Trump may have violated copyright law by selling mugshot merchandise
Trump may have violated copyright law by selling mugshot merchandise
The Trump campaign may have violated United State copyright law by selling merchandise featuring the former president’s mugshot, legal experts have warned.
The Trump campaign may have violated United State copyright law by selling merchandise featuring the former president’s mugshot, legal experts have warned.
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I hate that a shitty picture taken as part of legal proceedings is copyrightable. Just like research paid for by the government should be free and unencumbered, so should things produced by the government itself.
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Yeah I think most (all?) NASA stuff is IIRC. If Trump was a planet there'd be no worries.
It may not be allowed to use NASA images for commercial purposes though.
Edit: looked into it. Not only is it allowed, permission is not even required to use it commercially.
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Employees of the federal government generate IP that generally goes into the public domain. States can decide whether their employees, or municipalities ' employees' IP goes into the public domain or not. By default, it does not, and from briefly looking into it, it seems most states accept the default, and very few put it into the public domain, or allow for broad use of state-generated IP.
It makes sense, and it isn't a rule narrowly targeted at mugshots, but I'm not sure how to interpret it as a good thing. More government workers' IP going into the public domain seems like it would better serve the public interest. Even if it allows Trump to do nonsense like this.
I think the reason for this copyright is so nobody can massively shame the convinced. But nobody thought anyone would be proud about it so much to share it themselves.
He's not proud of it. He's just saying he is, so that people stops laughing at him. The fucked up pay is that he's making money out of it. But you bet he's seething over that mugshot. Especially because he said Hilary Clinton would be in jail. And he was technically in jail first.
The reason for the copyright is that you automatically get a copyright on any photograph. It seems unlikely the sheriff's office would want to enforce it. This is all wishful thinking.
That works out so well for Florida man.
Naw, practically everything is copyrighted if it meets some fairly simple rules. Copyrighted is the default and the rules exclude works from being copyrighted.
Copyright can't stop what you're saying. People obviously are shaming Trump and other criminals. News articles typically use mugshot photos. Copyright can't stop memes (and trying to do so usually just causes the Streisand effect).
Federal government works generally aren't domestically copyrightable. They are considered to be in the public domain within the USA.
ETA: I will add that that USA has some of the best protections for Fair Use. But Fair Use definitely doesn't extend to selling it at that scale.
These are the tests for Fair Use:
- the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; [very commercial]
- the nature of the copyrighted work; [photographic, publicly available]
- the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and [100% of it]
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. [Effectively eliminated the value to the copyright holder]
This isn’t federal, though. This is state.
Yes exactly. It isn't in the public domain, and so is still protected by copyright, and arguably fails the test for Fair Use. But OP's earlier comment suggested they were not aware that federal works sit in the public domain.
It is absurd that that would matter.
The law is a federal law though.
It is a federal law that only applies to federal works. This is a state case with a state mugshot that is a state work.
This isn't accurate as there is no such thing as a federal work or state work nor is there any actual court case. The law covers the whole country and it's explained in the first sentence of the article:
Donald Trump’s campaign may have violated United States copyright law by selling merchandise featuring the former president’s mugshot, legal experts have warned.
US Copyright law is a federal law about how copyrights are protected, but the posted regulation is about what federal work is copyrighted and NOT applicable to how state work is copyrighted. It even says it right there in the title: "Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States." The jail photographer is not an employee of the federal government, nor is the trial an activity of the federal government. This photo was not a work by the federal government.
Woops I didn't realize you were referring to the upper level comment and not the main post. My apologies!
No worries. The big issue is how does Georgia law apply to photographs taken by a state employee as part of the stated job functions for their official job. It's one thing for an employee to take a photo while on the job, but when their specific job is to take an official photo then I think it would be ridiculous for that person to own the copyright and it not be public property (like NASA images). Should DMV employees own the copyright to license photos?
I'm not a lawyer but my layman's opinion is that the state should retain ownership over the photo. To give an example, where I live a company began scraping mugshot photos and then compiling them into a newspaper that they distributed and sold for profit. It became really popular but it also drew a lot of negative attention since this company was earning money by spreading photos and arrest records of people that hadn't even been convicted of a crime. The solution here was to just stop posting mugshots online, which was effective, but didn't address ownership of the photos at all.
This isn't exactly a 1:1 comparison since Trump was the subject of the photo and also the one selling merch, but I think there's a valid argument against allowing people to privately sell products based off work/production funded by the public.
The government office could try to assert copyright, but it would be an uphill battle.
As a matter of public policy “the U.S. Copyright Office will not register a government edict that has been issued by any state, local, or territorial government, including legislative enactments, judicial decision, administrative rulings, public ordinances, or similar types of official legal materials.” U.S. Copyright Office Practices § 313.6(C)(2).
https://garson-law.com/can-state-governments-own-rights-in-copyright/
A mugshot isn't a law, so maybe this doesn't apply cleanly, but the copyright office clearly isn't rushing to hand out rulings in favor of publicly created works.
I submit to you copyrighted laws.
It's one example. I don't remember exactly which state, but I remember clearly hearing that one state or more has the only law resource being a LexisNexis book of laws. Copyrightable because it's technically "annotated", but the non-annotated versions are not available.