5 ms·

I'm curious if we're entitled to royalties when our likeness gets used. Anyone know one way or another?

by jppope 7y ago

binarymax 7y ago
Probably not. Only if it’s a photo that you own the copyright of, and you didn’t divest that copyright when you gave the photo to a site that had a reshare clause in its terms of use.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  Didn't Harrison Ford trademark his face? Then they have to pay him to use it on toys and mechanise?
  - sgc 7y ago
    Could I trademark someone else's face and claim royalties? It seems like a legal stretch, or at least indicates a legal reality I can't support. Unless he has secretly had so much plastic surgery he designed it.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      > Could I trademark someone else's face and claim royalties? To get a trademark, the mark you're registering has to be actively used in commerce. There are other laws that come into play if you're using someone else's likeness in commerce. The entire purpose of trademark is to prevent consumer confusion (for instance, to prevent one company from using another company's logo on their products).
    - redler 7y ago
      Is the Obey logo trademarked?
- bosswipe 7y ago
  Do you give up copyright when you upload photos to Facebook or LinkedIn?
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    No, you don't. You grant them a perpetual license to use those photos. You aren't granting a license to any companies who scrape those photos to use them. However, copyright only applies to distributing copies -- someone could collect and use photos and not violate copyright as long as they don't redistribute those photos. Another wrinkle is that in the US the copyright of a photo belongs to the person who took the picture, not the person who appears in it (unless an assignment of copyright was signed). So, if you posted a picture of yourself that you didn't take then you probably aren't the copyright holder, which would mean that you aren't the one who would have the right to recourse for any misuse of it.
    - bosswipe 7y ago
      The grey area is if data gleaned from a photo is also under copyright. Clearview could analyze public photos and store facial data from them without storing the photos themselves.
      - JohnFen 7y ago
        Right, this was what I was alluding to. I am not a lawyer, but I have a solid lay understanding of copyright. By my understanding (which may be wrong!), copyright law does not prohibit this use of the pictures at all. However, if they are providing the pictures themselves as part of the search results, there may indeed be a copyright issue.
cameldrv 7y ago
I don't see why not. When you post your photos to Facebook, you are giving them a license to it, but that license certainly doesn't extend to companies that scrape Facebook's site. Seems ripe for someone to deal a punishing class-action to Clearview. One caveat is that you might need to register your copyright in order to be able to recover damages. I also wonder if one might be able to use the DMCA process against Clearview.
- wolco 7y ago
  They only view and make calculations against publically available data. The DMCA would only be helpful if they were sharing said photo.
  - voxic11 7y ago
    No copyright law applies to the copying of a work, not its distribution. If they made any copies of the work (which they would have to if they were loading them into memory for processing) then they need to comply with copyright law. > "The court determined that a copy of a program made from a hard drive into RAM for purpose of executing the program was, in fact, a copy under the Copyright Act." see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Computer,_Inc.#Copyright_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Comp...
    - wolco 7y ago
      But these are public photos offered by facebook under that license. Anyone visiting the profile will have a copy of said public photo in there cache. That in itself doesn't trigger a copyright act because the photo is licensed for that act. Reusing the image would trigger copyright protections as the licease granted to facebook doesn't cover that. It would be the same as downloading a trial program with images. You can use them in the game, you can make calculations on those images (they are this big, they are classifed as tree, face, etc) but you can't include them in your game.

I'm curious if we're entitled to royalties when our likeness gets used. Anyone know one way or another?

by jppope 7y ago

I'm curious if we're entitled to royalties when our likeness gets used. Anyone know one way or another?

Probably not. Only if it’s a photo that you own the copyright of, and you didn’t divest that copyright when you gave the photo to a site that had a reshare clause in its terms of use.

paulryanrogers 7y ago
Didn't Harrison Ford trademark his face? Then they have to pay him to use it on toys and mechanise?
- sgc 7y ago
  Could I trademark someone else's face and claim royalties? It seems like a legal stretch, or at least indicates a legal reality I can't support. Unless he has secretly had so much plastic surgery he designed it.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > Could I trademark someone else's face and claim royalties? To get a trademark, the mark you're registering has to be actively used in commerce. There are other laws that come into play if you're using someone else's likeness in commerce. The entire purpose of trademark is to prevent consumer confusion (for instance, to prevent one company from using another company's logo on their products).
  - redler 7y ago
    Is the Obey logo trademarked?
bosswipe 7y ago
Do you give up copyright when you upload photos to Facebook or LinkedIn?
- JohnFen 7y ago
  No, you don't. You grant them a perpetual license to use those photos. You aren't granting a license to any companies who scrape those photos to use them. However, copyright only applies to distributing copies -- someone could collect and use photos and not violate copyright as long as they don't redistribute those photos. Another wrinkle is that in the US the copyright of a photo belongs to the person who took the picture, not the person who appears in it (unless an assignment of copyright was signed). So, if you posted a picture of yourself that you didn't take then you probably aren't the copyright holder, which would mean that you aren't the one who would have the right to recourse for any misuse of it.
  - bosswipe 7y ago
    The grey area is if data gleaned from a photo is also under copyright. Clearview could analyze public photos and store facial data from them without storing the photos themselves.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      Right, this was what I was alluding to. I am not a lawyer, but I have a solid lay understanding of copyright. By my understanding (which may be wrong!), copyright law does not prohibit this use of the pictures at all. However, if they are providing the pictures themselves as part of the search results, there may indeed be a copyright issue.

cameldrv 7y ago

I don't see why not. When you post your photos to Facebook, you are giving them a license to it, but that license certainly doesn't extend to companies that scrape Facebook's site. Seems ripe for someone to deal a punishing class-action to Clearview. One caveat is that you might need to register your copyright in order to be able to recover damages. I also wonder if one might be able to use the DMCA process against Clearview.

wolco 7y ago
They only view and make calculations against publically available data. The DMCA would only be helpful if they were sharing said photo.
- voxic11 7y ago
  No copyright law applies to the copying of a work, not its distribution. If they made any copies of the work (which they would have to if they were loading them into memory for processing) then they need to comply with copyright law. > "The court determined that a copy of a program made from a hard drive into RAM for purpose of executing the program was, in fact, a copy under the Copyright Act." see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Computer,_Inc.#Copyright_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Comp...
  - wolco 7y ago
    But these are public photos offered by facebook under that license. Anyone visiting the profile will have a copy of said public photo in there cache. That in itself doesn't trigger a copyright act because the photo is licensed for that act. Reusing the image would trigger copyright protections as the licease granted to facebook doesn't cover that. It would be the same as downloading a trial program with images. You can use them in the game, you can make calculations on those images (they are this big, they are classifed as tree, face, etc) but you can't include them in your game.