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Photographer and Kat Von D Go on Trial in Case That May Upend Tattoo Industry
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jerrysievert 3y agoportland has a similar issue, [Portlandia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portlandia_(statue) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portlandia_(statue)), where the city commissioned it, $300+ thousand was paid to the artist, but he maintained the copyright, so no photos of it can be sold. the statue is a reinterpretation of an existing city seal, but wants to keep its "uniqueness" by not allowing any other reinterpretations of it (nee laurelwood brewing creating a likeness of it (an illustration) for their beer cans).
- themerone 3y agoI hate the idea of having restrictions on photographing things in outdoor public places. I have been harassed by building security for taking photos from the sidewalk outside my cities tallest skyscraper. An architect might own the rights to a buildings design, but they don't own the right to the cities skyline. City photography would become impossible if photographers have to acquire a license for every building in their photos.
- graphe 3y agoSurveillance isn't worth a few photos.
- WhackyIdeas 3y agoImagine getting a tattoo of your hero, then them pulling this crap on you. How many people have got tattoos of superheroes, brand names, etc etc. Not even Nintendo would go after someone for a Mario tattoo, and THAT says something.
- bdcravens 3y ago> Imagine getting a tattoo of your hero, then them pulling this crap on you. Miles Davis isn't doing this. He's been dead for 32 years. > Not even Nintendo This isn't a large corporation doing this either - it's a photographer whose livelihood depends on them licensing their images.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoImagine looking up to someone as a hero but not requesting permission from their photographer / negotiating rights to reproduce or derived from their work.
- gonzo41 3y agoThis seems like silly trial. If I do a master copy painting it's fair use. This is essentially the same as this tattoo, it's fair use. If Kat Von D, was tattoing a Nike logo on someone, then maybe there's something there. I'm suprised this got to trial.
- todd3834 3y agoI’m confused. It says she did it for free why is there a case?
- itsdrewmiller 3y agoAs discussed later in the article, she profits from her social media usage of the image / documenting her work on it.
- graphe 3y agoThen the photographer must not benefit from the publicity unless he sues.
- gklitz 3y ago“Upene the Industry” vs actually just paying for their sourge material is a bit much. Why should it be considered so fundamentally different from TShirts. If you want to use the source material of someone, then pay for it.
- canucker2016 3y agoShe won the case. But it ain't over - the photographer says his side planned to appeal. from https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/kat-von-d-wins-copyright-trial-miles-davis-tattoo-1234955355/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/kat-von-d-wins...: ==== Jurors took less than three hours to unanimously decide her tattoo — as well as her planning sketch and four related social media posts — were not “substantially similar” to the copyrighted 1989 portrait of jazz legend Miles Davis at the center of the trial. The eight jurors also found that three other social media posts made to Von D’s personal and business accounts that also referenced the photo qualified as “fair use.” ====
- baldgeek 3y agoWhen I got married (20+ years ago), my dad painted (oil panting on canvas) of our engagement photo that our photographer took, and wanted to display it at our wedding reception. I asked our photographer at the time if it was ok, and he mentioned that his painting was considered "deriavitive work", so that he wasn't violating his copyright. Yea, I get he's not a lawyer, and this is just a single instance, but I hope the outcome for Kat Von D, especially since she didn't get paid for the tattoo comes out the same.
- jpc0 3y agoReasonably sure YOU PAYING a photographer for a photo of YOUR engagement would give you the copyright... Emphasis on the important parts there, feel free to correct if I got one of them wrong.
- topkai22 3y agoYou often don’t get the copyright to the photographers take of you, even if you are paying them. It depends on the contract you sign. I won’t hire photographers who won’t give me rights to the photos at the end. This has been an issue with a surprising number of them.
- usefulcat 3y agoI don't know how common this is nowadays, but I'm pretty sure it used to be fairly common for wedding photographers to retain the copyright to all the photographs they take (even when you are paying them). Often they would not share the negatives or full resolution images. That way if you decide you want enlargements, more prints, whatever, you have no choice but to buy them from the original photographer. BTW, in the above scenario it's highly advisable to get whatever pictures you want soon after the event. No telling how good your photographer's backup practices are, or whether the basement where they keep all the negatives will get flooded..
- jpc0 3y agoThis feels more like shady practice than anything founded in copyright... Copyright on commisioned works is pretty clear and I'm pretty sure you would have to explicitly sign over your rights in that case. I think its more a matter of the photographer not knowing the law or knowing you are unlikely to take then to court regarding it.
- everforward 3y agoThis seems silly to me. Transcribing a photo or painting into a tattoo seems almost necessarily transformative due to the limitations of the medium. There are severe limitations on how dark black can get, ink fades which has to be factored in. Even skill-wise, it's a small subset of tattoo artists that are good enough to replicate a face well enough that it isn't transformative by nature of not looking like the reference at all. They're not going to extort money from your average scratcher who couldn't manage to violate copyright if they tried. Even moving beyond that, in practical terms I don't understand the economic reasoning here. Tattooing is a heavily manual process. There is no route to "industrial copyright infringement" like with books or movies where they can be effortlessly shared. Kat was tattooing for hours on that; I would wager it took over 8 hours just to ink that, ignoring prep work. Combine a heavily manual process with a limited number of artists capable of producing infringing material and I just can't see what the end goal is. To put everybody back on flash for all their tattoos? To get Midjourney to generate reference material and avoid copyright?
- echelon 3y agoIf she loses the case, does the person with the tattoo have to scar their skin permanently to remove the image? That'd be fucking wild.
- caslon 3y agoThey could black it out, or put an alternative image over it. This is common practice when someone has a tattoo they don't want, or can't keep.
- echelon 3y agoBut then the state is telling someone what to do with their body.
- freedomben 3y ago> But then the state is telling someone what to do with their body. I don't think that's a problem for 95% of people. Pretty much every state on the planet tells people what to do with their bodies all the time. If you eat/smoke/whatever certain plants that are found in nature, they can lock you in a cage and steal your livelihood. I think it's heinous and wrong, but it is the current status (even though it ought not to be).
- cypherg 3y agothis is more about tattoo artists copywriting their own work and that being reproduced by other tattoo artists
- mjh2539 3y agoThis is anathema to the whole industry though. You can't do this and also remain a tattoo artist in good standing with the rest of tattoo-dum. It's akin to a punk band calling the cops on someone in the crowd for singing along.
- dylan604 3y agoeven if another tattoo artist does it, it will still be unique. hell, if the same artist does the same tattoo multiple times, each will be unique. it's not even remotely the same as seeing an image in Google image search, and using it for whatever without permission.
- CaliforniaKarl 3y agoSuggested viewing before commenting: Tom Scott. “YouTube’s Copyright System Isn’t Broken. The World’s Is”. Chapter 2: “No Copyright Infringement Intended”. https://youtu.be/1Jwo5qc78QU https://youtu.be/1Jwo5qc78QU
- mjh2539 3y agoThe judge will order the infringing works to be destroyed and the man's arm will have to be cut-off.
- HKH2 3y agoI think flaying would be sufficient.
- bdcravens 3y agoI realize you're being tongue-in-cheek, but I believe they often give the infringer the option of how to dispose of the infringing work. Laser tattoo remove, or inking over it would be adequate. Presumably this would be at Kat Von D's expense, since the wearer of the ink isn't named in the lawsuit.
- neilv 3y agoTattoo would be a very painful copyright violation "takedown".
- bitwize 3y agoI've always wondered how that worked. Like, if I tattooed Bowser playing a double necked guitar while riding a surfboard on a guy, am I not infringing copyright? Especially since I'm accepting payment for use of Nintendo's copyrighted material? How have tattoo artists gotten away with this for so long?
- graphe 3y agoThey sucked, they were cheap, and nobody would sue. Now new dyes, better training, more pop culture wants it, and the artists want to be known.
- euniceee3 3y agoRIP Trevor Moore
- drewzero1 3y agoYou'd have to be on like a gallon of PCP to get a tattoo like that!
- shwaj 3y agoA gallon, you say? I can’t resist: https://youtu.be/tFUvmZWf4hI https://youtu.be/tFUvmZWf4hI
- SoftTalker 3y agoWell TIL about that photograph, and the name of the photographer who took it. It's a cool photograph, possibly someting I might want to buy a copy of. The photographer should be thankful for the publicity.
- jfengel 3y agoArtists of all kinds make bitter jokes about "publicity", e.g. "oh good, my landlord will let me pay in either cash, Bitcoin, or publicity".
- esafak 3y agoSeriously. Don't talk about paying artists in publicity except in jest.
- freedomben 3y agoI know you and GP haven't said anything else about this, and I don't want to put words in your mouth by assuming your opinion. So this is not aimed at you specifically, but I'm sure there are plenty of people on the side of the photographer who would agree completely with you. For those people: Are we seriously holding in mind that publicity isn't worth anything to artists so you should never say that, while also saying that the tattoo artist (whose compensation is only publicity on social media because she did this tat for free) has profited illegally from a copyrighted image and therefore should be sued for damages? I don't see how both of those could possibly be true.
- em-bee 3y agoAre we seriously holding in mind that publicity isn't worth anything to artists so you should never say that no, there is a difference between an artist offering to do something for free (because of the publicity they expect) and directly asking an artist to do something for free because i promise they will get publicity out of it. the later is an insult, because it is not for me to judge if the publicity is worth anything to them. it might not be. if an artist is maxing out their capacity with paid work, then additional publicity may not help them. then doing something for free would only lower their income.
- j-bos 3y agoFeels like there's a joke in a photographer suing a tattoo artist for illegally copying the face of a dead third party.
- bdcravens 3y agoCopying the dead third party isn't the issue. Copying a specific rendition, as composed by the photographer, is. There are a number of photos of him that have non- or less-restrictive licensing.
- j-bos 3y agoOf course, my comment isn't about any issue per se, simply that something about the concept feels ironic.
- mortenjorck 3y agoIn practical terms, this really has nothing to do with the question of how transformative a tattoo is or is not as a derivative work. The reason this hasn’t been a problem before is simply due to the nature of a tattoo - people typically only see the finished product after it was produced, long separated from the tattoo artist that inked it. Even with celebrities whose images are all over the media, a rights holder isn’t going to go track down Vin Diesel‘s tattoo artist to demand compensation. There have been high profile tattoo artists, of course, but one assumes they have been aware of their visibility and thus by and large steered clear of exactly what Kat von D just stepped into.
- calciphus 3y agoCounter example, just because it fills out the picture a bit: https://www.techdirt.com/2011/05/25/is-mike-tyson-tattoo-ed-helms-parody/ https://www.techdirt.com/2011/05/25/is-mike-tyson-tattoo-ed-... In 2011, the tattoo artist who did Mike Tyson's tattoo suing Warner Bros over The Hangover 2 / Ed Helms. It was settled out of court so no precedent was set, sadly.
- sonorous_sub 3y agoI feel like I have a Doppelgänger somewhere who's going to file an infringement claim against me for wearing his face.
- bdcravens 3y agoThat's not what's being argued here. If she had used a freely licensed photo of Miles there would be no issue.