The state of Texas’s use of a cowboy silhouette on vehicle inspection stickers could prove expensive if a photographer proves his claim that the image was illegally appropriated by a prison inmate who scanned it from a magazine without consent or payment. [San Antonio Express-News]
3 Comments
Just wondering, does the fact that you picked this story for “Overlawyered” mean that you feel this case has little merit? It seems like a clear case of intellectual property theft to me. The government, especially, shouldn’t be appropriating citizen’s property, intellectual or otherwise.
1) On what if anything it signifies when Overlawyered covers a story, see this reminder.
2) In this case, there’s a whole genre of photo-permissions and art-permissions disputes, such as this, this and this, in which the underlying claim may be well founded on its face but the law leaves the proper quantum of damages so uncertain as to encourage high monetary demands and intensive litigation.
3) Large businesses have already been getting the message that they’d better step up lawyerly supervision of each and every use of images in their communications and output, even if that makes it more complicated and bureaucratic for them to, e.g., put out a localized newsletter. Disputes like this might well pressure public-sector entities down the same path, for better or worse.
On the subject of “Large Business”– my consulting company does a lot of work for a Big Hollywood Media Company. This company has published a lot of music, and even has a record label. You’d think it would be easy to clear music in a creative project for them that belongs to them.
It isn’t. Most of the time, we end up going to some low-rent generic music licensing site and getting some mediocre filler.