News Paper took screen shot of my web gallery

[emooreart]

A newspaper took screen shots of photos in my website gallery and used them in a damaging story to one of my models without my permission. The images are copyrighted to me. Can they do that? What are my options?

www.emooreart.com/photo.html

Thanx

Eric

[brmill26]

That's definitely a tough question. The news has quite a lot of leeway when it comes to reporting. My initial thought is that because your images are on the internet, they are considered in the public eye, and the news has a lot of latitude with anything public.

All I was able to find was this story, which does show that a screenshot could be protected (or at least some lawyers think so), but this is not a news-related thing, so it doesn't completely apply here.
http://networks.silicon.com/mobile/0...180,00.htm?r=1

It might be worthwhile to contact a copyright lawyer, it seems like an interesting issue.

As far as the story being damaging, as I'm sure you're aware, if the story is true, there's nothing you can do about that.

[emooreart]

Thanx for getting back to! I am meeting with a copyright lawyer this week and will post his recommendations

Eric

[brmill26]

That'd be great, Eric, I'm very interested in seeing what an expert says and it'd be very informative for us all here.

[emooreart]

I spoke to a lawyer and he says that Journalist can do the screen capture. They worded the article with "As seen on photographer Eric Moore's website" and showed my gallery in a web browser as a back door way to use the images. Had they used the images alone I might have had a case.

I also found this on the web:

US Copyright Act of 1976, Section 106: " The owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: (...) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work." The U.S. law permits copying of images or text for "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research."

It's pretty lame because 2 other news papers offered to buy the images and I turned them down.

Oh well. We learn something new every day.

[brmill26]

Thanks for writing back Eric. That's good information for everyone to know. Sorry there's nothing you can do about it, but then, that's part of what makes our press free. Doesn't make it any less better when you feel like you're on the short end of things though.