The State of the Union Live Web Feed- Are you listening Seventh Circuit?

The New York Times is broadcasting the State of the Union on the front page of its website as I write this. It is a lovely thing to watch, and it is a clear example of how newspapers have changed- in what they can do and how they can deliver the news.

If the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA) was in charge of the State of the Union, the New York Times would not be web-casting the State of the Union, in it’s entirety. Instead they would be limited to two minutes worth of highlight footage, with no live blogging allowed. Sound absurd? That is exactly what WIAA claims it can do with its high school championship games. A federal judge agreed with them and the case is now under appeal. WIAA is a state actor, and if you say that WIAA can restrict coverage of its events, where is the line drawn?

The photo editors of social networking

There is an interesting story in today’s New York Times about a growing profession of screeners whose job it is to look at social networking images and flag them for inappropriate content- pornography, violence and other disturbing images. Some of the work is outsourced, but some is done in-house, depending on the company needing the review.

Like journalists, many of these individuals suffer psychological consequences from constantly seeing disturbing images. Oddly the article doesn’t mention anything about how they handle referring illegal activity to law enforcement. But it is fascinating to realize that in a world where content is provided by the masses, there is still a level of gate-keeping.

Digital Economy Bill passes in UK- without orphan works provision

Busy day. The controversial Digital Economy Bill has apparently passed in the UK. The good news is that the controversial orphan works provisions in the bill were removed, due primarily to the efforts of photographers. YEAH photogs.

Read about it here.

My previous post on the controversy, and photographers efforts is here.

Photo groups file suit against Google

Well, several photo groups, along with some photographers, have filed suit against Google regarding their google books project.

I won’t repeat what has been said in the various articles. You can read about it:

In the New York Times;

On the ASMP website;

Read the complaint itself.

One thing I will say is that the recent Supreme Court ruling of Reed Elsevier v. Muchnik has paved the way for this case.

Here is why.

Many of the photographers covered  in the Google Books photographers class action suit have likely not registered their copyrights. This means that they could not bring suit themselves and still get statutory damages. But in the Muchnik case, the Supreme Court ruled that the court can still have jurisdiction over a copyright case in a class action, even if the members of the class covered by the settlement have not all registered their copyrights. Of course the google suit asks for statutory damages for each infringement, and a court is not likely to award statutory damages for infringements where the copyright is not registered. But getting a judgment and getting a settlement are two entirely different things. The way is now clear for a settlement.

Photographers should be aware of the danger of class actions suits. Google may get hit in the pocket book, but there is always a risk that photographers who aren’t in the original suit will not see much of the money. Here’s hoping that the photo groups don’t let that happen.

New IP Czar seeking comments

The new Intellectual Property Czar is seeking comments on intellectual property enforcement and infringement. You don’t have to be a big fancy lawyer to give your comments.

Here is the request:

http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2010/2010-3539.htm

The comment opportunity breaks down into three parts:

Part 1: Comments on the harm and the threats caused by intellectual property violations. This includes economic threats and harms as well as the harm to public health and safety. Discussion of emerging or future threats is encouraged.

Part 2: Specific recommendations for accomplishing objectives and enforcement efforts. This can include “legislative changes, regulations, executive
orders, other executive action, guidelines, or changes in policies,
practices or methods.”

Part 3: In addition, the office is seeking supplemental comments in a broad range of categories. Got something to say? Chances are it fits into one of these.

As photographers, our voice is seldom heard above the din of massive corporate interests in the recording, publishing and entertainment industries. But photographers represent an essential segment of the U.S. Economy as small business owners.

Your organizations are out there advocating on your behalf, but there is no reason why you can’t advocate for yourself.

Obamafy ANY photo (photo booth plug-in not needed)

Many people have taken advantage of the Obamafy plugin for Photo Booth software (works on a mac).

For some reason, I couldn’t get the plug-in to work, so I sought a way to do it in Photoshop, without a plugin. I couldn’t find anything on how to do this, so I figured it out and wanted to share it.

It wasn’t that complex. Here’s a step-by-step guide. It works best with a photo that is lit from one side, so that you have a shadow area. To do this, you need a good understanding of photoshop. You will be using filters (halftone and cut-out), and photoshop tools (paint bucket, lasso, marquee) and color range.

First steps:

1. Download from the internet the obama art that you want to imitate. Consider that there are 5 colors in your pallet: red, pale blue, pale blue stripes, black (or very dark blue) and white (or cream colored).
2. Take your pre-existing photo and add filter>artistic>cutout. Select 5 or 6 levels, to match the number of colors in your pallet.

The Halftone:

1. The first part you want to get out of the way is the half-tone portion (the stripes). Look for the line that indicates the beginning of the shadow area. This should be between the light area of the face and the darker area. In my case it is the tan area going right down the middle of my nose.
2. Use the lasso tool to get a rough selection of the face area. This is so that you only get the highlights in the face for this color.
3. With the face selected, go to select> color range and select the tan color. Now just the highlights in the face should be selected.
4. Using the paint bucket, select the light blue in the obama photo that you want to imitate. Dump the color in your selected area. Do Not deselect.
5. To create the stripes: filter>sketch>halftone pattern (select Pattern Type: line) and adjust the size of the stripes to your choice.

The Background:

1. Now, using the rectangular marquee tool, select half of the image. Use the paint bucket tool to dump your background color. If your hair blends into the background, like mine does, you may have to use the lasso tool to avoid selecting the hair.
2. Select the other side of the photo and do the same thing to the background. Make sure the hair is separated.

The Hair

1. For me this was the trickiest part. My hair isn’t black, and making it black makes me look silly. So I just made the hair on the right red, and the hair on the left blue.

The Rest

1. Now fill in the other colors using the paint bucket from your cut-out photo with corresponding colors:

• lightest color and highlights= white or cream
• middle to light color= light blue
• shadow of face and darker shadows= red
• darkest areas= dark blue or black

Clean up the spots that you missed using the clone tool. As a final touch, you can expand the canvas size of the image by a few points (image>canvas size) until you have a poster-like border (make sure your background color is cream or white).

P.S. More information is coming out about the photo that the original Shepard Fairey poster was possibly derived from. I have read that Fairey copied it off of the internet which has legal implications for such a iconic image. And certainly, an ironic act for someone who has been burned by intellectual property theft himself. At a minimum, it is good for a scholarly discussion. But I think it is irresponsible to comment without more facts.

Cell phone laws, by state and country

In celebration of my new international cell phone and since photographers are always on the road, and always on the phone, I thought it would be useful to share this nugget which is a chart of all countries that ban driving while on the cell and also has a state-by-state list of cell phone laws.

http://www.cellular-news.com/car_bans/

By the way, I am a guilty as the next guy but we all know it is true. When you see someone driving like crazy, they are often on their cell phone.

Text messages, some emails, are private (at least on the West Coast)

The Ninth Circuit has ruled that even if your cell phone is owned and the plan is paid for by your employer, that employer cannot read your text messages. The court ruled that an Ontario police department violated an officers right to privacy when they obtained his text messages from the cell phone company to see if he had been writing personal text messages. They also ruled that if a company outsources its email service (no company server), that email is private as well.

This, despite the fact that the department had a policy clearly stating that employees should have no expectation of privacy and that the text messages and emails might be monitored. The kicker- despite that policy, they told the officer that if he paid the overage fess, his texts would not be audited. This created a reasonable expectation of privacy. If they had told him that in subsequent months they were going to audit the content of the messages, that might have been all right. The key- he had a reasonable expectation of privacy, and the search was unreasonable.

Clearly he did expect privacy- he had been writing sexually explicit messages to his wife.

Remember, that this is the 9th Circuit. This may lead to a different result in the 5th Circuit. But the Ninth Circuit, having jurisdiction over silicon valley, has a lot of experience with adjudicating tech cases

Source, Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Co.

Wow. $12 million copyright infringement case

Photo copyright award– Photo Attorney Carolyn E. Wright writes about a recent copyright infringement case that awarded the photographer $12 million in damages. It’s quite a tale, check it out. The case is Ordonez-Dawes v. Turnkey Props., Inc., 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 24320 if you want to read it.

Here is a portion of the judgment:

1. Plaintiff is entitled to an award of actual damages and infringer’s profits, pursuant to 17 U.S.C. � 504(b), of $ 12,089,260.00. This amount consists of $ 58,760.00 in actual damages and $ 12,030,500.00 in lost profits.

Quick poll. Do you think the losers in this case will

• a) sue their attorney for malpractice,
• b) file for bankruptcy, close their company and open a new one,
• c) try to appeal, or
• d) flunk their Civ Pro class

In other copyright news, AP and bloggers are in dispute over the limits of fair use of quotes and links and AP is reportedly releasing guidelines soon about what it considers appropriate fair use. Bloggers, are of course, up in arms, but they probably don’t know what it is like to be laid off because the company that is paying you to create content is no longer the company that is profiting from that content.

While brief quotes and links seem to fall into fair use, there is an abundance of bloggers whose entire posts are someone else’s content, or who post entire articles and even photos and then try to claim that it is fair use. Rather than launch an army of lawyers, I recommend that bloggers simply paraphrase, and do a little of their own reporting. It will take less time.

who knew?!

So I just figured out that instead of googling euro conversion calculator, you can just type into the google window “300 euros in US dollars” Also works for kilos/ pounds and I’m sure it works for a bunch of other stuff too. Awesome.