Sadly common sense and copyright law are not happy bedfellows. Look at music. It's considered fair use to convert a CD you bought to MP3 so you can listen to it on the move on an MP3 player. This is common sense.
Yet in reality we have content producers doing everything they can to stop this fair use. The copy protect CD's, they install rootkits on PC's, hell they even stop the CD's playing on a PC in the first place.
Likewise they tried, and failed, to stop VCR's because they saw this as an infringement on their copyright. Yet because of VCR's there blossomed a huge rental industry and those same content producers made even more money out of it.
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Originally Posted by Charlotte
The important point to distinguish here is that fair use of copyrighted material is largely accepted for private use but not for commercial use, i.e. to make any money out of it. Displaying stuff on your personal website is a bit of a grey area + is more down to courtesy than law I think, since every single personal website cannot possibly be policed.
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So some obscure law criminalises all of us? Even if we're not caught. This is right how?
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Originally Posted by Charlotte
A single use plus quoting/crediting the author may be often be accepted, depending on whether the author is a Mr Nice Guy or a git - and I think the author would have a hard time suing anyone for that - although this would relate more to text than to photo's. However, it is always safer + just plain courtesy to get permission first, and with photo's I think it's an 'honour among photographers' issue, except where a copyright notice is published alongside the photo specifically forbidding any use of it.
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Hmm, I think you're talking about something slightly different. That reads to me like you're talking about using others work lock stock. And I agree that should be protected. However my point is about
incidental copyright infringement.
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Originally Posted by Charlotte
In any event - and back to the logo-in-the-background issue - if someone has displayed their copyrighted material in such a way that it is publicly accessible, i.e. published or on open display in a public place (as with signage), then they must expect fair use!
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See! There you go using common sense again!
What you might expect and what is actually legal are different - sadly.
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Originally Posted by Charlotte
The difficulty comes in assessing what "fair use" would include, which would in fact differ in various scenarios. Of course, in any case "fair use" specifically excludes reproducing it for profit, which is the main thing which copyright is there to protect.
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My point, and the point of the book, is if this is in the background and not actually part of the "subject" why should any artist have to go through the hoops of getting permission? This is the stifling of creativity I'm talking about.
It's so much bloody hassle to get permission that you wonder if it's worth the bother.
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Originally Posted by Charlotte
But if you displayed a photo you took of your spouse which happened to have a Boots sign in the BG, then that would be ok.
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Which is where we diverge. It might seem ok but by the letter of the law it's not.
Sadly you mentioned "spouse" in that sentence so there is a good chance that's likely to be a private image and therfor probably perfectly OK. If however it was, for example, a street performer you where doing a promotional shoot for, then you are breaking copyright laws. Simple as.
That all said, you're absolutely correct that it's not likely to be a problem for most of us. As rank amatuers are so under the radar of the copyright enforcers that we can pretty much shoot a street scene with boots in the background without a second thought.
However the moment you try to cash in on YOUR work there are legal hurdles you must overcome just because the boots logo "happened" to be in the background.
This is where creativity is stifled. Do you have the time, money and inclination to write to companies and ask for permission to publish your work?
How is this not stifling your creativity?
As I say, read the book. He's so much better at these wordy things than me