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Check this great article by David Riecks on how to protect your images -

Six Ways to Keep your Digital Images from Becoming “Orphan Works”

The U.S. Copyright Office will host a Copyright Matters program on May 6, 2013, at 3:00 p.m. in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress. A panel of experts will address “Nimmer on Copyright: Celebrating 50 Years” with reflections about the treatise and copyright law. The panel will be moderated by Karyn Temple Claggett, associate register of copyrights and director of policy and international affairs, and includes David Nimmer, UCLA School of Law and Irell & Manella LLP; Jon A. Baumgarten, former general counsel in the Copyright Office; Peter S. Menell, professor of law at the University of California Berkeley School of Law; Robert Brauneis, professor of law at The George Washington University Law School; and Shira Perlmutter, chief policy officer and director for international affairs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The event will be hosted by Maria A. Pallante, Register of Copyrights. Joseph Salvo, president of the Copyright Society of the USA, will give opening remarks. The event is free and open to the public.

You must file your copyright infringement claims in federal district court. Check this blog entry for more information.  Unfortunately, the costs to file suit are increasing.

Specifically, the Judicial Conference initiated a new general administrative fee for civil cases filed in the district courts. The new $50 general administrative fee is in addition to the current $350 filing fee for civil cases and becomes effective May 1, 2013. So it’s going to cost $400 to initiate your copyright infringement case. Hopefully, you’ll be eligible for statutory damages and be able to recover your costs from the infringer.

On Wednesday, April 24th, from 1 to 3 pm, the U.S. Copyright Office will host a Copyright Matters program in recognition of World Intellectual Property Day. The program will be held in historic Coolidge Auditorium on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., and is free and open to the public. This year’s theme, as announced by the World Intellectual Property Organization, is “Creativity: the Next Generation.”

The program will feature performances from members of the Nashville Songwriters Association International, including NSAI President Lee Thomas Miller (e.g., You’re Gonna Miss This, recorded by Trace Adkins), Jessi Alexander (e.g., The Climb, recorded by Miley Cyrus), and Brett James (Jesus Take the Wheel, recorded by Carrie Underwood). Register of Copyrights Maria A. Pallante will speak, as will James Pooley, Deputy Director General of the Innovation and Technology Sector of the World Intellectual Property Organization, and Teresa Rea, Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property. Filmmakers from the Copyright Alliance will also present.

World Intellectual Property Day, internationally observed on April 26th, marks the date in 1970 when the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Convention came in to force. The anniversary of this occasion is observed as a way of promoting and increasing general understanding of intellectual property.

Before it’s possible to pursue and enforce infringements of your photographs, you first need to know about them! Image Witness is an innovative new solution designed to show photographers where their content is showing up online.

As Image Witness explains:

It’s currently possible to track individual images online but until now, no one has provided a solution to manage a photographers entire image collection. Image Witness provides a unique reporting platform that shows you where your content is online and provides automated processes to filter and tag results for you each month. Once you know where your content is online, you are then in a position to do something about it.

You may try Image Witness’ service for free at http://www.imagewitness.com/pricing.php.

ALSO - Image Witness is giving away 3-month trials of its “small” plan (which covers up to 1500 images each month) to three (3) of the Photo Attorney’s blog readers!  So the first three readers to send an email to photoattorneyprize@imagewitness.com get the prize.  GOOD LUCK!  

Update:  while the three prizes have been claimed, Image Witness now is offering a free 25% increase in images monitored per plan to any others that enter.  Thanks, Image Witness!

The U.S. Copyright Office will host a Copyright Matters program on May 6, 2013, at 3:00 p.m. in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress. A panel of experts will address “Nimmer on Copyright: Celebrating 50 Years” with reflections about the treatise and copyright law. The panel will be moderated by Karyn Temple Claggett, associate register of copyrights and director of policy and international affairs, and includes David Nimmer, UCLA School of Law and Irell & Manella LLP; Jon Baumgarten, former general counsel in the Copyright Office; Barton Beebe, professor of law at New York University School of Law; Robert Brauneis, professor of law at The George Washington University Law School; and Shira Perlmutter, chief policy officer and director for international affairs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The event will be hosted by Maria A. Pallante, Register of Copyrights. Joseph Salvo, president of the Copyright Society of the USA, will give opening remarks. The event is free and open to the public.

The Copyright Matters lecture series was founded by Register of Copyrights Maria A. Pallante in 2011 as a community forum to discuss the practical implications of copyright law in the 21st century and to provide education and training to the staff of the U.S. Copyright Office. Through the series, a wide range of invited speakers – including Congressional leaders, authors, market experts, and legal scholars – present topics of critical importance to the copyright debate. Lectures occur throughout the year at the historic Library of Congress and include discussions about authorship, copyright registration, marketplace investment, copyright enforcement, fair use, international norm setting, orphan works and other updates and revisions of copyright law for the digital age.

Our blog post back in 2010 on the important issue of which social media sites preserve your websites deserves an update.  David Riecks continues his good work, including over at www.damcoalition.com.  David recently reported on the new study by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) that found that “major social networks like Facebook, Twitter or Flickr remove copyright information and other useful embedded data from pictures posted by their users.” The results are available at www.embeddedmetadata.org/testresults. Also check the news release about the Social Media Study.

The Copyright Office is in the process of identifying and evaluating potential improvements and technical enhancements to the information technology platforms that support its registration and recordation functions. The Office seeks comments on how stakeholders use the current online system for registering claims to copyright and recording documents and how this system meets user expectations. In addition, the Office wants to know how stakeholders would like to interact with the Office electronically in the future, that is, what online services the stakeholders would like to have. A comment form is posted on the Copyright Office website at www.copyright.gov/docs/technical_upgrades. Comments are due on May 21, 2013.

Christopher Boffoli is a Seattle-based photographer who has been dealing with infringements for a while. He’s got a new claim and was kind enough to share his story. He explains:

This is in reference to a series of images that I’ve been shooting since 2002 that I call Big Appetites.  The work features tiny figures photographed against real food backdrops.  These images have been published in more than 95 countries around the world and are represented by fine art galleries in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia.  More information about the work can be seen on my website here:  http://bigappetites.net.

[Recently], the gallery that represents my work in London altered me to the fact that there was an amateur photographer in Rome named Tony Polinni who was apparently creating his own exact (or close) replicas of my photographs and selling them to media syndicators.  The syndicator had already sold his images to media outlets, including the UK Daily Mail which ran a big feature with his “work” on Wednesday.  And the creepiest thing was that, in the article that accompanied the images which asked him about his inspiration and the messages in his work, the quotes from Polinni were things that I had said in interviews or that had come off my website!  My photographs have been very well-received in Italy and were featured in a December issue of Italian Vogue.  So there has obviously been more than enough opportunity for this guy to see my work.

While there are plenty of artists and photographers doing parallel work with scale juxtaposition and figures, you will see from the attached PDF (Boffoli v. Polinni comparison) this is clearly a case of plagiarism.  He is copying my exact images as best he can.  I reached out to 500px.com (where he had posted dozens of images and seemed to be basking in the praise from commenters  for his originality and brilliance), the Daily Mail and his photo syndicator, Solent.  Fortunately, they all immediately recognized this as a blatant case of plagiarism and everyone pulled his images.  His syndicator recalled his work from their partners and from the media clients they had already sold to.  The sites obviously had to remove his work as they were probably guilty of contributory copyright infringement.  But still I appreciated how efficient and professional they were.

My legal team is in the process of drafting a cease and desist letter for Mr. Polinni.  I had hoped that have all of his images pulled would have sent him a strong message that what he did was wrong.  But unfortunately he has been defiant, insisting that he is not a plagiarist but merely was inspired by my work.  I expect I’d have a strong copyright case against this guy.  However, the fact that he lives in Italy makes the prospect all the more tedious and expensive.  So we’re hoping the cease and desist will have some traction.

As a digital photographer of the Internet age copyright infringement is an unfortunate part of the game.  But I can’t say that I’ve ever been so excessively plagiarized before and the fact the plagiarist insists he has done nothing wrong is all the more frustrating.

Christopher has a history of protecting his work, and we applaud him for his efforts!  Keep it up!

Bill Hemmel has provided an update to the previous blog entry on the attempt to make aerial photos of homes illegal in New Hampshire.  He attended the hearing on the bill and reports as follows:

NH House Bill 619-FN - “AN ACT prohibiting images of a person’s residence to be taken from the air”

The NH House Criminal Justice and Public Safety committee held a hearing on this bill [on] 2/19/2013. Besides the author of this bill (Rep Neal Kurt, RHillsboro) and the committee, there were quite a few others in attendance, some surprising. They included the United States Army, NH DOT (Bureau of Aeronautics), the ACLU, and NH State Police, along with paid lobbyists for the NH Broadcasters Association and Apple Computer. A lobbyist from TechAmerica – representing many major hitters in the drone industry- was also there, along with myself and the owner CR Helicopter in Nashua.

The original bill was never submitted to the committee. (My guess is that Rep Kurt received so much flak prior to the hearing, he re-thought his position.)

30 minutes before the hearing started, he presented a revised amendment that deleted all references to anything other than drones. In his opening remarks, he admitted that the bill was conceived after he saw a $300 drone toy- with video for sale in a mall this past Christmas.

While providing exceptions for law enforcement, the bill now makes it a FELONY for an individual to use a drone for “surveillance”. Surveillance, as defined in his new bill, would include photographing the inside of a building (huh?), or a “recognizable” image of a persons face. (Thus your 12 year old, flying a toy over
the neighbors pool and recording video, would technically be a felon if convicted.)

The bill also prohibits the use of drones carrying weapons or “lazer rays” (honest!), and specifies that they cannot be used to hunt game. First to testify was a Brigadier General from the US Army. He began by firmly reminding the committee that the airspace above New Hampshire was not owned by New Hampshire, but by the United States of America, and therefore controlled by the FAA. One of the committee members challenged him as to where that authority came from. The General was kind enough to quote chapter and verse. There were no more questions.

The only participants to speak in favor of the new bill were the NH Dept of Safety and the ACLU. All others spoke against it.

At the time of recess, a vote had not been taken. A post-session conversation with one of the committee members leads me to believe that the bill will not be included in this years legislation, but may be held for review again next year.

This new version of the amendment is [now] available online at http://www.gencourt.state.nh.us/legislation/amendments/2013-0448H.html

The New Hampshire branch of the ACLU supports the new bill (see http://nhclu.org/hb-619/).

The Concord Monitor newspaper has reported on the latest status of the bill (look for “Drones be gone” towards the middle of the page at http://www.concordmonitor.com/home/4869803-95/state-bill-budget-committee.

Thanks to Bill Hemmel at lakesregionaerials.com for these updates!