Nancy Monson is technically correct, Greg, but they do talk out of both sides of their mouth whenever it's convenient.
For example, in order to be eligible for statutory damages and other goodies, you must register the image with the copyright office within a certain time period. Otherwise, you can still enforce the copyright as the owner, but are not going to be eligible to collect the ridiculous sums Getty generally claims they're entitled to.
When they don't bother to tell you the copyright registration information and yet claim they can nail you for statutory damages and attorney's fees, they're totally talking out of both sides of their mouth.
I suspect the Getty guarantee partly addresses the liability involved with "orphaned works". S.G. and I were commenting about proposed legislation to address this issue. At the risk of being redundant, I'll quote the post here:
There is some interesting legislation being proposed for a category of works named "orphan works". Orphan works are works for which the owner is very difficult or impossible to find. The idea is that some great works are locked up in a vault and not being shared because people don't want to expose themselves to being sued if the copyright owner suddenly turns up and makes a claim. The legislation is intended to free up stuff like archival film, paintings, photographs, books and other types of work that can be copyrighted.
When I was reading the proposed legislation, it seemed to me that it would provide some balance in cases such as the HAN/VKT baitpaper images we've discussed at length. The images are being offered for free on thousands of websites, so even an honest and diligent search for a copyright owner would be incredibly difficult. VKT's bulk registrations with the Copyright Office are little or no help. A person caught using one of his images could argue that they did a reasonably diligent search for an owner and found nothing except for a mountain of evidence suggesting that the image was in the public domain. VKT would be entitled to the following:
...we recommended a framework whereby a legitimate orphan works owner who resurfaces may bring an action for “reasonable compensation” against a qualifying user. A user does not qualify for the benefits of orphan works legislation unless he first conducts a good faith, reasonably diligent (but unsuccessful) search for the copyright owner. As defined in our Report, reasonable compensation should be the amount “a reasonable willing buyer and reasonable willing seller in the positions of the owner and user would have agreed to at the time the use commenced.”2 Such a recovery is fair because it approximates the true market value of the work. It allows a copyright owner to present evidence related to the market value of his work and, at the same time, allows the copyright user to more precisely gauge his exposure to liability. Statutory damages would not apply to use of an orphan work. (The Office agrees with copyright owners who have since suggested that an award of attorney's fees might make sense in certain instances where an orphan work user acts in bad faith.)
Source: http://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat031308.html
This is an example of how legislators are actually trying to address some of the issues that are currently making a mess out of copyright law in the digital age, where reproduction and publishing are nearly instantaneous and there is a huge demand for content. Copyright owners must be protected, but not at the expense of fairness or worse yet, people's civil rights.
As S.G. correctly points out, this is
PROPOSED legislation. For now it's still a trolling paradise out there.
Topic: Letter from Getty on a screenshot (Read 7598 times)