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Shouldn't purchasing the tattoo transfer the rights to the person being tattooed?
Though it is kind of funny when it goes for a tattoo, just never thought about it. It is not like you want to have contract for a tattoo unless you are LeBron...
Tattoos were used since thousands of years for a particular job (apart of decorative purposes): They excel hiding needle marks. Tattoos with a pattern of multiple repeated x6 or x5 darkened areas arranged in a star or a circle could be particularly useful to mask a weekly routine of steroids delivered around some point of interest. In that sense some designs could be better than other and became equivalent to any other industrial secret for their owner.
And this is only a part of the history. Tattoos showing trade marks or copyrighted art are another problem.
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It’s almost like intellectual property is an absurd injustice.
Especially since it escapes taxation. If you taxed IP like you do real property, we would see quite a different system form.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Welcome in post-capitalistic absurd world. End there are still some people who say "hey we are in a free market"...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18770963 also breaks the site guidelines. If you could please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.
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> You are suggesting that since it’s legal for me to share a fanphoto of myself and Mike Tyson, then by extension I should be allowed to use his likeness in a 3D model in a computer game. No, that's not what they're suggesting at all, and you're conflating two separate things here. Using someone's likeness in a commercial work is already legally protected (in the most economically important jurisdictions anyway) and…
It doesn't seem that simple. If I get a tattoo of Star Wars or R2D2 or Iron Man there's arguably something not 100% "It's now mine to do whatever I want with". I'll get a tattoo of Darth Vader on my back, take a picture, print it on a cereal box and sell Darth Vader cereal. If you agree (maybe you don't) that I shouldn't be able to sell cereal with a picture of my Darth Vader tattoo on the box then what's the differe…
Did you have a license to get those as tattoos in the first place? My understanding would be that the original sin there would be getting that tattoo of an IP at all without permission, even if such things commonly fly under the radar (unless there is some legal right to get any tattoo regardless of IP). The remedy there would presumably be to get sued and have to pay a judgement as a result of a lost civil action [1]. Future separate damages could result in future suits.
>"It's now mine to do whatever I want with"
Be specific about what you're referring to with "it's" there. Are you arguing that an instance trademark infringement would mean the infringer no longer owned their whole body any longer? Is that actually justified by the damage caused by an unauthorized tattoo? Of course it wouldn't allow any other usage beyond that incidental to using their body and likeness overall. But I'd be really, really wary of allowing IP infringement to enter into this area, and try to game theory out the costs even for restricted implementations. Imagine for example you argued "well, we'll only restrict it for commercial usage!" But now consider the case of a person with an infringing tattoo who commits some act of public notoriety, say a politician who is significantly corrupt. News organizations want to cover this, and they're clearly commercial, but that would mean if they show the politician in question they'd be showing the infringing tattoo as well. Is this allowed? Does it require a court case to determine as an affirmative defense or is it innate, and what are the chilling effects if the former? What's the line?
I'm not saying you can't come up with answers for all this, but it also gets awfully complicated awfully quickly vs just defining bodies as a special area of law. Exactly what damages is that Star Wars tattoo really causing?
>If you agree (maybe you don't) that I shouldn't be able to sell cereal with a picture of my Darth Vader tattoo on the box then what's the difference?
Are you seriously confused about the difference between a cereal box and a human's control of their own body and the public's interest in the representation of humans? It is both perfectly legitimate and standard practice to weigh different things differently and consider how remedies impact conflicting parties. IP in general only exists for the public interest after all.
>That Darth Vader belongs to someone other than the tattoo artist?
Well yeah, that matters in that the tattoo artist could themselves be committing an act of infringement against a third party. Whereas an original design for hire does not involve any other parties besides those part of the transaction. That's not irrelevant.
>If that's the argument then why does the tattoo artist have to give up their design but Disney does not when it's drawn on someone?
Why do you assume the tattoo artist should own their design on a person? The natural default is no IP. How is the public interest advanced by giving tattoo artists a perpetual right over any human they work on vs declaring that all commercial compensation should be part of the actual transaction? We exhaust rights (such as with first sale doctrine) elsewhere all the time.
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1: Maybe removal would be offered as a settlement, but I'm not sure a US court would ever require that as a judgement since performative actions are not usual in civil cases, plus it'd constitute a painful medical procedure which is its own can of worms.
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If it's legal to do it in photos and videos, it's legal to do it in 3D models. Perhaps it ought to be by extension but apparently it's far from a settled matter. I mean, our copyright laws are full of weird seeming-contradictions. Games companies pay to license an athlete's likeness, but photographers don't? Photographs of a sculpture are copyright-protected, but photographs of tattoos aren't? Architecture with an ex…
Not just copyright law. Look at the difference in laws being recording a video of a person and recording sound of the same person. I would love for law to be consistent, but as of yet there is no such requirement.
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It’s almost like intellectual property is an absurd injustice.
Especially since it escapes taxation. If you taxed IP like you do real property, we would see quite a different system form.
The whole point of copyright protection was to prevent someone from freely duplicating a work and thereby depriving the original artist of profit, but in the case of a tattoo, I'd argue that every artistic tattoo is so slightly different from each other and labour-intensive to create that it should really be treated as "work for hire" and the human who owns the skin also owns the tattoo on it.
Seems to me the only logical thing to do in a digital world is to abadon the idea of intellectual property?
This with the other article doing some troll logic mental gymnastics trying to convince us that dance moves/choreography should be copyrightable[1] (or intellectual property) really brings out the point how absurd the notion of IP/copyright is. When will we see that the whole thing is a sham and needs to be abandoned? https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/20/18149869/fortnite-dance-...
Never, as long as there's enough people getting $$$ from it (and have the power to influence such decisions.)