8 ms·

Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist location? According to Wikimedia's legal analysis, it depends.[

by radlad 2y ago

Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist location? According to Wikimedia's legal analysis, it depends.[0] Furthermore, authorship and copyright are distinct. [0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Authorship_and_Copyright_Ownership https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Authorship_and_Cop...

onemoresoop 2y ago
From that ruling to this case it extends that the local or tourist who took the photo would be the copyright holder which makes little sense.
- Aloisius 2y ago
  It makes perfect sense. The photograph is the photographer's creative expression. This is how copyright has always worked.
  - davely 2y ago
    To be fair, a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression. I wonder about something like this[0]. So much awesome engineering went into it. And the guy is clearly an artist and considers himself an artist[1]. As it is his own tool, are the random splatters it generates not copyrightable? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XyE41_ANrc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XyE41_ANrc [1] https://engineezy.com/pages/about https://engineezy.com/pages/about
    - stonemetal12 2y ago
      >To be fair, a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression. Depending on if the prompt met other guidelines for copyright, it would be pretty uncontroversial to say you own the copyright on the prompt. Copyright on the picture, is about as assignable as if you invited ten painters over to your house and read the prompt as spoken word poetry, then received one painting at random. The fact that your prompt won't reliably produce the same picture suggests that you are not in control of the artistic choices made, and therefore have no claim to the copyright.
    - blacksqr 2y ago
      >a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression. Then it's the prompt that is copyrighted, not the end result. US copyright law specifically states that only works fixed into existence by a human author can be copyrighted, and specifically excludes processes or procedures by which a work might ultimately come to be fixed.
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    In terms of AI, then it should be clear that the prompts (that AI used to generate my work) are my creative expressions. Sure, the AI may alter it in some unknown ways, but does this make it any less so my creative expression?
- elicksaur 2y ago
  If I lend you my camera to take pictures you choose, do I hold the copyright because I own the camera? (No)
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    "you choose" is a pretty important factor in this.
    - californical 2y ago
      Do “you choose” to angle the phone slightly up 5 degrees to capture a bit of the sky? Or do “you choose” the moment to take the photo when the timing is right? There is always some creative decision involved by the person who presses the shutter
    - sejje 2y ago
      What if I ask a stranger to take my photo, and it turns out he's Ansel Adams? He's going to make some decisions about the framing etc, as one of the best photographers of all time.
      - johnisgood 2y ago
        So if I ask someone to take a photo, but I tell them "tilt the camera", I am the copyright holder, but if they do so without me "prompting" them, then I no longer am? Am I understanding you correctly?
        aziaziazi 2y ago
        What if Louis XVI ask Antoine Callet to use a lighter color for his skin? Does he own the Callet painting copyright? You can prompt whatever you want but won’t own the copyright. Photographer will choose himself if he follow or not your "prompt", what side and angle he tilt, the zoom, when to press the shutter…
        2y ago
echelon 2y ago
Take out the second person and imagine if you set the camera to a timer. Perhaps we record the path of the sun every day for a year to create an analemma. That's something artistic that should absolutely qualify for copyright. Who owns the copyright then? Nobody? Because if so, that feels like bullshit. Like we're making up the rules completely arbitrarily with no logic at all. At some level in many electronic systems there is some kind of autonomous human out of the loop subsystem. It'd be easy to target almost any of these and say a machine is responsible for making the content. No human is making quaternion calculations by hand, for instance. If a human put in work, regardless of any automations, a human deserves the copyright. Either that, or nobody deserves copyright.
- dcow 2y ago
  I believe the correct answer is “nobody deserves the copyright”. It’s a big fat myth that creatives would starve if copyright disappeared tomorrow. Think of all the countless hours society has wasted arguing about who owns creative expression. If we assign it to the public, we can move on and find better ways to keep creatives housed and fed.
  - iamacyborg 2y ago
    Creatives absolutely would suffer if they lost copyright protection.
    - I-M-S 2y ago
      The person you're replying to explicitly stated that a different way to compensate creatives for their talents should be put in place in case copyright is eliminated.
      - Goronmon 2y ago
        "Just do something different that works better." is hardly an explicit statement.
davely 2y ago
Oof, this gets into all sorts of weird legal grey areas. - All of our phones do a bunch of computational photography where AI tooling improves a photo in various ways. In that case, is any photo taken by a modern phone not copyrightable? - If it is copyrightable, what if someone uses an Img2Img tool or inpainting with something like Stable Diffusion (or Photoshop) in order to slightly modify an image. Is that no longer copyrightable? (FYI, my questions aren't directed at or attacking you -- just interesting hypotheticals.)
- oniony 2y ago
  Wouldn't they be derivative works of a copyrightable work?
- Maken 2y ago
  - All of our phones do a bunch of computational photography where AI tooling improves a photo in various ways. In that case, is any photo taken by a modern phone not copyrightable? On a related note, I believe it's just a question of time that in some high profile case (murder, rape, thief) direct photographic evidence of the perpetrator will have to be discarded, because it was taken with a smartphone and it's imposible to determine to which degree it was altered.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    There was a post someone made, some time ago, where they took a picture of a rabbit, with its head turned away from the photographer, so its eyes were not visible, and their iPhone painted an eye on it, because the profile was the same as if the rabbit had its head facing forward. It was in the discussion about the fake Samsung moon photos.
  - eloisius 2y ago
    To some degree it wouldn’t be hard to do non-destructive editing and save the original sensor data, and embed the developed jpeg (or heif) in it. This is already normal for digital cameras when shooting RAW.
  - d1sxeyes 2y ago
chii 2y ago
> Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist location? because you asked and they complied, there's a work contract between said photo-button presser and you. The implicit agreement is that you own the copyright to the photo, and the consideration paid is a word of thanks from you. Now on the other hand...if you dropped your phone, and a stranger with no prior interaction picked it up, and pressed the button, then you can argue that they own the copyright.
- fnord123 2y ago
  > Now on the other hand...if you dropped your phone, and a stranger with no prior interaction picked it up, and pressed the button, then you can argue that they own the copyright. If they've performed an Unauthorized Access to a Computer System then they may want to drop any copyright claim.
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    Precisely.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > because you asked and they complied, there's a work contract between said photo-button presser and you No, this can't happen, because there is no consideration. > and the consideration paid is a word of thanks from you Nope. You can call it consideration, but that won't make it consideration.
  - chii 2y ago
    consideration doesnt have to be money.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      No, but it does have to exist. A private word of thanks isn't enough to even rise to that level.
- 2y ago
mschuster91 2y ago
Let me add something even more funny: in Germany, some buildings and art installations are copyrighted which means they aren't allowed to be photographed for non-private usage despite being literally out in the open for everyone to see [1]. [1] https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000108536963/schraeges-urheberrecht-fotos-vom-hamburger-hafen-bei-nacht-koennen-teuer https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000108536963/schraeges-urh...
- shagie 2y ago
  This is country specific (as is copyright itself). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_architecture_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_architecture_in_t... https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/120 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/120 > The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place. This gets further complicated by sculptural works that are not part of the architecture of the building which have their own copyright. For example, the sculpture of lions in front of the New York Public Library are works of sculpture and not part of the architecture of the building and so photographs of them are derivative works... though that's not an issue now as they've fallen into public domain (they were the example given when I started photography as a sculpture that was often photographed along with architecture)... but are trademarked. Then you get things like the Eiffel Tower which is public domain, but the lights (installed in 1985) are not... so a photograph of it, by night, is under copyright. It's complicated.
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    Yup, that's insane, all of it. Anything that is visible with the human eye or a reasonable camera (i.e. no 1200mm superzoom into someone's residence where a painting hangs) from the open street or any area accessible to the general public such as parking lots, airports and the likes should be freely redistributable.
- Suppafly 2y ago
michaelbuckbee 2y ago
Who owns your photo of the moon after Samsung uses "SceneOptimizer" to AI fix it? https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...
- bacchusracine 2y ago
  Burger King.
- mubou 2y ago
  Wow, that last "photo" is especially damning. I hate how impossible it is nowadays to buy a phone with a camera that just takes photos without 'shopping them somehow. Even Pixels apply unnatural filters. It just ruins photos, which you often can't ever go back and retake... (I know you can shoot in RAW, but I don't have time to develop every photo I take and I really shouldn't have to. Some phones' RAWs are actually post-filtering, too, and not actually "raw".)
  - thewebguyd 2y ago
    They pretty much have to. The sensors on smart phones are so tiny that a true RAW file out of them would be pretty much unusable. They simply don't capture enough light. The only way at this point to improve photo quality out of a phone is a bigger sensor, or software. Thus far, everyone has chosen doing it in software. Though you should definitely be able to adjust the amount of post processing, some is always going to be necessary if you don't want a grainy mess of a photo.
    - mubou 2y ago
      I'd be awesome if there was a phone meant for photographers (who can't be arsed to carry a DSLR all the time). Like, take the sensor off a compact point-and-shoot and slap it on a smartphone. Because honestly it feels silly that point-and-shoots still exist in 2025; you'd think they'd have gone the way of the mp3 player.
Suppafly 2y ago
>Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist location? Wouldn't that be a 'work for hire' situation?
kazinator 2y ago
Generally, whoever has more money for better lawyers, and/or is more intimidating or threatening.

by radlad 2y ago

onemoresoop 2y ago

From that ruling to this case it extends that the local or tourist who took the photo would be the copyright holder which makes little sense.

Aloisius 2y ago
It makes perfect sense. The photograph is the photographer's creative expression. This is how copyright has always worked.
- davely 2y ago
  To be fair, a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression. I wonder about something like this[0]. So much awesome engineering went into it. And the guy is clearly an artist and considers himself an artist[1]. As it is his own tool, are the random splatters it generates not copyrightable? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XyE41_ANrc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XyE41_ANrc [1] https://engineezy.com/pages/about https://engineezy.com/pages/about
  - stonemetal12 2y ago
    >To be fair, a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression. Depending on if the prompt met other guidelines for copyright, it would be pretty uncontroversial to say you own the copyright on the prompt. Copyright on the picture, is about as assignable as if you invited ten painters over to your house and read the prompt as spoken word poetry, then received one painting at random. The fact that your prompt won't reliably produce the same picture suggests that you are not in control of the artistic choices made, and therefore have no claim to the copyright.
  - blacksqr 2y ago
    >a prompt fed into a generative tool _could_ be considered an artist's creative expression. Then it's the prompt that is copyrighted, not the end result. US copyright law specifically states that only works fixed into existence by a human author can be copyrighted, and specifically excludes processes or procedures by which a work might ultimately come to be fixed.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  In terms of AI, then it should be clear that the prompts (that AI used to generate my work) are my creative expressions. Sure, the AI may alter it in some unknown ways, but does this make it any less so my creative expression?
elicksaur 2y ago
If I lend you my camera to take pictures you choose, do I hold the copyright because I own the camera? (No)
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  "you choose" is a pretty important factor in this.
  - californical 2y ago
    Do “you choose” to angle the phone slightly up 5 degrees to capture a bit of the sky? Or do “you choose” the moment to take the photo when the timing is right? There is always some creative decision involved by the person who presses the shutter
  - sejje 2y ago
    What if I ask a stranger to take my photo, and it turns out he's Ansel Adams? He's going to make some decisions about the framing etc, as one of the best photographers of all time.
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      So if I ask someone to take a photo, but I tell them "tilt the camera", I am the copyright holder, but if they do so without me "prompting" them, then I no longer am? Am I understanding you correctly?
      - aziaziazi 2y ago
        What if Louis XVI ask Antoine Callet to use a lighter color for his skin? Does he own the Callet painting copyright? You can prompt whatever you want but won’t own the copyright. Photographer will choose himself if he follow or not your "prompt", what side and angle he tilt, the zoom, when to press the shutter…
        2y ago

echelon 2y ago

Take out the second person and imagine if you set the camera to a timer. Perhaps we record the path of the sun every day for a year to create an analemma. That's something artistic that should absolutely qualify for copyright. Who owns the copyright then? Nobody? Because if so, that feels like bullshit. Like we're making up the rules completely arbitrarily with no logic at all. At some level in many electronic systems there is some kind of autonomous human out of the loop subsystem. It'd be easy to target almost any of these and say a machine is responsible for making the content. No human is making quaternion calculations by hand, for instance. If a human put in work, regardless of any automations, a human deserves the copyright. Either that, or nobody deserves copyright.

dcow 2y ago
I believe the correct answer is “nobody deserves the copyright”. It’s a big fat myth that creatives would starve if copyright disappeared tomorrow. Think of all the countless hours society has wasted arguing about who owns creative expression. If we assign it to the public, we can move on and find better ways to keep creatives housed and fed.
- iamacyborg 2y ago
  Creatives absolutely would suffer if they lost copyright protection.
  - I-M-S 2y ago
    The person you're replying to explicitly stated that a different way to compensate creatives for their talents should be put in place in case copyright is eliminated.
    - Goronmon 2y ago
      "Just do something different that works better." is hardly an explicit statement.

davely 2y ago

Oof, this gets into all sorts of weird legal grey areas. - All of our phones do a bunch of computational photography where AI tooling improves a photo in various ways. In that case, is any photo taken by a modern phone not copyrightable? - If it is copyrightable, what if someone uses an Img2Img tool or inpainting with something like Stable Diffusion (or Photoshop) in order to slightly modify an image. Is that no longer copyrightable? (FYI, my questions aren't directed at or attacking you -- just interesting hypotheticals.)

oniony 2y ago
Wouldn't they be derivative works of a copyrightable work?
Maken 2y ago
- All of our phones do a bunch of computational photography where AI tooling improves a photo in various ways. In that case, is any photo taken by a modern phone not copyrightable? On a related note, I believe it's just a question of time that in some high profile case (murder, rape, thief) direct photographic evidence of the perpetrator will have to be discarded, because it was taken with a smartphone and it's imposible to determine to which degree it was altered.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  There was a post someone made, some time ago, where they took a picture of a rabbit, with its head turned away from the photographer, so its eyes were not visible, and their iPhone painted an eye on it, because the profile was the same as if the rabbit had its head facing forward. It was in the discussion about the fake Samsung moon photos.
- eloisius 2y ago
  To some degree it wouldn’t be hard to do non-destructive editing and save the original sensor data, and embed the developed jpeg (or heif) in it. This is already normal for digital cameras when shooting RAW.
- d1sxeyes 2y ago

chii 2y ago

> Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist location? because you asked and they complied, there's a work contract between said photo-button presser and you. The implicit agreement is that you own the copyright to the photo, and the consideration paid is a word of thanks from you. Now on the other hand...if you dropped your phone, and a stranger with no prior interaction picked it up, and pressed the button, then you can argue that they own the copyright.

fnord123 2y ago
> Now on the other hand...if you dropped your phone, and a stranger with no prior interaction picked it up, and pressed the button, then you can argue that they own the copyright. If they've performed an Unauthorized Access to a Computer System then they may want to drop any copyright claim.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  Precisely.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> because you asked and they complied, there's a work contract between said photo-button presser and you No, this can't happen, because there is no consideration. > and the consideration paid is a word of thanks from you Nope. You can call it consideration, but that won't make it consideration.
- chii 2y ago
  consideration doesnt have to be money.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    No, but it does have to exist. A private word of thanks isn't enough to even rise to that level.
2y ago

mschuster91 2y ago

Let me add something even more funny: in Germany, some buildings and art installations are copyrighted which means they aren't allowed to be photographed for non-private usage despite being literally out in the open for everyone to see [1]. [1] https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000108536963/schraeges-urheberrecht-fotos-vom-hamburger-hafen-bei-nacht-koennen-teuer https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000108536963/schraeges-urh...

shagie 2y ago
This is country specific (as is copyright itself). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_architecture_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_architecture_in_t... https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/120 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/120 > The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place. This gets further complicated by sculptural works that are not part of the architecture of the building which have their own copyright. For example, the sculpture of lions in front of the New York Public Library are works of sculpture and not part of the architecture of the building and so photographs of them are derivative works... though that's not an issue now as they've fallen into public domain (they were the example given when I started photography as a sculpture that was often photographed along with architecture)... but are trademarked. Then you get things like the Eiffel Tower which is public domain, but the lights (installed in 1985) are not... so a photograph of it, by night, is under copyright. It's complicated.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  Yup, that's insane, all of it. Anything that is visible with the human eye or a reasonable camera (i.e. no 1200mm superzoom into someone's residence where a painting hangs) from the open street or any area accessible to the general public such as parking lots, airports and the likes should be freely redistributable.
Suppafly 2y ago

michaelbuckbee 2y ago

Who owns your photo of the moon after Samsung uses "SceneOptimizer" to AI fix it? https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_space_zoom_moon_shots_are_fake_and_here/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/11nzrb0/samsung_sp...

bacchusracine 2y ago
Burger King.
mubou 2y ago
Wow, that last "photo" is especially damning. I hate how impossible it is nowadays to buy a phone with a camera that just takes photos without 'shopping them somehow. Even Pixels apply unnatural filters. It just ruins photos, which you often can't ever go back and retake... (I know you can shoot in RAW, but I don't have time to develop every photo I take and I really shouldn't have to. Some phones' RAWs are actually post-filtering, too, and not actually "raw".)
- thewebguyd 2y ago
  They pretty much have to. The sensors on smart phones are so tiny that a true RAW file out of them would be pretty much unusable. They simply don't capture enough light. The only way at this point to improve photo quality out of a phone is a bigger sensor, or software. Thus far, everyone has chosen doing it in software. Though you should definitely be able to adjust the amount of post processing, some is always going to be necessary if you don't want a grainy mess of a photo.
  - mubou 2y ago
    I'd be awesome if there was a phone meant for photographers (who can't be arsed to carry a DSLR all the time). Like, take the sensor off a compact point-and-shoot and slap it on a smartphone. Because honestly it feels silly that point-and-shoots still exist in 2025; you'd think they'd have gone the way of the mp3 player.

Suppafly 2y ago

>Who owns the copyright when you ask someone to take a photo of you using your phone in a tourist location? Wouldn't that be a 'work for hire' situation?

kazinator 2y ago

Generally, whoever has more money for better lawyers, and/or is more intimidating or threatening.