Techdirt. Stories filed under "photos"

Police Follow Up Beating A 'Possibly Intoxicated' Man To Death By Seizing Witnesses' Cell Phones

Tim Cushing — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:52:00 PDT

How many law enforcement officers does it take to subdue one intoxicated man? In Bakersfield, CA, it takes nine: seven sheriff's deputies, two CHP officers and a police dog. It also appears that being publicly intoxicated and resisting arrest in Bakersfield is punishable by immediate death in the same county.

At this point, consider everything regarding the beating to be "alleged." After all, we don't have any conclusive evidence of what happened, despite two people filming it (and a handful of eyewitnesses) because law enforcement made sure every recording of the event (except one -- more on that in a bit) was seized as "evidence."

Also, keep in mind that David Silva, the thirty-three year old father of four who was allegedly beaten to death by nine law enforcement officers, was only allegedly intoxicated and violent. Evidence of his crime(s) disappeared along with the footage of multiple cops swinging batons. (I suppose this will be verified when the autopsy results are made public, presumably featuring a full toxicology report.)

Here's an eyewitness account of the beating:

At about midnight, Ruben Ceballos, 19,was awakened by screams and loud banging noises outside his home. He said he ran to the left side of his house to find out who was causing the ruckus.

"When I got outside I saw two officers beating a man with batons and they were hitting his head so every time they would swing, I could hear the blows to his head," Ceballos said.

Silva was on the ground screaming for help, but officers continued to beat him, Ceballos said.

After several minutes, Ceballos said, Silva stopped screaming and was no longer responsive.

The phones used to record the incident were seized by law enforcement as "evidence." As it's highly doubtful the sheriff's department is looking into charging a dead man with a crime, the only "investigation" possible would be a look into the actions of the officers at the scene. This also means the only criminal activity captured on film would be the officers'. Turning over the only copy of evidence to the perpetrators is generally considered to be a terrible idea. But when you've just witnessed nine law enforcement officers beat a man into unconsciousness (and eventual death), your normal citizen is probably going to think twice before telling another officer, "No."

But the witnesses held out as long as they could. The incident happened around midnight. The two witnesses who had recorded the event (a male whose name hasn't been released and Maria Melendez) were called back to their apartment by the sheriff's department. This was at 3 AM. At that point, the officers demanded they turn over their cell phones. They refused to do so without being served a warrant. The officers then detained them in the apartment, telling them they couldn't leave without turning over their phones.

Three hours later, the male turned over his phone, stating he needed to be to work in a couple of hours. The officers detained Melendez for nearly nine hours. The search warrant finally arrived around noon and Melendez relinquished her phone. The two witnesses were told they could pick up their phones the next day. When the unnamed male went to recover his, he found the timeframe had now changed to "months, even years" before he could get his phone back.

Two bits of evidence have made their way into the public, unimpeded by sheriff's deputies with endless amounts of time to waste and rights to violate. The first is a 911 call reporting the beating made by Salinas Quair, Melendez's daughter. This call alerted law enforcement to the fact that the (alleged) beating had been recorded, triggering the intimidating roundup (and detainment) of these witnesses.

There's a man laying on the floor and your police officers beat the [explicit] out of him and killed him," said the woman. "I have it all on video camera."

The woman continued:

"I am sitting here on the corner of Flower and Palm right now and you have one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight Sheriffs. The guy was laying on the floor and eight Sheriff's ran up and started beating him up with sticks. The man is dead laying right here, right now."

The second piece of evidence, a security camera recording, was turned over by an individual who (unsurprisingly) has refused to go on camera or reveal his or her name. Here's KERO TV's (Bakersfield) description of the recordings' contents.

The grainy black and white video appears to show the alleged victim, David Silva, 33, lying on the ground. Another person is then seen walking up to Silva and attempting to pick him up. Both men appear to scuffle, and after a few minutes, Silva is seen being struck with an object.

Other cars are seen arriving at the scene with lights flashing on top of them. Several other men are then seen in the video, also striking Silva more than a dozen times with objects. Silva is then seen being taken into custody.

If you click through and watch the footage, at about 4:05 an officer can be seen taking a two-handed swing with a baton. Shortly thereafter, more officers arrive. One of the first to arrive also takes a two-handed swing with a baton. In all, nine baton-swinging officers showed up. A spokesman for the Kern County Sheriff's Office reassures everyone that the officers felt no need to deploy any of their other weaponry, as well as undercounting the number of respondents.

KCSO Spokesperson Ray Pruitt told 23 ABC it took 5 deputies, 2 CHP officers and a K-9 to subdue Silva.

Pruitt said officers were forced to use their batons to arrest Silva but no tazers, pepper spray or guns were used during the altercation.

His count is off. Here are the names of the Sheriff's Department personnel involved in the incident, as released by the Sheriff's Office.

The office did identify the officers involved in the arrest as Sgt. Douglas Sword and deputies Ryan Greer, Tanner Miller, Jeffrey Kelly, Luis Almanza, Brian Brock and David Stephens.

That's seven from the sheriff's department. The names of the two CHP officers have not been released. That's nine altogether, plus a police dog.

One has to wonder, though, how the officers were "forced" to use their batons. Perhaps some force was needed to subdue Silva, but with nine officers responding (and swinging), you'd think the tide would have turned in law enforcement's favor long before Silva lost consciousness. And how much "resistance" did Silva actually offer, considering the first officer on the scene was responding to a call from Kern Medical Center security who reported Silva as "passed out?"

End result: a man loses his life for being intoxicated. Nine officers ~~beat Silva senseless~~ take Silva "into custody," which in this case is synonymous with "attempt CPR and call an ambulance." Ironically, Silva was only a block away from Kern Medical Center, not that it did him any good.

Not content to limit its wrongdoing to a beating, deputies then barge into a home without a warrant and detain two citizens against their will, one of them for nearly nine hours, until the warrant they should have needed just to get in the door at 3 AM finally shows up at noon.

Now, all of the inarguable evidence is in the hands of the same people who would prefer it just went away. It will be tough for them to get away with simply deleting the recordings, but stranger things have happened to evidence that implicates law enforcement officers but has ended up in the possession of law enforcement. The recording can be termed "unrecoverable" or have inexplicably large gaps in the footage. Or the phone may be damaged during "processing." Sometimes, the evidence just vanishes conveniently and a lengthy internal investigation will unwind at a glacial pace until everyone loses interest.

There's a law enforcement problem here, and the problem is with the brand of "enforcement" that bypasses the law entirely. David Silva's death at the hands of police officers conjures up images of similar methods being deployed to subdue a schizophrenic homeless man in nearby Fullerton, CA. Kelly Thomas was beaten by several officers, resulting in a death by "mechanical suppression of the thorax." This one was caught on tape (via security camera), as well as captured more intimately by a microphone worn by one of the officers.

The people who witnessed this beating have nowhere to go. They can't trust the police and they've seen those who recorded the event quarantined in their home until they complied with the officers' requests to turn over their phones. If not for the constitutional violations committed by "law enforcement," the footage would already be publicly displayed. The longer the Sheriff's office delays in releasing this footage, the worse it appears. If this went down as described, there's no way law enforcement can hope to salvage some respect by attempting to downplay or justify the actions of these officers.

Even if Silva was putting up the fight of his life, he was intoxicated and was outnumbered 9-to-1. Any reasonable person would expect a suspect to be subdued before it got to the point where it became life-threatening. But any hopes of a reasonable outcome were discarded the moment that first two-handed swing connected.

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Montreal Student Arrested For Posting Photo Of Anti-Police Graffiti To Instagram

Tim Cushing — Tue, 9 Apr 2013 00:10:50 PDT

UPDATE: A commenter below has provided a link to coverage of this story by the Globe and Mail which includes more details than the CBC story linked in this post. Apparently, Pawluck had previously posted other photos of anti-police graffiti as well. This additional information doesn't make the actions of the police department any less egregious, but it does explain why they might have an interest in questioning her. In addition, she was also arrested several times during the Montreal demonstrations. Again, this doesn't excuse any overreactions, but it does at least explain why she may have been questioned at length. Her history with the police department makes this investigation about more than one uploaded photo.

If anyone needed any more evidence that police departments are casting a wide surveillance net over social media networks, here's one more story to add to the woeful deluge.

On Wednesday night, news broke that a 20-year-old “supporter of the student movement,” Jennifer Pawluck was arrested in Montreal for posting a picture to Instagram that she took of a graffiti wheat paste illustration that showed Montreal’s police commander Ian Lafrenière with a bloody bullethole in his forehead. According to the CBC, the image was thrown up on a brick wall in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighborhood. And Jennifer Pawluck—not that this even matters—didn’t even draw the anti-cop graphic in the first place.

Further details at CBC's site indicate that the Montreal police are actively monitoring Instagram, or more likely, its new best friend, Facebook.

Jennifer Pawluck was picked up by Montreal police at her home Wednesday, questioned for several hours and then released on a promise to appear in court.

So, this wasn't a case of Pawluck shooting photos of graffiti and being approached by an officer. This would be a posted photo being spotted online and traced back to Pawluck. The surveillance aspect is disturbing enough, but the Montreal police went even further, accusing Pawluck of "criminal harassment against a high-ranking Montreal police officer." All over a photo of artwork she didn't create (or apply to a wall).

The picture depicts Montreal police commander Ian Lafrenière with a bullet hole in his head. Lafrenière was a bit of a lightning rod during last year's riots in Montreal due to his position as head of the Communications Division. While the image is violent and could be perceived as threatening, posting a photo of the graffiti on Instagram is hardly "harassment" in and of itself. As the Vice article points out, there have been plenty of other photos of this particular artwork uploaded to Instagram.

The police (unsurprisingly) have been less than forthcoming as to why Pawluck needed to be questioned for "several hours" about this photo. Here's what the department did have to say:

Spokesman Const. Dany Richer said the concern extends beyond just the posting of the photo, but said he could not go into further details.

“There are circumstances that surrounded the publication of this image, circumstances that we can’t reveal because it is still under investigation,” he said.

This statement is suitably vague with a hint of menace. There may be some "circumstances" surrounding Pawluck's participation in last year's demonstrations. There may also be some "circumstances" surrounding the original artwork, as I would imagine the police are very interested in finding the creator and questioning him or her for several hours. But I cannot see there being "circumstances" surrounding the upload of a photo to a social media site, at least not to the extent that someone gets detained and questioned for several hours and released only with the promise that they will appear in court, all without being charged with any criminal wrongdoing.

She has not been formally charged, but is scheduled to appear in court on April 17.

No charges, and yet the police have prohibited her from contacting Lafrenière (can't imagine why she would want to -- and she states she never has) or coming within one kilometer of the Montreal Police HQ.

This last part is enlightening. It strongly suggests the police department fears the general population, or at least those who photograph (or create) anti-police artwork. There's no other reason the police would need to file a restraining order (so to speak) against a student whose "weapon" is a cell phone with a camera. Unfortunately for Pawluck, the "restraining order" isn't mutually restrictive. I would imagine this won't be her last run-in with Montreal law enforcement. They seem unusually interested in shutting down expression they don't like, and are apparently willing to try to intimidate people into compliance.

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DailyDirt: More Trendy Photos

Michael Ho — Mon, 8 Apr 2013 17:00:00 PDT

The news of several portrait studios shutting down marks an end of an era. Families used to get all dressed up to go to a special corner of Sears where a professional photographer would stage a nice portrait, and fuzzy warm photos would be sold in a respectably-sized frame. Sure, there are still plenty of other places to get your own image held hostage by copyright, but it's just not the same. Digital photography has brought photo-taking to the masses, and almost anyone can take a nice looking (staged) picture. Here are just a few examples of what kids these days are doing with their cameras.

Fake Dragonball attacks seem to be a growing trend in staged photography these days. Even if you haven't seen the Dragonball anime that inspired these photos, the concept of being able to blow up stuff via telekinesis is a pretty widespread meme nowadays. [url]
Vadering is another fad where you make it look like you're a Sith lord choking various people. I find your lack of faith disturbing.... [url]
Owling was a spin-off of the more popular meme of planking. Unfortunately, it didn't catch on and elucidate how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie roll Tootsie pop.[url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

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Beyonce Meet Streisand: Publicist Tries To Remove 'Unflattering' Beyonce Photos From The Internet

Mike Masnick — Wed, 6 Feb 2013 10:29:58 PST

Sometimes I wonder what sort of qualification you need to be a "publicist." At the very least, you would think that it would help to be familiar with the basics of The Streisand Effect, and making sure that you don't make something worse. Apparently, that's not the case for the publicist that Beyonce hired to try to get "unflattering" images taken of her at the Super Bowl disappeared. It all started with Buzzfeed doing what Buzzfeed does -- pulling together a silly collection of images. In this case, The 33 Fiercest Moments From Beyonce's Halftime Show. That apparently resulted in a quick phone call from someone working as a publicist complaining that some of those photos were "unflattering," which was then followed up by an email... which Buzzfeed chose to post publicly as: The "Unflattering" Photos Beyonce's Publicist Doesn't Want You To See: If you can't read that, the important part says:

Thanks for taking my call. As discussed, there are some unflattering photos on your current feed that we are respectfully asking you to change. I am certain you will be able to find some better photos.

Now, to their credit, the publicist did not demand that the photos be changed, nor make any kind of legal threat. While that may seem obvious since there would be no legal basis for Beyonce to make such a threat, we've certainly seen others make similar legal threats in the past. So it was a respectful "request." And, you can certainly make the argument that Buzzfeed's response was anything but respectful. But, come on. This is Buzzfeed we're talking about. Pageviews uber alles. So of course they're going to get more attention for it.

The end result? Suddenly lots and lots of sites are talking about it and (of course) highlighting the unflattering photos. Some will argue, of course, that "any publicity is good publicity" and perhaps that was the strategy all along. That's a dubious argument however. Beyonce was getting a ton of great press for her Super Bowl performance. Why sully it with suddenly hunting down "unflattering" images that weren't doing any damage to her reputation in the first place? Asking for those images to be taken down hurts her image a lot more than any of the photos in question.

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The SHOCKING Photos That Violated Facebook's Policies!

Nina Paley — Fri, 7 Dec 2012 08:31:34 PST

Update: The account is now unblocked, with this message from Facebook:
I'm so sorry for the inconvenience caused, there was a temporary misconfiguration in our photo review systems which caused a very small subset of users to be incorrectly enrolled in one of our checkpoints. There was no issue with your original photo, we have a combination of automated and human-review systems dedicated to keeping people safe, and a bug caused one of these systems to incorrectly enroll a small number of users into checkpoints.

We have since remedied the issue, and remediated all affected accounts. Please let me know if you or others are still experiencing any difficulties.

Yesterday I posted this adorable photo on Facebook:

Being a cute picture of a cute cat, it got a lot of "likes" and comments. A few hours later I followed up with this photo (accompanying text in the caption):

Another photo of Nut and me. Here you can see in more detail how Nut presses her face as hard as she can into mine. She does this all night, by the way. If I move my face away, she rearranges herself to grip the back of my head as tightly as possible. If I'm face-down on the pillow, she slides her paws under into my eye sockets and mashes her head into my ear. It's very cute but I don't think I could stand it every night.

Shortly thereafter, FB wouldn't let me view my feed, instead giving me this message:

"We noticed you may be posting photos that violate our Community Standards. Help make Facebook better by cleaning up your photos and removing friends that post nudity or other things that violate our standards."

Then it took me directly to all my photos and said,

"To keep your account active, please remove any photos that contain nudity or sexually inappropriate content. Check the box next to each photo you need to remove."

I didn't have a single dirty photo to check, so I checked none and then clicked the box that said, "I have checked all my photos that violate Facebook’s policies." For that, I was rewarded with this:

"Because you uploaded photos that violate our policies, you won't be able to upload photos for 3 days.

"If you have other photos on the site that violate our policies, be sure to remove them immediately or you could be blocked for longer. After this block is lifted, please make sure any photos you upload follow Facebook’s Policies."

Followed by another checkbox that says,

"I understand Facebook's policies and I won't upload any photos that violate these policies."

But I haven't checked that box yet, because I really don't understand Facebook's policies. At all. Maybe Franz Kafka could explain them to me. Can you?

UPDATE: several hours later, I still can’t see my FB home page/news feed. This is what I continue to get instead:

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French Court Detaches Itself From Reality, Demands Tabloid Turn Over 'Original' Topless Kate Middleton Photos

Tim Cushing — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 11:12:58 PDT

In what has to be the most purely symbolic decision handed down by a court since King Solomon's derailing of a vexing child custody battle, a French court has ordered the tabloid that originally published the topless photos of Kate Middleton to perform an act of contrition that is actually more pointless than prosecuting this case itself:

The French magazine Closer, which published topless photos of the Duchess of Cambridge, must hand over the original pictures and pay a 10,000-euro ($13,000) fine each time the images are published again, a French court ruled.

The magazine, owned by the Berlusconi family’s Arnoldo Mondadori Editore Spa (MN), was sued after it printed a series of photos of the royal couple sunbathing on a private French estate. The tabloid was ordered to pay Kate 2,000 euros in expenses and an additional 10,000 euros each day it fails to turn over the original images.

Perhaps the judge (Judge Jean-Michel Hayat) spent the past few days enjoying some fine film noir, watching negatives go up in smoke in starkly lit ashtrays as the music rose and screen went soft focus momentarily as things, indeed, appeared to be working out for the troubled heroine. This explanation is as good as any for an order that completely ignores the reality of the situation. The picture is out there [indicates everywhere, but especially the internet] and no amount of fines or orders to produce the "originals" (on what? an SD card?) is putting those breasts back under proper British clothing.

It's not even a problem specific to the internet era. This wouldn't have flown 30 years ago when people had access to both newpapers and copiers. For that matter, this type of order has been outdated since the point photographs could be affixed to paper and distributed to readers/gawkers. You can't simply undo a mass distribution of "unapproved" photos. Not now. Not 30 years ago. Not 100 years ago. The photos are everywhere.

“Clearly, the harm has been done,” said Christopher Mesnooh, an American lawyer working in France for Field Fisher Waterhouse. “Thousands, now tens of thousands of copies, are now in public circulation. A legal decision is a wonderful thing to obtain and the royal couple did exactly what they should have done. But you know the magazine is out there and I suspect most of you have already seen copies of that magazine, so the basic, the initial harm, has been done.”

So, it all boils down to making sure the royal family is given some sort of... something for its "troubles." There will likely be more of these utterly disconnected decisions as the royal family may also pursue legal action in Italy and Ireland, not to mention pursuing criminal charges against the photographer. But I suppose it's a misguided (and amusing) effort to be doing something, especially considering the relationship between the royal family and its paparazzi has been anything but pleasant.

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Matthew Inman Takes Photos Of $211,223 In Cash To Send To FunnyJunk & Charles Carreon

Mike Masnick — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 05:11:00 PDT

Charles Carreon dropped his highly questionable case against Matthew Inman, IndieGoGo, the American Cancer Society and the National Wildlife Fund last week. It was pretty clear he was going to lose (and in a big, bad way). However, he claimed "victory" because, to avoid further complications, Inman made sure that all the money went directly from IndieGoGo and/or Paypal to the charities, so there was never any question of what he might do with the money. Of course, as part of his original pitch, he had promised to photograph all of the money raised as cash and send it to Funnyjunk. Inman got around the rules by taking out the same amount of money from the bank, and photographing it in a variety of different poses, some of which I'm assuming Inman won't mind if we reproduce here.

First up, the money in a duffel bag and laid out on a table, including a shot of Inman in front of it.

Then there's the fun stuff, including arranging the money to show a few special messages, mainly directed at Charles Carreon, even if the original focus was on FunnyJunk.
And all of it concludes with a package which is apparently being sent to Charles Carreon: I will admit to being a bit confused about one key thing. Inman had originally promised that the photo and the drawing were to be sent to FunnyJunk. Of course, in all of this mess, it didn't seem like FunnyJunk officially said anything, and I don't recall FunnyJunk's owner ever being identified. Instead, everything shifted over to being about Carreon, due to Carreon's behavior. Remember, even though the threats were technically "from" FunnyJunk, the eventual lawsuit was from Carreon alone. We had noted that Carreon appeared to be wrong in claiming that the drawing of the mother and the bear was about his mother, when the text of the campaign seemed clearly to be indicating the mother was "FunnyJunk's" mother. Of course, if no one knows who FunnyJunk actually is, perhaps it's reasonable to ship this stuff to FunnyJunk's "lawyer," which would be Charles Carreon.

Either way, we await Carreon's response.

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The Pointless Copyright Freakout Over Pinterest

Mike Masnick — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 16:07:57 PST

I've been debating whether or not it's worth doing this post for a few weeks now, but with so much sudden interest in Pinterest and how it fits in the copyright scheme of things, people keep asking "when," not "if," we were going to write about it, so we might as well tackle it. If you don't know, Pinterest is an insanely popular social network of sorts, built around the concept of "pinning" images you like, creating collections of such images and sharing them with your friends. It's been the buzz of Silicon Valley for quite some time, and hit the mainstream in a big way a few weeks ago. Lots of commentators like to point out that it's widely used by women -- because that's apparently noteworthy in contrast to the typical internet buzzy services that get the usual "early adopters" who tend to be more of the male persuasion. Either way, it's crazy popular. I first heard about it in the context of teenagers sharing "looks" -- creating effective collages of images of clothing/style/accessories and sharing them with friends in a "wouldn't this look nice" kind of way.

But, as Pinterest hit some sort of inflection point right around the Super Bowl (with the help of Facebook integration), a bunch of people started noticing that there were some significant copyright questions involved. After all, the basic way it works is you make use of images you find online and "pin" them into a collection. But if you don't have the rights to use those images, is it infringement? Some are pretty sure that it violates the law in that it wasn't clear it would really qualify for fair use -- and there were also some questions about how thoroughly it complied with DMCA takedown requests. Either way, the issue began to explode with a ton of articles all discussing the copyright questions.

As this suddenly got so much more attention, Pinterest just rolled out a "nopin" meta tag, which allows website owners to basically block images from a site from being easily "pinned" to a Pinterest collection. Depending on who you listen to, this either answered all the copyright questions or merely represented a "small step" towards dealing with them. For angry photographers, I'd bet they're going to claim the latter is more accurate, if they'll even grant that much.

There's also a separate, but related, issue concerning Pinterest's terms of service that includes some boilerplate language that pretty much every online service includes and when someone reads them for the first time, they freak out about how Pinterest is claiming too many rights over the uploaded works. This is an exaggeration -- and we've seen the same thing happen with TwitPic and others, where the terms are there to make sure you're granting the site an effective license to display the works, and not as some nefarious plan to claim ownership of the works.

Either way, the community that's been most vocal about Pinterest and how it's something evil are photographers. While there are plenty of photographers who are quite reasonable on copyright issues, for some reason, it seems like photographers often can be the most extreme on copyright issues, and it's no different here.

However, it seems like (as the music industry did with Napster, and now the movie industry has done with cyberlockers), they're getting the wrong message out of what's happening online: these services are opportunities, not threats. If you want to understand why, I recommend reading (thoroughly) a recent blog post by photographer Trey Ratcliff, who goes into great detail not just about how Pinterest has been really useful for him (including in driving revenue), but that photographers need to stop treating everything as a threat, and start looking at these things as opportunities. Again, you should read the whole thing, but here are a few useful snippets. Ratcliff points out that treating everything as a threat means that you spend all your time trying to angrily shut stuff down, rather than getting your work out there. But there are real advantages to getting your work out there (and he explains why it should be high res, and without watermarks, contrary to the standard way that many photographers do thumbnails with annoying watermarks):

Most people in the world are good people. If they find digital art they want to buy for a print or use in a commercial campaign, they will figure out a way to get you money. 99% of your traffic is truly “window-shoppers.” They will look at your goods, take note, enjoy them and move on. But 1% will want to make a personal or business transaction with you....

[....]

StuckInCustoms.com has healthy traffic that grows every year thanks to good old-fashioned word-of-mouth. We don’t advertise or buy links or any of that stuff. So I depend on the Internet and nice people like you to link back to the site and tell your friends that you find something unique and cool.

Last month, we had 714,143 Pageviews and 234,107 unique visitors. 15% of this traffic came from Pinterest. Amazing! If Pinterest didn’t exist (a reality some photographers would prefer), then our traffic would be 15% less. Choosing to switch-off innovation is a fool’s errand, especially in today’s world. It reminds me of the scene in Anthem where the council of candle-makers becomes rather upset at the invention of the light bulb.

[....]

Someone on Pinterest can make a board called “Feeling a bit blue,” and they can fill it with cool-colored melancholy photos. Isn’t this just another way of making a poem? If I built up this pinboard and sent it to a friend, it’s nothing but a visual poem in a new medium. It’s just as powerful, and, in many ways, more accessible.

Pinterest is simply another way (a newer, evolving way, mind you) for humans to communicate with one another. It is increasingly the job of digital artists to inspire, share and bring more beauty and communication into the world.

There really is a lot more there, and it's worth reading the whole thing. Also, Ratcliff appears to be an absolutely awesome photographer, so I recommend checking out his work too.

Either way, his point is a strong one, and it's really no different than what many people have made to reactionary folks in other parts of the content industry. You can spend all your time trying to kill innovation or stop people from doing what they want to do... or you can bask in the wonderment that people want to do stuff, encourage them to do so, and make it easier for them to help spread your works... all the while making it easy for them to support you. Ratcliff seems to be a perfect example of our discussion on the benefits of being open, human and awesome.

And, in the end, that's the key point. Whether or not Pinterest is a copyright landmine is kind of besides the point. It's a really fascinating innovation that is having massive (unprecedented) success in terms of users. Clearly, it's tapped into a market by providing something that a very large number of people absolutely love. When that happens, there are always opportunities, and smart photographers should be focused on finding and embracing those opportunities.

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Protip: Make Sure Your Facebook Photos Don't Contradict Your Statements In Court...

Eric Goldman — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:34:41 PST

In my long-running series of litigants saying one thing in court and another when talking to their friends online, consider this from a worker's comp case after a refrigerator fell on Clement:

The first issue Clement raises in his brief is whether pictures of him that appeared on Facebook and MySpace should have been admitted into evidence. He complains that the pictures “are a disgrace to the dignity of the workers' compensation proceedings and the legal system” and have nothing to do with his medical treatment....

We find no abuse of discretion in the allowance of the photographs. Clement contended that he was in excruciating pain, but these pictures show him drinking and partying. Certainly these pictures could have a bearing on Clement's credibility, albeit a negative effect that Clement might not wish to be demonstrated to the ALJ or the Commission. We hold that there was not an abuse of discretion in allowing the photographs.

Now that Facebook can do facial recognition, it should next develop a tool to detect photos depicting alcoholic drinks and give users a way to automatically opt-out of those photos!

Prior blog posts in this series:

* YouTube Video Impeaches Witness' Credibility--Ensign Yacht v. Arrigoni
* Facebook Entries Negate Car Crash Victims' Physical Injury Claims
* Contrary MySpace Evidence Strikes a Litigant Again--HAC, Inc. v. Box
* MySpace Postings Foil Another Litigant--Sedie v. U.S.
* Disturbingly Humorous MySpace Posts Used as Impeaching Evidence in Spousal Abuse Case--Embry v. State
* Latest Example of Social Networking Site Evidence Contradicting In-Court Testimony--People v. Franco

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Take Picture Of Your 4-Year-Old Daughter Eating Ice Cream... Get Investigated Under Terrorism Act [Updated]

Mike Masnick — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:13:00 PDT

We've covered plenty of ridiculous stories concerning police going after photographers lately, but this one is a bit different. As a whole bunch of you have sent in, at a mall in Scotland, Chris White took a photograph of his 4-year-old daughter eating ice cream at an ice cream stand. However, the mall apparently has a "no photographs" law, and workers at the ice cream stand were supposedly "suspicious," and called security... who called the police, after White refused to delete the photos on his phone (and noted that they'd already been uploaded to Facebook). The police then questioned him under the UK Terrorism Act, saying that they could confiscate his mobile phone. To everyone's credit, the situation didn't escalate and he was left alone (and not made to turn over the phone). But, just the fact that it went that far seems crazy. How difficult is it to recognize a common scene of a father taking a photo of his daughter eating ice cream?

Of course, the attention that this has received resulted in the mall changing its official policy

Update: Important update to this story. While the mall has apologized, the police are hinting very strongly that White's account is not accurate, and that there was some other (unnamed) activity that was the reason he was investigated...

It is because Mr White chose to seek publicity for his account of events and because of the planned demonstration that we feel compelled to take the unusual step of making our findings public.

“In reaching our conclusions, officers took statements from a number of independent witnesses and viewed the substantial amount of CCTV that was available in the centre.

“On reviewing all of this objective evidence, I have to tell you that we can find no basis to support the complaint which MrWhite has elected to make.

“The members of the public who asked for the security staff to become involved have told us that they did so for reasons which had absolutely nothing to do with him taking photographs of his daughter. They had a very specific concern, which I am not in a position to discuss publicly, that they felt the need to report. It was because of this very specific concern that security staff became involved. They were right to raise their concern and we are glad that they did so.

“The security staff were the ones who asked for police involvement. Again, this was not because Mr White said he had been photographing his daughter, but was due to the concerns that they themselves had regarding this particular incident.

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Apparently, FBI's 'Forensics Team' Creates Aged Photos Of Terrorists By Doing Random Google Image Searches

Mike Masnick — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:12:00 PDT

We've all seen those forensic "aging" pictures that are often used to try to show what a fugitive might look like now, when law enforcement doesn't have a recent photo available. I always assumed that there was some sort of science behind doing that. However, it appears that when it comes to the FBI, the way it's done is to do a Google Image search, find an image the FBI likes and then do a simple photo merge with the person they're trying to "age." Of course, that became a bit of a problem recently, when it came out that the photo the FBI used to age both Osama bin Laden and another senior al-Qaida leader, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, happened to be a Spanish member of parliament named Gaspar Llamazares. Llamazares is not happy about this -- especially since both of the people who his likeness was used to demonstrate have since been assassinated. He's now planning to sue the FBI. I am curious what charges he'll bring. I can't see anything really sticking, to be honest. There might be a copyright claim from whoever holds the copyright on the image -- and that would be pretty amusing, given the Justice Department's rather strong views on the absolute evils of copyright infringement. But really, the whole story seems pretty ridiculous.

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Is Getty Guilty Of Trademark Infringement For Every Photo It Has That Shows A Trademark?

Mike Masnick — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 05:20:28 PDT

And here we have yet another case of trademark law gone wrong. We've mentioned in the past that the company CAR-FRESHNER is so insanely over aggressive with its trademarks concerning its annoying pine tree-shaped car air fresheners that it takes out magazine ads warning photographers not to photograph the iconic air fresheners without permission. This struck us as trademark abuse. Contrary to the claims of the company, a trademark does not grant you all uses of a mark. It was initially designed as a consumer protection law, to help avoid consumer confusion. Unfortunately, aggressive trademark lawyers and the courts seem to keep expanding how trademark is interpreted, and CAR-FRESHNER may be leading the way towards a massive expansion of how trademarks can be asserted.

It appears that the company sued Getty Images for infringing on its trademarks on those tree shaped air fresheners because a few of the stock images available via Getty Images includes the tree. Getty Images responded that this isn't a violation of trademark law and is clearly fair use, so the claims should be dismissed. Unfortunately, at this stage, the court has refused to do that, and argues that CAR-FRESHNER actually has made a reasonable enough argument that there may be consumer confusion.

Really?!? I'm curious what moron-in-a-hurry is going to look at these images and think, "gee, the idiotically misspelled company CAR-FRESHNER must have sponsored this photograph that some person took in their car." I just don't see it. Furthermore, trademark (unlike copyright) has a clear requirement that the mark be "used in commerce." While Getty is certainly selling these images, it's ridiculous to think that it's using the trademark in commerce. It's just selling photos -- millions of them -- that photographers have taken. In this case, the "commerce" associated with AIR-FRESHNER happened when someone bought the little tree. Photographing it doesn't represent a new use in commerce. Except in this court, unfortunately.

And if you think this is just a minor issue, you're not paying attention. As trademark lawyer, Marty Schwimmer, points out in the link above, this could make Getty liable for every image in its collection that incidentally shows any trademarked item:

Given that Getty has 80 million images, it may have some agita that its fair use defense did not defeat a 12(b)(6) motion, given that perhaps some others of its 80 million photos that may depict recognizable trademarks as well.

While there may be some poetic justice, given reports that Getty is, itself, a rather insanely aggressive protector of copyrights, known to send out letters demanding huge payments for finding incidental parts of its images on websites, we should never celebrate the expanding of bad laws like this.

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Facebook Hosts 4% Of All Photos Ever Taken In History

Mike Masnick — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:31:00 PDT

For all the talk of how content creation is going down the drain due to lax copyright enforcement, it seems that everywhere we look, we just keep seeing more and more and more content creation. The latest is a report that Facebook currently hosts 4% of all photos ever taken. Specifically, it hosts 140 billion photos out of 3.5 trillion photos taken in history. Now, obviously, technology change is at work here. Photography really only showed up for real about a century and a half ago, and didn't really hit the mainstream until less than a century ago. And, of course, for most of that time it involved (sometimes expensive) film and the expensive step of processing it. Photography has exploded over the last decade or so with the rise of digital cameras, and, of course, high quality digital cameras built into mobile phones.

But, really, that raises a bigger point: the tools of creation for all sorts of things have been changing rapidly and making it easier and cheaper to create content, whether it's a photograph, a song, a movie, a book or.. well... just about anything. We're being inundated with new creative works... at the same time we're being told that content creation is dying. Now, to be fair, much of the content production we're talking about is amateur production, but some of that is of fantastic quality, and is leading people into professional content creation roles. But, I guess this raises a separate question. What is the real purpose of copyright? Is it only to incentivize professional content creation, or to incentivize content creation overall? Given the stated purpose is to "promote the progress," and to provide the public with more content, I would argue the goal is to promote more overall content, and it seems that technology is doing a much better job of that than copyright.

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If A Kid Grabs Your Camera In The Street And Snaps Some Photos, Who Owns The Copyright

Mike Masnick — Fri, 9 Sep 2011 17:42:48 PDT

You may recall, from a few months back, the copyright debate we had going back and forth over the question of whether or not monekys could hold the copyright on some photographs they took. The general conclusion was that they could not, and the photos taken were almost certainly in the public domain, contrary to the claim of the guy who owned the camera, and the news agency he tried to "license" the photos to. That said, what if you have a similar situation involving a human? Photographer Mirjam Letsch has an interesting blog post on her site, in which she notes that while walking through an Indian bazaar with her camera dangling on her shoulder, a kid grabbed the camera and took five quick photos, some of which are pretty nice. Here's just one, but click through to Letsch's site to see the rest: As she admits in her post:

I really liked the creative result when I later saw these images! Don’t know who owns the copyright though!

While it may depend on the specifics of Indian law, in the US and many other parts of the world, it's likely that the kid almost certainly holds the copyright, technically, though the likelihood of him ever enforcing those copyrights is minimal at best. Similarly, it's unlikely that Letsch holds the copyrights on the images, but thankfully, this doesn't seem like a case where anyone wants to fight over the copyrights, but rather is an opportunity to just see some cool photos taken in under unusual circumstances.

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Summit Entertainment Commences Criminal Legal Action Against Twilight Fan Who Shared Images From Movie

Mike Masnick — Wed, 3 Aug 2011 07:23:35 PDT

We were somewhat stunned a few months back when notoriously overly-litigious movie studio Summit Entertainment absolutely freaked out and went legal against some fans of the Twilight movies by filing John Doe lawsuits against people for tweeting some photos from the next film in the saga. Remember: these are photos. And the reason they're getting passed around is because these people are fans. Nothing in these photos takes away from the marketability of the movie itself. If anything they do the exact opposite.

Summit Entertainment simply doesn't know when to give up. It apparently went out and spent money to hire Kroll Inc., a famed corporate investigations company who is not cheap, to track someone down to Argentina, and discover that they had shared the images... and then commenced legal action against the person in both the US and Argentina, including criminal charges in Argentina (thanks to DandonTRJ for sending this in).

Remember, this is a fan who was sharing photos of a film that would only serve to get people more interested in the film. Step on up, Summit Entertainment, because you just won the award for the absolute worst entity at treating fans right.

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Flickr Using Questionable Excuse To Take Down Photos From Egypt

Mike Masnick — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:58:01 PDT

On Friday, after Clay Shirky's excellent talk about social media and the Middle East at SXSW, someone in the audience pointed out how some photos from Egypt of secret service agents had been removed from Flickr. Shirky later tweeted a link to coverage of the takedown letter, which mentions vague terms of service violations. Yahoo later came out and claimed the images were taken down because they weren't taken by the uploader. Of course, as some have pointed out, that's a bogus excuse, since plenty of people -- including Flickr's top employees -- regularly post images that they did not create. And, of course, in true Streisand Effect fashion, all this has really done is call that much more attention to the images and information that was taken down.

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Photographer Demanding Cash From Sites Using Palin's Official Governor Photo

Mike Masnick — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 10:37:42 PST

Pickle Monger points us to the latest ridiculous story involving copyright and the government. Apparently, a photographer named Jeff Schultz, who has taken many photos of Sarah Palin, took the photo that Palin used as her "official state photo," while she was governor of Alaska. Members of Palin's administration say they regularly handed out that photo to all sorts of folks as Palin's official headshot. Not surprisingly, the image can be found widely on the internet.

However, it appears that Schultz is now claiming that those who use it are violating his copyright, and are demanding they pay up. And not just a marginal sum, but $11,750, according to the demand letter embedded below. The story covers a demand letter that was sent to a restaurant owner who, back during the last Presidential election, hosted an event where he showed the VP debate between Palin and Biden. In promoting that event at the restaurant, the owner pulled Palin's official pic and put it on his website, where it has remained "in the archives" where almost no one sees it. However, Schultz or his lawyers found it and demanded money from the restaurant owner. Even after the image was pulled, they still demanded money, and rather than fight it, the restaurant owner eventually paid up. Schultz's lawyers also demanded a gag order, that he not talk about the threat and the demand for cash, but he refused to agree to the gag order. Of course, this just makes you wonder how many other folks did pay up and can't talk about it...

Palin's deputy press secretary while she was governor notes that Schultz did, in fact, retain the copyright, but that seems silly. If you're going to post a headshot like that for an official government figure and use it as distribution material for all sorts of media, it seems like you should automatically relinquish any copyright on it. That Schultz is going around now, years later, and demanding cash (and silence!) from those using it seems like yet another story of copyright trolling.

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Kodak Getting More Patent Aggressive: In Legal Fight Over Photo Sharing Site

Mike Masnick — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 19:36:03 PST

About a year ago, we were disappointed to see Kodak start to sue mobile phone companies for patent infringement, wondering if this was a sign of trouble at the company. As we've seen in the past, when big companies start filing patent infringement lawsuits, it's a sign that they're having trouble innovating in the marketplace, so they switch to trying to use the law to hold back competitors. It seems that the company is taking things even further and has sued photo-hosting/sharing site Shutterfly. Years back, you may remember, Kodak bought a similar site, Ofoto, and apparently now it's claiming that only it is allowed to do some rather basic photos hosting site features, such as selling prints or photobooks from the site. Shutterfly has its own patents and has filed a countersuit -- which Kodak called a "litigation tactic." Yeah, it's a litigation tactic: responding to a silly patent lawsuit with a similar one. Problem is, Kodak is the company that kicked off this "litigation tactic."

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Righthaven Takes On Drudge Report

Mike Masnick — Thu, 9 Dec 2010 13:55:00 PST

We recently noted that MediaNews, the second largest newspaper publisher in the US, had apparently signed up with Righthaven to start suing blogs and other websites for using any content from the Denver Post. It looks like for its second lawsuit over Denver Post content, Righthaven has gone big: it's suing Matt Drudge, the operator of the famed Drudge Report, because he used a photo from the Denver Post. This is a bit different than the usual Righthaven lawsuits over copies of articles -- and perhaps an even tougher claim. Drudge may have a decent fair use claim on a single photograph, though that may depend on a lot of other details. Still, all this is doing is making me wonder why anyone would ever want to use any Righthaven connected publication as a source ever again.

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AFP Still Not Giving Up On Its Bizarre Claim That Twitpic Images Are Freely Licensed To Anyone

Mike Masnick — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 15:51:01 PST

Earlier this year, we wrote about an absolutely bizarre lawsuit, where the newswire AFP -- a company who has claimed that merely linking to its stories is infringement -- had sued a photographer whose photograph AFP had used without permission (and with a false credit). The story was so convoluted and filled with confusion that it was really quite amazing that anyone involved is still pushing forward with the case. The "short" version is that a photographer in Haiti when the earthquake happened earlier this year opened a Twitter and a Twitpic account soon after the earthquake, in order to show off some of the photographs he had taken. Another person copied those photos and pretended they were his (also on Twitpic) and offered to license them. The AFP saw the photos from the second person (who didn't actually have the rights to them) and then posted them on its own stories, crediting the second guy.

Soon after this, the actual photographer saw the photos and sent a cease & desist. The AFP then sued the actual photographer, claiming that it had not violated his copyrights. The AFP's argument for this was so confused that it raised questions about whether or not the AFP even really understood what the company had done. First, it claimed that Twitter's terms of service says the following:

You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

It seems the AFP somehow interpreted this to mean that any content posted to Twitpic could be freely used. There are two massive problems with this line of argument. First, Twitpic isn't Twitter (something that no one involved in the lawsuit on either side seemed to realize -- which is just downright sloppy) and posting an image to Twitpic has nothing to do with Twitter's terms of service. Second, even if the images were covered by Twitter's terms of service, those terms are boilerplate language describing the license between the user and Twitter -- not between the user and any third party. This is plainly obvious from the language of the clause, which notes that it "grants us" the license. The "us" is Twitter. Not any third party. The Twitter license then does allow Twitter to post that content elsewhere -- but that right does not just extend to any third party. This is pretty standard stuff that is found in just about any internet service's terms of use.

I had kind of figured that after this rather massive set of mistakes was highlighted, AFP would realize its errors and back off from the lawsuit. No such luck apparently. Venkat Balasubramani has an update on the case, suggesting that the AFP is sticking by its totally illogical claims. What brought this on is that Twitter has apparently clarified its terms of service, to avoid this sort of situation (even though the original terms seemed pretty clear), but the AFP is still insisting that its tortured interpretation of the terms supports its position. It's somewhat bizarre to see that no one involved in the lawsuit has realized just how insanely weak this position is. It seems like a huge waste of effort for an interpretation of terms of service that, if actually believed, would likely come back to haunt AFP.

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Couple Claims That Merely Talking About A Photo Is Copyright Infringement

Mike Masnick — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 08:48:00 PST

Bert Reyntjens writes "Some time ago, the (nude) photograph of the wife of Helmut Lotti, a Belgian singer, was used in a famous Flemish quiz 'de slimste mens ter wereld' (or in English 'the smartest man in the world'). Several newspapers and magazines reported on this, some displayed the photograph, others didn't. Now Lotti and his wife are suing several of these publishers for copyright infringement because they didn't have the permission to show this picture.

Everything so far seems more-or-less normal, except that one magazine (Story) was also sued even though it didn't publish the photograph (that link is in Dutch -- here is the Google translation), it only mentioned it. According to the lawyer for Lotti -- 'a mere reference to an image should be considered a reproduction of the image'!"

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Vanessa Hudgens Claims She Owns Copyright On Nude Photos Of Herself

Mike Masnick — Fri, 8 Jan 2010 08:02:00 PST

As we've discussed in the past, the subject of a photograph does not have any copyright claim on the image. The copyright is, instead, granted to whoever took the photo (amusingly, yes, this means that if you hand your little point-and-shoot to a random stranger to take you photo while on vacation, technically, that stranger owns the copyright on the photo). This is something that people often confuse -- as they assume that the subject has a copyright on the images. Copycense points us to the news that actress/singer Vanessa Hudgens isn't just suing some blogsite for posting nude photos of her, but is claiming copyright on the photos, saying she took them herself. I haven't seen the photos, so I'll rely on the claims at that link that the photos show her posing, with no indication that she is the one taking the photos. It is possible that the photos used a timer, I guess, but other reports have said that the photos were cameraphone photos, which usually don't have timers. As such, it certainly sounds like it might be a case of copyrfraud to falsely claim copyright on images where you do not, in fact, hold the copyright. That said, it's hard to be sympathetic to a site posting nude photos of someone who does not want them posted -- though, you have to admit that it's odd that these photos were registered with the US copyright office.

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Is Everyone Who Received Monday's Metro Toronto Guilty Of Child Porn Possession?

Mike Masnick — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:25:29 PST

We were just talking about how current child porn laws that make you a criminal based on incidental possession alone can be quite problematic. Reader Jesse highlights an example of this. If you happen to have been in Toronto on Monday, and received a copy of Metro Toronto, a popular commuter paper, buried a few pages in was a "featured picture" of some kids celebrating at an annual parade by jumping around in a hot tub. The only problem? The male in the photo appears to be, well... having a wardrobe malfunction. Not unexpectedly, a bunch of sites were having some fun with this... until some realized that these were high school students. At that point, even Gawker -- who will post almost anything -- removed the photo realizing that under current laws, it was likely child pornography. Jesse points out that this would appear to make a bunch of people at the Metro, all the recipients of the paper on Monday, many people who visited blogs like Torontoist and Gawker while they had those photos displayed... potentially at risk for possessing child porn (and in the case of Metro employees and these blogs, for distributing it as well) -- making them all potential felons who could be required to sign up to be on sex offender lists for the rest of their lives. Isn't something wrong with the law when that happens?

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Facebook Photos Coming Back To Haunt Users In Surprising Ways

Mike Masnick — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:08:00 PST

There have been a bunch of stories lately about how pictures that people put up on Facebook are coming back to haunt them in unexpected ways. First, we have the case of Adam Bauer, a University of Wisconsin-La Crosse student who had been careful about who he friended, but chose to accept a friend request from an unknown user, because "she was a good-looking girl." Turns out that the "good-looking girl" was actually the La Crosse police, who ticketed him for underage drinking because of a photo on Facebook of Bauer holding a drink. This reminds me of a case we wrote about six years ago, involving a woman who posted some naked photos of herself at some locations around Lincoln, Nebraska -- leading the police to charge her with violating local no-nudity laws.

The other story that a bunch of folks have submitted was the case of a woman who who lost her disability insurance benefits because of photos on Facebook. She was on sick-leave due to a diagnosis of depression. Yet, somehow the insurance company got access to her Facebook photos that showed her out having fun -- at a birthday party, on vacation and the beach and at a Chippendale's show. Now it's entirely possible that there was insurance fraud going on. Or, it's also possible that someone who had been diagnosed with depression was trying to put her life back together. It's a bit difficult to think that an insurance agent looking at photos online is better at diagnosing the situation than a trained doctor.

In both of these cases, the issue is that photos might not tell the whole story. Making major decisions based just on some photos uploaded to social networks seems fraught with potential problems. I could certainly see using them as part of a larger investigation, but it doesn't seem like that was the case in either situation. But, in the meantime, it's a reminder that your privacy is increasingly disappearing -- and you may be surprised about decisions that others make about you based on what you assumed was perfectly innocent activities.

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Once Again, Walmart Stops People From Printing Family Photos Due To Copyright Law Claims

Mike Masnick — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:47:00 PST

It's been many years since we first wrote about how stores like Walmart were dealing with ridiculous copyright laws by telling employees to simply not allow the printing of "professional-looking" photos, just in case they were covered by someone else's copyright. Last year, a story popped up about a Walmart employee not letting a family print their own old family photos for this reason. It looks like we've got yet another such story. greenbird was the first of a few of you to send in this story about Walmart (yet again) not allowing the printing of family photos (this time for a funeral, which makes it that much more tragic), with copyright used as the reason. Once again, the employee made some dumb statements, such as saying "copyright is forever."

But, just like last time, I have to say that we shouldn't blame the Walmart employee, who is just trying to protect her job, and lives in a world where copyright maximalists constantly push this sort of message. It's not her fault, it's the fault of current copyright law, which makes such things seems reasonable, and the ongoing effort by lobbyists and politicians to only push copyright law further in that direction.

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