Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Copyright denied because the model’s pose is not unique

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 162 posts

Re: Copyright denied because the model’s pose is not unique

#121

Post by nulbyte »

Sujan wrote: post #89
kweingar wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US you do not need to register copyright unless you intend to file a copyright infringement lawsuit.

Important nuance, thanks for letting me know.. I was under the impression you only "got" the copyright by doing that. Do you "forfeit" anything by not doing it as soon/early as possible?

Copyright in the U.S. is immediate upon creation of a work.

GP is partially incorrect; you can bring a suit regarding an unregistered work. In such cases, however, you cannot claim statutory damages, but are limited to claiming actual damages (actual money lost or actual profit from the infringer). If the work is registered within the alotted time, you can claim statutory damages and attorney's fees.

You can register within 1 month of learning of the infringement to protect your ability to claim statutory damages and attorney's fees.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/412

Re: Copyright denied because the model’s pose is not unique

#122

Post by laserlight »

debesyla wrote: post #16
glandium wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it only "inspired" when it's not only the same pose, but the same person and the same clothes, up to its individual folds. "Inspired" would be inviting a model to wear the same thing and take the pose, and painting that. Here, it's a reproduction of the mirrored picture, with different colors and trivial changes (like the earings). Calling this inspiration is utterly ridiculous.

It's not a carbon copy and the changes aren't minimal - thus it's inspired, not copied. After all, copyright works for whole thing, not spare parts (technique, style or "idea" aren't copyrightable)...

> copyright works for whole thing

No, this is wrong. Here's a counterexample [0].

[0] Structure, sequence and organization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure,_sequence_and_organi...

Re: Copyright denied because the model’s pose is not unique

#123

Post by esrauch »

debesyla wrote: post #16
glandium wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it only "inspired" when it's not only the same pose, but the same person and the same clothes, up to its individual folds. "Inspired" would be inviting a model to wear the same thing and take the pose, and painting that. Here, it's a reproduction of the mirrored picture, with different colors and trivial changes (like the earings). Calling this inspiration is utterly ridiculous.

It's not a carbon copy and the changes aren't minimal - thus it's inspired, not copied. After all, copyright works for whole thing, not spare parts (technique, style or "idea" aren't copyrightable)...

Essentially any movie adaptation of a book can't be copyright infringement based on this being the bar; even cases that keep many lines of dialog verbatim end up just being detail similar to keeping the exact same folds of fabric at the bottom.

Re: Copyright denied because the model’s pose is not unique

#124

Post by nulbyte »

CrazyStat wrote: post #42
shadowgovt wrote: post #18

This is somewhat demonstrative of how thin-on-the-ground copyright protection is relative to where creators want it to be (especially when considering what AI-generated art does to the industry). Many artists seem to think the protection is thicker, but here we see an example of doing a painting based on a photograph being sufficiently transformative.

It's not the the painting was found to be sufficiently transformative, but rather that the photograph was ruled to be ineligible for copyright protection in the first place. I'm not familiar with Belgian copyright law so I can't really comment on how reasonable that ruling is. Under American copyright law it would be absurd.

> I'm not familiar with Belgian copyright law

As I understand it, this is a case in the country of Luxembourg, not the Belgian province of the same name.

Re: Copyright denied because the model’s pose is not unique

#125

Post by kzrdude »

shadowgovt wrote: post #21
kzrdude wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The face of the person in the painting is recognizable across the copying, I don't see how it can not be a copyright issue. Clearly cribbed her work completely and changed some color and details.

Which is, indeed, legal in many jurisdictions (including the US). Cross-reference Andy Warhol's famous silk screens. For example, the reproduction of Elizabeth Taylor ( https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/andy-warhol-and-his-pro... ) was sourced from a 1950s publicity photo.

I think we can possibly see a difference - the face crop of Elizabeth Taylor could be regarded as generic, without artistic detail ("not original") while in this case the original photo with posture, composition, face, flowers, details together make it an original artwork with its own character.

Re: Copyright denied because the model’s pose is not unique

#127

Post by dale_glass »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #7
Waterluvian wrote: post #2

That is an unoriginal pose. Which is why it seems ridiculous that a copyright would be based on pose. There’s still a lot of originality present. I guess the issue is that the authorities need to feign some sort of objectivity and while a human can say “these are obvious imitations/reproductions” they might struggle to define a set of rules you could use to test every case. Copyright continues to feel weird to me.

Art feels weird to me. https://www.elitereaders.com/ridiculous-paintings-insanely-s...

A lot of art is part of some sort of conversation that those in the know had, and so it makes sense to them, but those outside that scene have no idea.

What I think is particularly confusing about art is that in other disciplines, you pretty much never see such things exhibited to the public. Eg, take Perl poetry for instance:

    # The Cow
    #    by Ogden Nash
    #
    # The cow is of the bovine ilk;
    # One end is moo, the other, milk.
    #
    package cow;
    @ISA = qw(bovine);
    push @cow, 'moo';
    unshift @cow, 'milk';
Now imagine somebody framed that and hung it in a museum and normal people trying to understand what is this all about.

Re: Copyright denied because the model’s pose is not unique

#128

Post by CrazyStat »

nulbyte wrote: post #124
CrazyStat wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the the painting was found to be sufficiently transformative, but rather that the photograph was ruled to be ineligible for copyright protection in the first place. I'm not familiar with Belgian copyright law so I can't really comment on how reasonable that ruling is. Under American copyright law it would be absurd.

> I'm not familiar with Belgian copyright law As I understand it, this is a case in the country of Luxembourg, not the Belgian province of the same name.

Oops, my mistake. Not sure where I got Belgium from.

Re: Copyright denied because the model’s pose is not unique

#129

Post by Fargren »

tgv wrote: post #58
luxuryballs wrote: post #6

Imagine a problem that someone wouldn’t have if copyright protection had never existed to begin with? Here’s a great example of one.

Copyright does address a very real issue. How would you solve it?

Copyright addresses a real issue but at the same time creates new issues. It's not obvious to me that a world without copyright is better than one with it. Just because something solves a problem doesn't always mean that it's worth doing, if the costs are too high.

Re: Copyright denied because the model’s pose is not unique

#130

Post by Danin »

fxtentacle wrote: post #105

Eww looks like she's bending the facts a bit. The first issue here is that she never registered her original work with any copyright registry. It's $55 for 750 photos for the US Copyright Office, which is more or less accepted worldwide. (Also, she's living in the US and working there.) That leads to the second issue which is that it is now impossible to determine if the painting is a derived work off her photo, or i…

If the court ruled that the work is not creative or unique enough to qualify for copyright protection, then why does it matter that the work was not registered with a copyright office? The implication of this would be that foreign artists would have more legal protection and rights in Luxembourg than Luxembourgers.

It's also fairly possible to demonstrate that it's a derivative work and that the artist would have had to have used the photo as a reference because the painting is a 1:1 reproduction of the photo, it's actually impressive how well it's reproduced. Flashing image warning: https://i.imgur.com/RERFdBZ.gif

As a nitpick, in this post you're saying it's a derived work but in a child comment you're saying it's a transformative work so it's not 'pure copyright infringement'. In pretty much every country, producing a painting using a reference photo is derivative and is 100% covered by copyright law to the point that it's the example legal scholars use to demonstrate what a derivative work is. It cannot be the case that the photographer can sue for revenue on the painting without it being a copyright violation because that's the legal mechanism for which the photographer has any rights to sue the painter. However that's not the case here, because the court ruled that the photographer has no rights or protection under copyright law because the photo was found to lack the creativity or uniqueness to be afforded protections by copyright law.

As far as 'transformative' goes, it's not a concept that exists in my European countries legislation, but it's a term legal scholars use to demonstrate when a derivative work can be considered fair use using vaguely defined terms such as whether the work substantially changes the 'meaning', 'emotion', or 'aesthetic' of a work, and examples of this are things like reviews or criticism of a work (e.g., movie) or things like a parody. Merely reproducing a photograph is not considered transformative enough to be considered fair use, and even making substantial changes to the photograph may not make it transformative enough to be considered fair use, much like taking a photo of an artwork is not transformative, producing a movie from a book is not transformative, transcribing music is not transformative, etc.

Post reply on HN