Photographers Want Their Cut From Google's Ebooks

It's not just the writers anymore: carluva writes "The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and several other visual artist groups are suing Google over its digitization of of millions of books, claiming copyright infringement related to images within the books. The photographers initially wanted to be included in the authors' and publishers' class action suit, but filed their own suit after that request was denied. Google and others assert that images are only included in the digital copies when permission has been obtained from the copyright holder."

Comments

And after that, the models will want their cut

[Palestrina]

The complexity is that a modern book can have a large number of owners, who may have come together and agreed to publish a given book, or even a given edition of the book. But republication, translation, adaption for the stage, movies, song lyrics, etc., all need to be negotiated separately. It gets even crazier with video, since then you have musician rights, composer rights, etc.

I think Lessig gave us one of the best reads on this problem a couple of months ago: http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2010/02/05_lessig.html

Photographs

[Andy Smith]

I'm a newspaper photographer. I'll offer this perspective on Google's respect for copyright:

Google recently used some of my photographs on Google News, as the 'headline' photos to represent collected coverage of major stories. This fell outside any reasonable definition of fair use. This was for-profit publication of photographs that other publishers were paying for the right to use. Google used them for free.

Now, it's common in the news business that publishers use breaking news photos without permission, because they need to publish them quickly. But they ALWAYS pay afterwards, market rate, without question. This side of the business works on trust.

When I sent Google a bill, their first reaction was exactly what it should be: They would pay the market rate. They rang up to get my banking details for fund transfer, and that should have been the end of the matter.

Then they wrote to me saying that they wouldn't pay. They even denied publishing the images, which was clearly untrue. They told me that to take the matter further I would need to file a DMCA complaint -- and in doing so I must give Google permission to publish the DMCA complaint online. I believe this is outrageous! I only sell my pictures to UK publishers, yet here was a US company publishing my work without permission, and telling me that I would need to pursue them through the US legal system!

This gives me a fairly clear view of Google's attitude to other people's copyright. It seems that Google will take what they want, publish it however they want, profit, and then to hell with the people who originally produced the material in question.

Re:Photographs

[nblender]

So if I understand you correctly, you want google to pay 'market rate' for an 80x80 portion of a picture that you took with your EOS 5D-II? How small a part of your image does google have to use in order to qualify for "fair use"?

Re:Photographs

[stephanruby]

Google recently used some of my photographs on Google News, as the 'headline' photos to represent collected coverage of major stories.

You mean. Google recently used some photographs of yours on Google News, as the 'thumbnail' image to represent the collected coverage of major stories, linking back to the original online newspaper which originally published your photograph.

This fell outside any reasonable definition of fair use.

Who says? You do, but you're a little biased. Aren't you.

This was for-profit publication of photographs that other publishers were paying for the right to use. Google used them for free.

Yes, Google links thumbnails and summary information to online sources. It does the same thing on its search engine, which is also a for-profit operation. And it does this with the robots.txt (or sitemap.xml) permission of the original newspaper that published your photographs. If the original newspaper had just listed the folder in which your photograph was in, and told the googlebot not to index your photograph, then google wouldn't have used your photograph (to make a thumbnail out of it).

It seems your original beef is with the newspapers that published your photographs, not google. I think many would argue that indexing, linking to, publishing the summary information, and automatically making thumbnails, all because the original web site permits you through the robots.txt file, falls well within the purpose of 'fair use'.

Re:Me too

[bloodhawk]

Why I agree this is probably a huge case of opportunism, The fact remains google are evil bastards in how they are handling this and really they deserve what they get. An system that can take your property and requires you to "opt out" rather than opt in deserves to have as many law suits thrown at it as humanly possible.

Re:Me too

[beakerMeep]

I don't see how it is so cut and dried. If these artists have legitimate copyrights and Google is presenting the image in results, it certainly could be argued that is a form of republishing. Whether you agree or not, the issue is not exactly just 'me too.' While there may be an element of that TFA is pretty light on details as to what the plaintiffs are claiming represents unauthorized republishing of their work.