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Myths and legends of copyright

By Rebecca Tushnet

Here's a new one for me: "if it's your camera, it's your copyright." From an article in New York magazine about how to get compensated when you've been wronged:

A Jilted Ex Puts Nude Photos of You, With Your Name, on an Amateur Porn Site
... To get the photos taken down, find out your ex?s Internet-service provider, as well as the Website?s hosting company and domain registrant by going to whois .net. Call the contact numbers for all three and say, ?The images were obtained without my knowledge or consent, are being used in bad faith, and this is a violation of federal copyright law.? (For future reference, all risqué pics should be shot with your own camera, so you can claim copyright.) Ben Butler, director of network abuse for GoDaddy .com, responds to 30 women with unwanted photos each week, and takes them down if they break federal copyright rule.

I'm incredibly sympathetic to the victims here, but what's described is probably going to be an abuse of copyright claims; it is highly unlikely that the subject of the pictures owns the copyright therein, unless you want to revisit theories of authorship to a pretty extreme degree. The procedure described may work, but if so it works because of sympathy for the victims, and the site's editorial decisions are protected by 230. A real copyright claim, by the way, can probably be better made by using the DMCA's notice and takedown provisions, which aren't satisfied by a phone call.

Full post as published by 43(B)log on December 10, 2008 (boomark / email).