Friday, January 25, 2013

Federal Court Rules No Infringement in Case of Two Very Similar Photographs


This is a brief excerpt from PetaPixel




Copyright law is in place to protect artistic expression, not individual ideas. That was the crux of the reasoning behind a recent federal appeals court ruling that saw no infringement on the part of Sony. In the court’s opinion, Sony’s photo (right) was not nearly similar enough to Donald Harvey’s (left) and “no reasonable jury could find ‘substantial similarity’ between Sony’s recreated photo and Harney’s original.”

How the photo came to be infringed upon is an interesting story in and of itself. The original wound up at the center of a massive FBI investigation. The man in the photo had abducted his daughter and the photo was famously pasted on wanted posters and news outlets the world over.

It was this story that later became the subject of a Sony movie, for which the company took their own version of the photo. That’s when things got litigious.

Harvey sued, claiming infringement; Sony had copied key elements of his photo, including the core subject “and even the color and type of [the girl's] coat and the paper [her father] has clenched to his chest in his right hand.” Ultimately, however, the court was unable to …



By: DL Cade


Continued… click here!







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