Another Photo Copyright question... Who owns the crops from the Chinese Gigapixel Panoramic?

) August 28th, 2013

Last month, photographer Jeffrey Martin presented one of the largest photographs ever created. 150 Gigapixel Image of Tokyo.

You can zoom in extremely close. The image is twice the size of Photoshop maximum. 20,000 times more detailed than an iPhone. 8,000 images were stitched together.
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So, now Wired Magazine has an art presentation of crops made from the Martin Gigapixel image. Pretty cool images actually.

But my question is, Who owns the copyrights?

This is challenging previous notions of what it means to capture a photograph.

Other photographers are having curated art shows based upon Google Earth images and/or Google Street View. Who is the owner of this artwork?

See 9-Eyes surreal images from Google Street View.

Check out the gorgeous artwork of Mishka Henner compiled from Google Earth images.

Who owns these photos?

Observing members: 0

Composing members: 0

1 Answer

Google can claim ownership of its images whenever it wants. Imbedded in the closest views is a copyright watermark. However, artists [particularly the American Pop artists]
have successfully defended in court the use of popular cultural elements in their work. In cases like these, if the 900-lb gorilla wants to start a legal poker game at $50,000 ante, who wants to take the bet? Robert Rauschenberg was successful enough to take them on. Many aren’t.

Several art cases are discussed on this site My favorite reason for justifying it is “fair use by parody”.

Actually in the Rauschenberg lawsuit, two artists duked it out.

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