SkintBrit said:
As I said in my previous post, I dont understand how the judge could have known who was responsible for the original idea, or first person to come up with that image was. Surely this would have been a pertinent point in his decision?
The photographer took the image and it was made into a postcard in 2005. The video was taken a few years later. There was a clear record of the creation of the images and it didn't sound like anyone contended it.
sevencrossing said:
Normally Logos are protected by registering them as a Trade Mark
It is an interesting to idea to protect them by copyright laws
If you don't trade mark your logo, it is still covered under copyright laws. I have heard it is not as strong in court though.
spraynpray said:
...it seems possible now that copyright can be used for objects in photos. Quite where all this ends is impossible to estimate right now.
They made a point for the France case that French law was unique. It sounded like the pieces were the "subject" of the photos and not used as an accessory. That seemed to be threshold. If you are in France you should be careful but as for the USA that ruling would not happen.
tcole1983 said:
I think the judge was ruling on companies basically using a similar image for their products. So the problem being the one company is making their advertisement look similar to the others label or whatever.
That is exactly it. This is what the defending company (who hired the company who did the work) did:
...To produce the second work, the one with which this case is concerned, Mr Houghton took four photographs. Three were of different aspects of the Houses of Parliament and the fourth was a picture of a red Routemaster bus while it was stationary on the Strand. Of the three, one photograph showed the facade of the Houses of Parliament, one showed Big Ben and one showed part of Big Ben with Portcullis House across the road. Mr Houghton explained how the defendants' work had been produced by Sphere Design. They combined and manipulated Mr Houghton's images as well as an iStockphoto image of a Routemaster bus. The bus was re-sized to fit and the road marks were changed to be consistent.
Thus the original was a photograph, and the second was Photoshop-ed to create the look of the post card. It was not just two photos. The "copied" image was intentionally created to look like the original image.
This case was much narrower than people are making it.
