doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Auction house on-line photos - copyrighted?

Gene, you have a PM from me.

I'll throw in my 2 cents worth. I don't have any experience with publishing, but I did spend the last 10 years of my career as the intellectual property manager of a major oil company. I worked mostly with patents and trade secrets, but our outside council was a major intellectual property group. My impression fromtalking with them is that copyrights in the US are now implied, whether registered or not. Using anything without explicit permission in a work for profit could potentially cause a lot of headache.

Joanna Cote sent a very gracious email replying as to whether they might be interested in editing a book on Reilly. She said they will be involved for the next couple of years in editing their index to DGJ. She said the prospective book sounded like a great addition to their gun library though. Very classy people and their magazine, though now gone, is a historical record that will be consulted for years.

Maybe some clarification is needed here on photographs. The ownership of a photograph is the photographers not the subject of in the photograph with some real exemption's, if the photograph is the image of a genuine work of art for example a painting that will always be the property of the artist and and written books are the same you will need the author or artist's permission to use it because it enters the world of intellectual copyright. Now the way to circumvent a photographs ownership you can change something in the original photograph i.e.. lets say it is a gun remove the background replacing it with with something else using photo shop. next you could add something to the photograph like a small logo in a corner, doing this changes the original image. I am sure you have seen those Getty Images with their name plastered all over the photograph to stop you doing what I have just said. Now once you have adapted the image to the point that is not exactly the original then photograph your work the photograph you have taken means the ownership is yours. An example if this is that famous image of Che Guevara that we all know but the photographer did not receive any credit or cash for his efforts because the photograph was copied and the ownership went to any person who went to the trouble to make a copy. I personally have done this a number of times if I was unsure I would use a film camera to prove the image I used was taken by me. Now I do know that on your side of the pond that you have Lawyers that can talk the back end of a horse off and convince folks that white is black and black is white so make some enquiries first. On this side of the pond this sort of legal argument on photographs was all argued out when photography was in its infancy. This I hope is of some help though it could muddy the waters more.

Good luck with all your efforts.

Ernie

That is not the case in the U.S. Ernie. There is NO percentage by which an image can be changed to avoid copyright infringement.
https://topofy.com/how-avoid-copyright-infringement/

So posting this image here, found on Getty Images © (note the copyright icon) would be copyright infringement, unless it is listed as royalty free. In general, limited images/text used for non-commercial or educational purposes get a pass. A school art teacher can project images of art in the classroom; the textbook must get permission. The LCSCA site can't post extensive text from Brophy's or Houchins' works. There are a few images from Brophy's Plans & Specifications however.



Owners of internet sites (mostly business websites) have been successfully sued for allowing someone to post copyrighted material on their site.

Begging for forgiveness rather than permission can be expensive when dealing with copyright issues. Gil

Even LLCs might not be much protection if you only set them up to shield you from suit.if they can prove that is the only or main reason you set them up in the first place.

This is going to be a daunting task then. For instance, I've used a lot of collages to illustrate specific points in the text....6-12 guns in each. I'll have to go back to each auction house for each gun in the collage. And some of the ads on for instance Guntrader.UK whose pictures I used no longer exist...I copied the text of the ad but not who posted it:



And what about press articles? Much of this history was built around an analysis of press articles and advertisements, (Much like the biography of James Madison or John Adams relied on their letters). I mostly used this site: Since I paid for a subscription they may be amenable to my using extracts but I'll query them to make sure:
https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/

I notice in John Cambell's beautifully laid out article on Reilly in "Double Gun Journal" in Summer 2015, "E.M. Reilly, Purdey's Pretentious Rival," he used numerous advertisements and pictures from the internet (I collected many of the same pictures long before I know of the existence of this article). Perhaps Joanna or Daniel Cote might advise how they handled this.



A publisher would do this for an author. Perhaps I'll give that a try as well. If anyone has leads as to who publishes gun books (Larry Brown?), would much appreciate names.

Why worry about the printing of potentially copyrighted images, when they have all been posted here on Dave's forum for quite some time? It would seem the copyright infringement horse is already out of the barn.

Considering the legal advice given thus far, if I was Dave, I'd delete the whole damn thing now.

Besides, I really don't think this proposed book is going to turn a profit anyway. How many people are actually going to purchase a largely fictional account, filled with conjecture, about a gun maker who allegedly had over 300 imaginary gunmaking employees????... except nobody can find a trace of any but a small handful of them.

"Besides, I really don't think this proposed book is going to turn a profit anyway."

Well, while many if not most books are published for profit, a good number are not. For instance, my "proposed book" (presently in the process of layout) is in this non-profit category and I will be happy if I get my money back. There are many other reasons besides profit to publish a book. On the other hand my first book was for profit, but those were different times, before Internet.

And to address the original question. I had similar problems, and it took a lot of time - and nerves - to solve them. One major picure source, a prominent European auction house, flatly denied the use of their photos in my book. Many others just did not answer at all. But fortunately a number of other prominent auction houses gave me a permission to use their material (with proper credit, needless to say). And I also organized shooting of original photos expressly for my book, which took a lot of effort not to mention years of time ... In retrospect, I'm inclined to say that writing the book was the easy part.

Cheers,
Jani