Who owns the copyrights to these photos?
Funny odd ball story to put copyrights law to the test.
Man steals woman’s phone. He doesn’t realize the camera is set auto upload to her computer.
She starts a blog to document his life and photography. He takes lots of self portraits. She’s named him Hafid… as in “Who’s gotcha phone?... I HAFID”.
Ok, so here’s my question… Copyright law grants image rights exclusively to the photographer. Technically speaking, the woman is in copyright violation of “Hafid’s” images because she should need his permission to post his photographs online.
In this scenario, it’s rather trivial (aside from the theft). But… What if Hafid sold an image to an art gallery for mucho dinero? Who should that commission be awarded to? And what if the real Hafid told the woman to remove his photos from her blog? He has the legal right to do so. Otherwise, she is stealing his copyrights.
To make matters more complicated… What if the man pictured in the photos is not the one who stole the phone? Would it change any copyright if he simply and innocently bought it from the thief?
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6 Answers
From such situations, common law is born.
It would make for an interesting case in law, because the thief should not get any rights arising from a felony, but none-the-less, the creation of the photograph was from the thief. And, to complicate it, by publishing it the way he did, the thief may have put it into the public domain, so has ceded rights.
This is where lawyers earn their money, by doing the research to back their argument.
Edited…. statement no longer relevant.
Legally, the theft and the copyright are separate issues. The only questions relevant to the copyright question are “who engaged in the creative act?” and “has that person voluntarily transferred their rights?” So the copyright belongs to “Hafid,” but it probably won’t do him any good.
This is because most jurisdictions have a cluster of laws preventing people from profiting from their crimes. Thus he would not be able to legally sell any image taken on the stolen camera and would be required to forfeit any commission were he to be found guilty of theft. His copyright is essentially useless due to the theft.
Finally, the woman has every right to publish the photos in an effort to find the thief. As such, he cannot force removal of the photos from her blog so long as she claims that at least one purpose of the blog is to recover the phone. It doesn’t even have to be the only purpose. If she has any hope that the blog will help, she can publish the photos.
@zenvelo Uploading to a dropbox is not publishing, so “Hafid” cannot be said to have published his photos in any way. And even if he did put them online, that in no way causes him to relinquish his copyrights.
@filmfann The woman isn’t causing the camera to take the pictures. This isn’t one of those cases where someone has an anti-theft application on their phone, but rather a case of the thief purposely using the phone to take photos of his own.
I withdrew my statement, since I misunderstood the story.
As I understand it, Hafid and the woman are in different countries. So at the time of capture, two files are created. Hafid will have one on the phone, and the woman have one on her computer.
Notice I didn’t say the woman would have a copy. Her file is just as original as the one on the camera. The rights are to the image, not the medium that carries it. A jpeg represents the same image as a printed photo, or a tiff file.
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