belongs to/who had made the image etc then that would infringe on copyright law but if someone were to use a less well known image they found on a google search they could then just use it how they see fit? i.e. they could enter it in to competitions etc, sell it or make a profit from it?

If however you happen to find it on a website that is clearly indicated that all the images on there are property of the owner, does this then become theft/copyright if someone copies, reproduces or passes their work of as their own?

I am going into Uni tomorrow and will speak to one of my tutors about this then see if they have heard about it or know of anything further.

Ian
 
IanTurner said:
That sounds right, so for example if someone chooses to use 'The decisive moment' image, which we all know who it belongs to/who had made the image etc then that would infringe on copyright law but if someone were to use a less well known image they found on a google search they could then just use it how they see fit? i.e. they could enter it in to competitions etc, sell it or make a profit from it?

If however you happen to find it on a website that is clearly indicated that all the images on there are property of the owner, does this then become theft/copyright if someone copies, reproduces or passes their work of as their own?

I am going into Uni tomorrow and will speak to one of my tutors about this then see if they have heard about it or know of anything further.

Ian
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This is the unknown at the minute as far as I can see, realistically it should be clear evidence of ownership but if somebody copies it and then strips metadata they can then plead ignorance. It will be interesting to see where this goes once the overreactions calm down and people look at the legislation closely.
 
jacob12_1993 said:
This is the unknown at the minute as far as I can see, realistically it should be clear evidence of ownership but if somebody copies it and then strips metadata they can then plead ignorance. It will be interesting to see where this goes once the overreactions calm down and people look at the legislation closely.
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Indeed! I'm just worried now that i have spent time and a lot of money on a degree that will be potentially worthless if someone can do as you have mentioned.

I guess I will have to be patient and see where this goes...

Ian
 
This legislation is not just about photographs, it covers many aspects of artistic copyright including design and software to name but a couple of things.
 
jacob12_1993 said:
This is the unknown at the minute as far as I can see, realistically it should be clear evidence of ownership but if somebody copies it and then strips metadata they can then plead ignorance. It will be interesting to see where this goes once the overreactions calm down and people look at the legislation closely.
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'xactly.

Even worse....say I wanted to rip off one of your pics. All I do is copy it, strip the exif and post to Tumblr under a fake account. Then I can happily post that to my site claiming that I had found it on the web and been unable to trace the owner. Even when you find out (and even if you're pretty sure that's what I did) there's no easy way to proceed against me.

I've said it before, the age of copyright is over. Its decline started with that nice Mr Berners-Lee.
 
They still have to perform a diligent search to find the owner. I'd imagine Googles image search where you simply drop the image in question onto the page and Google searches the intertubes for it will come in quite handy, pointing many people to the original facebook/google plus/image host.

For instance a search for tiler65's avatar
avatar1030_20.gif


takes you to this thread http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=392385 and we're a couple of clicks away from making contact.

That presupposes they're nice people doing a diligent search, if they're not, I don't see we're any worse off than we were before the law came out.
 
maff said:
They still have to perform a diligent search to find the owner. I'd imagine Googles image search where you simply drop the image in question onto the page and Google searches the intertubes for it will come in quite handy, pointing many people to the original facebook/google plus/image host.

For instance a search for tiler65's avatar
avatar1030_20.gif


takes you to this thread http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=392385 and we're a couple of clicks away from making contact.

That presupposes they're nice people doing a diligent search, if they're not, I don't see we're any worse off than we were before the law came out.
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but you are only linking to the owner of the avatar and not the owner of the copyright - which is entirely different!
 
And I'm sure if I emailed you asking you if you owned copyright or not you'd tell me and my search could move on, maybe the avatar wasnt the best example, but take any picture from the C&C pages and googles image search would find the owner pretty damn fast.

Maybe its this person: http://zetcom.deviantart.com/art/Groucho-Marx-150253461
 
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maff said:
And I'm sure if I emailed you asking you if you owned copyright or not you'd tell me and my search could move on, maybe the avatar wasnt the best example, but take any picture from the C&C pages and googles image search would find the owner pretty damn fast.

Maybe its this person: http://zetcom.deviantart.com/art/Groucho-Marx-150253461
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that one is a photograph of a photograph.......... where do we stand on that one? it was shot with a sony dsc-s90 which I am quite positive in saying that camera wasn't invented when the original shot was taken.
 
This will work out great for professionals. It's been too easy to promote up until now.

It's going to go back to face-to-face portfolio viewings. Less website-orientated promotion.

I'm looking at this quite positively.
 
London Headshots said:
This will work out great for professionals. It's been too easy to promote up until now.

It's going to go back to face-to-face portfolio viewings. Less website-orientated promotion.

I'm looking at this quite positively.
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How do you work that out? At worse all it will be is a small watermark on the image? I definitely won't be giving up the website-orientated approach it just too big a market to ever dream of excluding
 
Even without going through the hassle of wanting to claim an orphaned photo, many photo sharing sites strip out the metadata. I guess if you know that the photo was taken within the last x years, then there "should" be metadata in the original so the electronic file you find doesn't have any, how far do you have to search for it to be "diligent" ?
 
maff said:
They still have to perform a diligent search to find the owner. I'd imagine Googles image search where you simply drop the image in question onto the page and Google searches the intertubes for it will come in quite handy, pointing many people to the original facebook/google plus/image host.

For instance a search for tiler65's avatar
avatar1030_20.gif


takes you to this thread http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=392385 and we're a couple of clicks away from making contact.

That presupposes they're nice people doing a diligent search, if they're not, I don't see we're any worse off than we were before the law came out.
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How would i know to search for Tylers avater if that image came up on some random google image search
 
I'm going to play devil's advocate here.

If I wanted to sell prints for example, what's stopping me creating a fake Google Plus account or similar and picking a collection of amazing shots from anywhere on the web, stripping the meta data and posting them to the account claiming not to be the owner or to know the original source, just that I found them using Google Image Search and I'm sharing them because I think they're fantastic. Somewhere down the line I could come along, decide I want to print and sell these images, send a few emails to the owner of the Google Plus profile (also me), get a reply from myself stating that the owners are not known and take this as due diligence and proceed to sell the images elsewhere? If it truly is that easy, Christ, what a crapper.
 
Just imagine those online print shops on eBay etc who already rip off people's work, they're going to have a field day selling our shots! Not happy to be honest, seems like a typical Government - Large corp handshake (with no supposed monetary bribe *cough*)
 
What about using invisible watermarks/stenography to sign photos? As long as you have the original that should provide proof of ownership would it not?
 
Me²;5538777 said:
If I wanted to sell prints for example, what's stopping me creating a fake Google Plus account or similar and picking a collection of amazing shots from anywhere on the web, stripping the meta data and posting them to the account claiming not to be the owner or to know the original source, just that I found them using Google Image Search and I'm sharing them because I think they're fantastic. Somewhere down the line I could come along, decide I want to print and sell these images, send a few emails to the owner of the Google Plus profile (also me), get a reply from myself stating that the owners are not known and take this as due diligence and proceed to sell the images elsewhere? If it truly is that easy, Christ, what a crapper.
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Nothing is stopping you doing that now under the old rules.

It's still fraud and infringement.


Steve.
 
jacob12_1993 said:
How do you work that out? At worse all it will be is a small watermark on the image? I definitely won't be giving up the website-orientated approach it just too big a market to ever dream of excluding
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You think amateurs and cash strapped professionals are going to spend the money to register each and every image they produce, or are they instead just going to upload less?

Just by way of fear-mongering, this act will significantly reduce the stream of photography hitting both personal websites and public image hosting websites.

Just as Instagram's traffic halved in a day when it tried to introduce it's new user agreement.
 
London Headshots said:
You think amateurs and cash strapped professionals are going to spend the money to register each and every image they produce, or are they instead just going to upload less?

Just by way of fear-mongering, this act will significantly reduce the stream of photography hitting both personal websites and public image hosting websites.

Just as Instagram's traffic halved in a day when it tried to introduce it's new user agreement.
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But is that a good thing?

There is nothing wrong with multitudes of web images - so long as nobody/corporations steal the images to pass as their own or far any commercial gain. (gain does not have to be monetary - it can be kudos too!)

The web has certainly brought new life into photography as an art and I would hate to see that stopped just because of a UK law that might ruin it for the little folk.
 
WillNicholls said:
Has this been passed?

If your images are watermarked are they able to be used, or do you have to register them all one by one?

Someone should start a petition!
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The enabling act was signed into law last week. SIs will follow with the actual laws.

Nothing to stop someone removing a watermark and EXIF and claiming it is orphaned.
 
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