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Court Rules It's Ok To Tag Pics On Facebook Without Permission
neoflexycurrent writes "A federal court has ruled that photos of a woman on Facebook showing her drinking were properly used as evidence in a child custody case. She had argued she was identified without permission. But the court rejected that argument. In reaching that decision, the court made the interesting observation that: '[t]here is nothing within the law that requires [one's] permission when someone takes a picture and posts it on a Facebook page. There is nothing that requires [one's] permission when she [is] "tagged" or identified as a person in those pictures.'"
Well, see, in countries where there's decent privacy laws, it's illegal to take a picture of somebody where that person is the subject of the photo, and then to publish that photo without their permission. You can still be in the background of a picture, as "noise" as it were, but if you're the actual *subject* of the picture, then they need permission to publish. (so those tourist photos you took of the Eiffel tower are fine: those people wandering around in the square below it are not the subject of the picture)
Such laws usually have to do with newspapers and magazines, but they could be extended to apply to people posting pictures of their friends on the 'net, but I don't think that kind of use was really in the minds of the lawmakers when they drafted this kind of law.
The phrase you are looking for is "easy cases make bad law.
For those who are unclear: the WORST law, in terms of setting precedents to be relied on later, comes from cases in which a defendant is "obviously guilty of something" or just plain unsympathetic. The end result is a jury ruling on the emotional bounds of what they are presented, rather than on facts in the case, or in the appellate side, a bunch of judges making "fuck it we can see they are guilty why are you bothering us with this crap" rulings.
Ironically, the counterargument - hard cases make bad law - is also valid. Hard cases require very case-specific rulings and legal hair-splitting in order to arrive at the verdict or appellate review result, but then inevitably someone comes along and tries to apply them to completely different situations as precedent.
"The days of 35mm cameras" might seem as ancient as the dinosaurs to you, but concerns that new technologies and new businesses exploiting of those technologies are infringing on the right "to be let alone" have been raised for more than a century.
Two future Supreme Court of the US Justices, named Warren and Brandeis, published a classic paper entitled "The Right to Privacy" in the Harvard Law Journal in 1890: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html. It is on of the most frequently cited law journal articles of all time and was the first to identify a Constitutional basis for a "right to privacy".
Of course in their day, the new technology was photographs (which were slow back then, but enough faster than paintings that they could be taken surreptitiously) and newspapers were the new business exploiting those technologies but the principles and issues have not changed in a long, LONG time. If you want to read some discussion by a couple of really smart guys about what acts in public deserve privacy, read the paper.