Ars Technica says than in the UK “you may soon need a licence to take photos of that classic designer chair you bought”.
Changes to UK copyright law will soon mean that you may need to take out a licence to photograph classic designer objects even if you own them. That’s the result of the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013, which extends the copyright of artistic objects like designer chairs from 25 years after they were first marketed to 70 years after the creator’s death. In most cases, that will be well over a hundred years after the object was designed. During that period, taking a photo of the item will often require a licence from the copyright owner regardless of who owns the particular object in question.
There are lots of exceptions hinted at here: what is a classic designer object and why will the photograph only require a license “often”? It also seems as if such copyright enforcement already exists and only the timing is changing. Perhaps in practice the effects of this change in the law will be minimal.
Nevertheless, it is wrong to meet with violence the non-violent act of photographing an inanimate object. It is also so unintuitive that people will be surprised by it. And it is so unenforceable that it will be applied selectively.
There is another possibility. A Star Wars fan recently had his Facebook account suspended for posting a photograph of a Star Wars toy.
One possibility is that at least someone at Disney was openminded about Carvalho’s thoughtful response, but the organization has a software-enabled copyright enforcement regime in place that they simply can’t stop.
Pattern recognition software means that previously unenforceable crazy laws and policies can now be uniformly enforced. I find this…interesting.
What about “fair use doctrine” ? If I can print an excerpt of an authors work in an analysis or critique can I not publish a photograph of a chair or sculpture and painting when I comment about that ? Doesn’t that seem to make sense ?
I claim no expertise on intellectual property law, but it seems to me it turns on the intended use of the property. Making a replica of a designer chair would clearly violate the creator’s copyright, but merely taking a photo of it should not. That’s because a chair is a tangible object intended for physical use. An image, however, such as one of the iconic Star Wars characters, must be protected in that form; i.e., a photograph of such an image would be subject to the law. Even in that case there still remain exceptions, however. “Fair use”, as mentioned by gongcult, is one. Another is “noncommercial private use”. I have trouble believing that a private individual posting an image on his Facebook page, where there is no commercial implication (he is making no money off it) violates copyright law. But I could be wrong; the law really could be that stupid.
BTW, that “70 years after death” term is currently the law in the US for literary, musical and artistic works. It varies from country to country, though, and I don’t know what the UK law is. It is entirely possible that your “Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act of 2013” is merely catching up with global norms.
This is what happens when you allow ownership of ideas and intangibles. Many of us have been warning about the dangers of taking “intellectual property” too seriously for a while. And here we are.
Laird wrote:
It’s the same here, 70 years after the death of the creator or from first publication, whichever is later. That’s because IP laws worldwide are governed by the Berne Conventions. Look for that 70 years to go up, oh, sometime around 2036…
Indeed. One of the reasons I am against IP is because it is not readily intuitive. Where do we draw the line? There’s no objective place like between murder someone/ not murder someone. Yesterday my other half took some lovely photos of her daughter in her Christmas fancy dress outfit. The outfit and everything in the room has been designed by someone… Are those pictures illegal without multiple licenses from the copyright owners? It’s inevitably going to be a mess.
Another is that it tends to trump physical property rights .it seems to me that if I own some materials i should be able to arrange them into any configurations I see fit, and if they happen to resemble an Iphone or a designer chair afterwards then that is just tough.
The Ars Technica article doesn’t spell out which part of the proposed legislation would have this effect, but it does link to a consultation document which refers to “repealing section 52 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 which reduces the term of copyright protection for artistic works which are produced through an industrial process.”
It therefore looks as though this change will return the law to the situation prior to the implementation of the 1988 act. Was it really illegal to take photos of designer furniture before that date?
Copyright has gone from a protection against ripping off someone’s idea to a business model where you merely pay to license the product rather than own it, a license that may be revoked at any point, for whatever reason.
This would not be possible if not for the forever extending copyright period as championed by the likes of Sir Cliff et al for purely financial and selfish reasons. It has gone beyond was initially thought of as a way to protect someone’s intellectual property until they’d had a chance to make some money from it, and is now adopted for other purposes.
Return copyright to its original shorter periods and this sort of thing can’t work.
That’s because IP laws worldwide are governed by the Berne Conventions. Look for that 70 years to go up, oh, sometime around 2036…
I know Walt Disney died in 1966, but my understanding is that Steamboat Willie, the first of the Mickey Mouse cartoons, will only go out of copyright in about 2048 (at least in the US). So we’ve got a few more years beyond that to go before Disney gets copyright law changed again.
It’ll make a mess of Ebay if nothing can be photographed for sale.
This would not be possible if not for the forever extending copyright period as championed by the likes of Sir Cliff et al for purely financial and selfish reasons. It has gone beyond was initially thought of as a way to protect someone’s intellectual property until they’d had a chance to make some money from it, and is now adopted for other purposes.
The US Constitution specifically has the word “limited” regarding Congress’ ability to set up a system of granting copyrights and patents. Unfortunately, “limited” has been stretched out of definition like all the other plain language of the Constitution (notably “reasonable” in the 4th Amendment).
IP is an area I avoid – I have enough enemies as it is, without making enemies on either side of the Intellectual Property debate.
However, I will say that I think the law has gone much too far – it is making IP look demented.
And organisations such as Disney (ABC) are at the heart of this.
One can not base an entire economy on copyrights (or even patents) – they may be justified (although not in the extreme way they are enforced today – with 25 years turned into 70 years after death and so on), but one needs lower taxation (which means lower government spending), and less regulations also.
Chinese (and other) companies must be laughing – as if bits of paper from the American government can be the entire basis of the American economy.
Still it is amusing.
After all Hollywood types are, mainly, leftists (Mr Lucas of Star Wars is).
Yet they use the government to pile up money for themselves – and to hunt down the “little people” all over the planet.
I suppose that is how they believe all “big business” types behave.
It may work with Hollywood – but it will not work in manufacturing.
Eventually production goes to the most efficient places to produce – regardless of what government says.
And NO that does not mean the areas of lowest wages.
After all Britain had the HIGHEST wages when it became the leading industrial power.
And the United States had the HIGHEST wages of all major powers when it became the leading industrial power.
Low taxes (low government spending) and limited regulation, and secure conditions (no endless violence as with much of Latin America)are much more important.
As is a stable monetary system – not Credit Bubble finance (as with most of Latin America, and the modern West).
The fact that a moral right cannot be effectively enforced does not make it any less of a moral right, and breaching it a moral wrong. What it does make it is just that: unenforceable. What it means, in turn, is that some morals cannot be legislated, and trying to do so, as with so-called Intellectual Property (as if there is any other kind of property) only makes things worse, not better.
Governments should have no business meddling with patents, logos or ideas in general – all they should be doing within this context – if anything – is enforcing voluntary agreements, if any. Some current IP issues can be solved reasonably well through subjecting them to such formal agreements, others can’t. As with many other issues in life, not everything can be formalized, legislated and enforced.
I initially got optimistic about this, but then I remembered that the software can have “ignore lists” to which bureaucracies can selectively allow admittance.
Woodsy42, indeed. One may have to go to the darknet to buy a footstool before much longer.
Alisa, spot on and exactly right. :>)))
Thanks, Julie 🙂
Well, my way of resolving this would be by demarking private property from public. Governments should be limited to public properties, like roads and parks and air-space, etc., and could enforce licences concerning public properties. As a private property owner, you could copy someone’s design, but you shouldn’t be able to broadcast it over public property; however, the designer could broadcast about his’her design.
OK, someone’s got to say it… Define “designer” in the context. All furniture (and most everything else) is designed in the sense that it didn’t “just happen”. Does this just apply to something designed by Frank Lloyd Wright or does it cover my IKEA stuff? What about clothes? Might it become a legal issue to photograph someone unless they are naked? And does that infringe God’s copyright?
Paul Marks, for someone who doesn’t like to talk about IP gets it right for me!
As the first commenter said, surely fair use covers this.
Two thoughts:
1. This will turn to be something to do with the EU.
2. “Selective enforcement” is what will happen – this will become yet another stick with which to hit anyone the state wishes to hit for reasons of its own. You know the sorts of people: climate realists, free-speech “extremists”, “islamophobes”, gun-owners, home-schoolers, etc etc.
Jonathan, I’m not even sure if there is such a notion as “fair use” in the UK. I can find some exceptions to copyright which don’t seem very useful, and from this page I discovered the notion of “incidental inclusion” but that does not sound like it would cover, e.g. a photograph of an object I own. Or even my clothing, for that matter. Channel 4 have made available their producer’s guide, which has some information.
I still can not find anything specific to the UK about photographs of objects apart from the claims in the Ars Technica article. In the USA an sculptor was found to be infringing when he copied a photograph.
Rob, fair use doctrine is more or less equivalent (to those who aren’t copyright lawyers) to UK “fair dealing”.
Apologies for the double post but I had some further thoughts.
OpenStreetMap, a voluntary and collaborative effort to provide ‘free’ (free in the same manner of open source software) geographic data, ran into copyright issues a lot in the early years and established a fairly good guide to copyright. They erred on the side of caution, which was advisable. What might be pertinent to this discussion is Copyright in deriving from aerial photography which discusses case law about copyright in images.
As Alisa said, if an effective enforcement mechanism makes us all less free, then we must grin and bear the immorality of property rights theft. And often, also, solutions are imperfectly implemented and have their own casualties.
On the bright side this may make it illegal to take pictures of your lunch before eating it.
On this note, I have often wondered what would happen if some effort were made to start including the Eurion constellation in clothing and other publicly visible items. I am not sure how ubiquitous software that reacts to it has spread but I have had at least a couple of scanners that refuse to work with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
Andrew: of course.