it is my opinion that image has no copyrights .

Baloney. That photojournalist makes a living by taking photos. Sometimes at great risk to self.


Did the artist *ask* the photographer? Did the artist *pay* the photographer for the right to use his/her copyrighted work?


The lazy attitude that one has the -right- to simply steal the work of another and use it as the basis for a prefab hack is just that, lazy. How hard is it to simply paint someone throwing a mol? Not. Not at all. What the painter did was to plagerize. That is unethical, and illegal. No sympathy here.

The case has similarities to one involving the Barbie and Ken dolls from several years ago. An artist took the dolls (some bought, some found) and modified them, then resold them. The court verdict was that the modified dolls where an original peice of art work and even though Mattel owned the copyrights on the unmodified version of the dolls, they could not prohibit the resale of the modified ones, nor could they collect royalites. Legal precident is with the painter in this case.

So, Oligonicella, if a painter ever sees a photograph, and paints a picture based on seeing it, does the painter also need to ask and pay?

Since when is painting a picture based on some other work the same as "stealing the work of" that person? The photograph is copyrighted; images created via other media based on seeing that photograph are not, however, violations of that copyright.

Making a copy of the photohgraph (even with, say, photorealist painting) might be violation. Making a painting compositionally based on the photograph, but with painterly method and especially with substantial changes, is not, nor should it be.

(Doron is still wrong; images have copyrights. But s/he is right that the image's copyright only applies to the literal image, not to interpretations of that image, especially wholly-created ones in other media - there may be some meat in a copyright case, of course, for an "interpretation" that consisted simply of re-coloring a scan in Photoshop... but IANAL.)

The problem with dealing with this as copyright, is that Joy's work (like that of Gerhard Richter, Rosenquist, Rauschenberg, Levine et al) is a comment on the image being appropriated - and therefore should be considered critical commentary - a fair use. But it gets sketchy for some because the painting is also being sold. it's not sketchy for me because the object of the painting is an artifact, just like the original photo, that is sold not based on it's materiality (well maybe for some painting collectors it is about that, but not usually photography), but based on it's communicative potential. no one has asked if the photographer obtained permission to capture the image of the person throwing the molotov? why's that? we should believe that someone owns the rights to an image because they snapped a shutter, while the person photographed is merely a landscape? Joy merely treated the image as the person in the photo was treated.
But the archive must be kept safe...
ryan

someone should have thought to
copyright that cross around his neck
that someone would have made a few bills

someone should have thought to
copyright that cross around his neck
that someone would have made a few bills

So, then all the paint artists out there would be happy to allow a photographer take pictures of their paintings and sell the pictures without any payment to the painter? If I understand the arguements in Joy favor that's just about what you're saying.

Joe,

You make a good point in the sense that Joy's work should not have had a conventional copyright on the painting. BUT, Joy did not make a replica of the original photo. The painting is actually a sampling of the orginal photo and not even a sampling. It's like taking a photo of a place or person on the street and making a painting out of it. This has been done for eons and even before the invention of photography; where artist will create their own versions of another artist's work. Why should this end?

Again, the main HUGE error Joy made was to not give attribution. She had just seen a digital sample of the image on a website. Not until the C&D had she seen the original. Due diligence, I say, due diligence. In times like these, you need to know how lawsuits work because it will come back to bite you.

Should the original photographer get a cut into Joy's painting? I don't think so. For one, I highly doubt the photographer has paid any of the people who are on her photos for the right to reproduce their images all over the world. Weird. She can capture someone else's face, slap a copyright on it and claim ownership. So she takes these people's images and claims ownership but nobody can do the same with samples of her work. This is the corruption of copyright.

The worst cases of copyright abuse are with museums. Many works of art are considered, under copyright law, to be in the public domain BUT the museums that house them control the reproduction and dissemination of the images of their collections. A museum can in effect curtail cultural currency by keeping a tight fist on the IMAGES culled from their collections and, in effect, taking any or all works of art and cultural artifacts they own out of the public domain.

The copyright and trademark systems are not broken --they've become 2 of the most successful economic tools for empire. The question is, how do we work around them?

me ? im not shy .. How dare you