All Your Images Are Ours

[Mike Farley]

There is a long tale of woe on Ming Thein's blog. The basic story is that in 2012 he was invited to a promotional event hosted by a watch manufacturer and posted the images he took on Flickr. Three years later he received a Notice of Infringement and take down notice from Yahoo!, which owns Flickr, as the watch manufacturer was claiming the copyright of his images. This was based on the shots showing branded goods are classified as derivative works, which Thein states is currently a legal grey area. Essentially, straightforward reproduction is OK, but depicting someone else's IP in a way which can be deemed malicious could land the author in hot water. Never one to accept such things quietly, Thein swung into action.

http://blog.mingthein.com/2015/10/27/hu ... not-yours/

He achieved a resolution remarkably quickly, mainly due to the contacts he has within the watch industry, and the images have been reinstated.

http://blog.mingthein.com/2015/10/28/re ... ographers/

It turned out that the claim had been filed by a third party acting on behalf of the manufacturer and the reason had been prevention of counterfeiting. Quite possibly the action was initiated by a junior employee who was not qualified to make such judgements in what is a complex legal area, but it is difficult to see how the images could be construed in that manner. As Thein says, in many instances this can prove counter productive where there has been no malicious intent and serves only to create bad publicity. Think back a few years ago to the music industry suing its customers for copyright infringement when developments in technology made it easier to reproduce and distribute their products illegally. Yes, they were legally in the right, but they went after the wrong target.

http://blog.mingthein.com/2015/10/28/hu ... -expected/

The worrying thing for all of us is the ease with which a third party can make an invalid claim on our work and how difficult it can be to assert our legitimate rights when this occurs. Maybe Yahoo! will change its policies as a result of this case, although that would undoubtedly involve much additional effort on its part.

[davidc]

I don't think Yahoo will or should make any changes. Their rules are setup to cope with the vastly more prevalent scenario of malicious IP infringement which is more damaging and i think as photographers it's probably better to have a "takedown first, questions later" policy - both sides also showed that they reacted very well once the true situation was revealed. It seems like a storm in a teacup really?

I can understand Ming's response even if the blog post was slightly sensational (especially the "don't underestimate social media" line) but really, the number of times I've had to get DMCA takedown notices issued means I much prefer erring on the side of the copyright owner.

What is interesting is the internal screwup that meant the watch company didn't do their own verification first... that is really embarrassing!

[Mike Farley]

Thein is saying that these notices are very difficult to reverse when issued erroneously. The work is probably being done by junior staff to save costs and companies are not really worried if a few innocents get caught up in the process. In such instances hosts such as Yahoo! might not be able to determine who is in the right. On this occasion, Thein was invited to take pictures at the event, but Yahoo! was not necessarily to know that. The only embarassment occurs when someone makes a fuss and is able to generate adverse publicity. Relatively few people will ever read Thein's blog and many of those will not be interested in watches, which limits the reputational damage.