Who's copyright, really?

Who's copyright, really?

Check it out: Same model, same dress, same background, most likely the same photo shoot. One photo is claimed by Shutterstock, the other is claimed by Alamy.

Recently a billion dollar lawsuit was filed against Getty Images for fraudulently claiming copyright and charging royalties on over 18,000 images by photographer Carol M. Highsmith. The photographs were donated to the U.S. Library of Congress are quite clearly established as being in the public domain. Despite that, Highsmith says she never surrendered the copyright. Curiously, I haven't come across too many Getty Images lately.

It makes you wonder how many photographs have been misappropriated by Alamy and Shutterstock as well. I don't know that they have, but if Getty Images has done it, it's reasonable to suspect that other Internet image providers have teams of freebooters raiding and culling Cyberspace for booty.

This is relevant to Steemians posting images on Steemit because you may find one day while googling or baiduing images you find some of yours. You may also try to give honest credit to your presumed image source for your post, and then find yourself getting notice from some Internet image giant's attorneys that you've appropriated their image and owe them a portion of your STEEM or SBD, or both.

We've seen the complaints of plagiarism here on Steemit, and they are right and justified. But what happens when the people claiming plagiarism are themselves the plagiarists, and on a colossal scale no less?

My inclination is to say, "Fuck 'em." But of course, that could have damaging repercussions for Steemit.com, and experiment and a business model that we're all trying to make work and develop in good faith. Or at least most of us are. But it does raise the issue of using images, how they are claimed, our sincere effort to credit sources, and how easy it is to commit fraud on a vast scale in the largely anonymous World Wide Web.