Image Lifted From Twitter Leads to $1.2M Payout For Haitian Photog

magic maverick writes "A U.S. federal jury has ordered Agence France-Presse and Getty Images to pay $1.2 million to a Daniel Morel, Haitian photographer, for their unauthorized use of photographs, from the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The images, posted to Twitter, were taken by an editor at AFP and then provided to Getty. A number of other organizations had already settled out of court with the photographer."

Comments

Sweet sweet copyright justice

[assemblerex]

Big business "borrows" images all the time. Nice to see they have to pay the working man (photographer) for once.

Re:Sweet sweet copyright justice

[MacDork]

which everyone on Slashdot naturally adores (heh)

You must be new here. GPL only works because of copyright.

Re:Sweet sweet copyright justice

[assemblerex]

The Hurt Locker made a profit as intended,but Voltage Pictures and are suing because they feel they are making less money than entitled. The guy in Haiti made no money at all, they just stole his images. So big business wanting every drop of blood versus a man who just wants a piece of the pie is an entirely different situation entirely. Public domain is saying you made enough money , now it belongs to everyone. This idea and public domain is under assault by companies like Voltage Pictures that want to make money forever.

Without copyright, copyleft is unneeded

[tepples]

Without copyright, anybody with more time than money could disassemble, document, and distribute any proprietary fork of a program and turn binaries back into (assembly language) source code useful for cloning the added functionality in the Free branch.

Re:He didn't understand how the Internet works

[roc97007]

Well, speaking as a photographer, the thing about selling photographs on the internet is that you generally have to show people what they're about to buy. So right click and save image is always a possibility. (There are coding ways around this, most of which are trivial to break. That's why the solutions are legal instead of technical.)

I generally have to put up with some amount of "fair use", especially for events, and usually don't make an issue of it, especially if I get a photo credit. But sell one of my photos without my permission and the law will get involved.

Point is, it's possible he knew exactly how the internet works, but with the expectation that he can display his works without having them ripped off, any more than you'd take photos of paintings in a gallery and then sell prints of art you didn't own.

...so this facebook and google thing, where they mine photos and use them as advertisements, is going to get interesting if they use a copyright work from a pro. IANAL, but I don't think a TOS will help them there.