Legal Question in Technology Law in West Virginia
Unauthorized use of personal image in degrading manner.
Is it legal for someone to take a personal photograph image from a webpage and use it to create a parody website, where the subject of the picture is made fun of, humiliated, and edited with graphics editing software in a series of pictures?
This is published to the web for many people to see, and Internet Relay Chat contact information is given on the webpage so that visitors can also poke fun at the person in the pictures.
2 Answers from Attorneys
Re: Unauthorized use of personal image in degrading manner.
I received this summary from BYTES IN BRIEF. I reproduce it here under the FAIR USE doctrine.
COURT OKS REPRODUCTION OF THUMBNAIL IMAGES
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that web sites may
legally reproduce and post thumbnail versions of copyrighted
photographs without violating the artists' exclusive right to
display their own works.
The decision in Kelly v. Arriba was issued on February 6th, affirming in part and reversing in part
the lower court's decision. The case was brought by Leslie
Kelly, a professional photographer who sued the search engine
Arriba for publishing his pictures on its site. Arriba (now
known as "Ditto.com") follows a practice common among search
engines of providing a service that canvasses the Internet for
graphics files and returns results as thumbnail images.
If a thumbnail is clicked, the site will return a framed image of the
original web site containing the image. The court said this use
of thumbnail images constituted fair use, in part because it was
transformative or added value to the work, and also because it
did not diminish the value of the underlying work.
However, the judge also ruled that Arriba's subsequent display of Kelly's
full-sized images in the framed web page is not a fair use and
violates Kelly's exclusive right to display his copyrighted
works. The panel ordered the case to be remanded back to the
district court, which will determine the appropriate amount in
damages and decide whether an injunction is necessary.
The opinion in the case may be found at
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/circs/9th/0055521p.pdf
Re: Unauthorized use of personal image in degrading manner.
This is a gray area of copyright and privacy law. Parodies are entitled to free speech protection and may be fair use, but if done for commercial purposes can be risky indeed. Altering a copyrighted photograph, even for parody, may result in a derivative work that consitutes an infringement. A much safer route is to do original artwork for your parody. The essence is in the details, and you should not be trying this without legal review of the details. Parodies tend to be offensive to the subject of the parody and thus tend to draw fire much more often that other types of possible copyright infringement. You are contemplating walking on quicksand. You better be sure you have a copyright lawyer to pull you out. Copyright is federal law and you may well find yourself in a federal court in some remote location and then have to pay to try to get it transfered to your district, which may or may not work.
Bottom Line: Copyright Parodies are Very Risky