A California law meant to impose special penalties on the paparazzi for reckless driving has  been declared unconstitutional by a Los Angeles County superior court judge, according to several news reports.

Judge Thomas Rubinson said the law was too broad when prosecutors invoked it against photographer Paul Raef. The paparazzo was charged with reckless driving last July after a high-speed chase of pop star Justin Bieber’s car.

The law, which was enacted in 2010, imposes extra penalties on anyone who drives dangerously to take photos for commercial gain. It was intended to target the paparazzi, although it could be used to prosecute photojournalists rushing to breaking news events.

The extra penalties include jail terms up to six months and fines up to $2,500. It was signed by former governor (and actor) Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it was supported by several celebrities who have lobbied state lawmakers to pass laws restricting the activities of the paparazzi.

Raef was first to be charged under the law when he chased Bieber’s car on a California freeway last summer at speeds that allegedly exceeded 80 miles per hour.

Rubinson said the law interfered with news gathering activities protected by the First Amendment.

Reaf still faces reckless driving charges and fines that any driver might face, but he’s no longer subject to the additional penalties called for by the photos-for-commercial-gain law.

And the law itself has not been struck down entirely. Rubinson’s ruling on the law applies only to Raef’s case. If prosecutors appeal the ruling to a higher court, the law could be struck down entirely.

Retired Associated Press shooter Walt Zeboski, who photographed Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign as well as many other people and events for the wire service, died at the age of 83 on Monday at his home in Sacramento, the AP reports. The cause of death was pneumonia.

Zeboski joined the AP staff in 1966. Over more than three decades he covered California politics and politicians. Among other subjects he photographed were labor leader Cesar Chavez, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (who attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975), and Queen Elizabeth during her 1983 visit to Yosemite National Park.

More details are available in the AP obituary for Zeboski.

An anti-gay group sued for using a photograph of a gay couple without permission in political attack ads has asked the court to dismiss the case on fair use and free speech grounds, according to a report by The Washington Post.

Public Advocate of the United States (PAUS) was sued in federal court in September by the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of Brian Edwards and Tom Privitere, as well as photographer Kristina Hill. The lawsuit charged PAUS of misappropriation of the likenesses of Edwards and Privitere, a gay couple, in two attack ads distributed in Colorado. The lawsuit also charged infringement of Hill’s copyrights.

Motions to dismiss civil claims are a common legal defense strategy of first resort, and are usually unsuccessful unless the facts of a case are undisputed.

Hill, a Brooklyn-based wedding photographer, had shot engagement photos of the couple. Edwards ended up posting one of the images on his blog, with Hill’s permission. PAUS downloaded the photo, and used it last spring in campaign ads against Colorado state senator Jean White (who had voted in favor of allowing same-sex unions in Colorado) and against Jeffrey Hare, a candidate for the Colorado house of representatives. The ads were distributed as mailers.

According to the Washington Post report, PAUS said that its use of the photograph is protected speech, because the organization was expressing its political views about gay marriage. PAUS also said that the gay couple depicted in the photograph had no reasonable expectation of privacy, because they had posted the image online where anyone could see it.

In its defense against the copyright infringement claim, PAUS argued that its use of the photo was protected by fair use because it “thoroughly transformed” Hill’s photograph by changing the background before publishing it in the political mailers. Hill had photographed the couple against a New York skyline. The PAUS ads replaced that skyline with two different Colorado landscapes.

Related:
Anti-GAy Group Sued for Unauthorized Use of Photo in Attack Ads

A Florida jury has acquitted photographer Carlos Miller of charges that he resisted arrest while covering police action at an Occupy encampment in Miami last January. Police alleged that Miller had refused orders to clear the area, but another journalist provided evidence to support Miller’s claim that he was singled out among several journalists for arrest.

Miller, who is the voice behind the Photography Is Not a Crime blog, has been a tireless critic of police harassment of journalists. He learned after his arrest last January that police had circulated his Facebook photo internally–including to the officer who arrested him–and that police considered him a troublemaker.

According to Miller, police had finished clearing the Occupy Miami encampment and had broken ranks when Miami-Dade police officer Nancy Perez recognized him. Perez ordered other officers to arrest Miller, allegedly for refusing a police order to disperse.

Miller managed to capture a video and audio recording of his arrest. Police erased the video file, but Miller managed to recover it with computer file recovery software. He intended to use the recording of his arrest to win acquittal.

But the case turned on the testimony of a Miami Herald columnist, according to Miller’s own account of the trial, and a report of the trial in the Miami New Times. The Herald columnist, Glenn Garvin, testified in court that Miller was on the scene as a journalist, not a protester, and that he (Garvin) never heard police order journalists to clear the area.

Garvin was standing near Miller when the arrest took place, and Garvin became worried that he would be arrested, too. But the officer who ordered Miller’s arrest assured Garvin that he was under no threat of arrest.

“That proved that police had not established a clear perimeter, contrary to what they had been arguing, claiming that I had deliberately walked into that perimeter after being told I was not supposed to be there,” Miller explained on his blog.

It was Miller’s third arrest while photographing in public. The first time, he was convicted of resisting arrest, but managed to get that conviction overturned on appeal. The second time, the charges against him were dropped because the arresting office did not show up at his court hearing to testify.

Related:
After Arrest, Photog Recovers Deleted Video File and Vows to Sue Police
Activist Carlos Miller Laughs at Plea Bargain Offer

Hurricane Sandy caused flooding of gallery storage areas in New York and elsewhere earlier this week. Paul Messier, a Boston-based expert on the conservation of photographs and works on paper, has worked as a consultant to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and other institutions. He also assisted museums and historical societies in the Gulf Coast area with restoration efforts after Hurricane Katrina.

PDN: Have you been getting calls from New York galleries?
Paul Messier: Honestly, no. I know there was a lot of devastation in the Chelsea area. I’ve heard from other conservators about individual salvage projects. But I have not been contacted yet, which is not surprising because the electricity is still off.

PDN: What’s the prognosis for recovering flood-damaged photographic prints?
PM: It’s highly dependent upon the photo process. Some photographic processes or more resilient than others. It’s also highly dependent upon the duration of the exposure to water, and it’s highly dependent upon the response. For example, things moved into freezer storage while still wet would have a much better prognosis for successful outcome. (more…)

In the seminar “The Art and Business of Portraiture,” held during PhotoPlus Expo, portrait photographers Lydia Panas, Chris Buck, and Charlotte Dumas showed their work, primarily focusing on their fine art images, and described how they interact with their subjects to make compelling portraits. Gallerist Michael Foley of the Foley Gallery in New York moderated the discussion.

Panas, a fine artist whose portraits reveal much about character and relationships, showed work from her Mark of Abel and Falling from Grace projects. She explained that she doesn’t direct her subjects; in fact, she talks very little, and works without assistants when she’s shooting fine-art portraits. “I recognize what is happening between myself and the model, and I don’t force anything,” she said. “It’s amazing what you can see just by staring at someone.” (more…)

British authorities have charged a 26-year old man with illegally detaining UK photographer John Cantlie and Dutch journalist Jeroen Oerlemans in Syria last July, according to a BBC report.

Shajul Islam, a British citizen who allegedly has ties to Syrian jihadists, was arrested October 9 upon returning to the UK on a flight from Cairo. Police charged him with the kidnapping after searching his home in London.

Cantlie and Oerlemans were held against their will for a week last July by Islamic militants in Syria. They were rescued by a Free Syrian Army group, and Cantlie told The Guardian after his release that he and Oerlemans were constantly threatened with death. They were both shot and slightly injured in an unsuccessful attempt to escape. Their captors were holding them for ransom, they said.

Cantlie reported to British authorities after his release that one of his captors spoke with a South London accent and had claimed to be a doctor working for the British National Health Service. Cantlie also reported seeing the NHS logo on medical equipment during his captivity.

Prosecutors said at a court hearing yesterday that Shajul Islam had been a doctor-in-training in London, and that he had gone to Syria to work as a medic for a jihadist group there.

Islam returned to the UK October 9 with his wife and two-year-old daughter. His wife was also arrested, but she was released without any charges filed against her.

An alleged copyright infringer appears to have gotten his just desserts from Facebook, which has summarily removed his Facebook fan page. But the story highlights the lack of transparency in Facebook’s policy regarding its handling of infringement claims.

Bill Tikos, the founder of the design and culture trend spotting site The Cool Hunter,  has complained on his Web site that his Facebook fan page was taken down for an alleged copyright infringement. A FB page and 788,000 fans “nurtured meticulously over the past five years–was gone,” Tikos wrote. “No explanation, flimsy warnings, no instructions on what to do next. None of our numerous attempts to rectify the situation and resurrect the page have worked.”

Cool Hunter–not to be confused with Cool Hunting, another trend-spotting site that remains in good standing with FB–says Facebook has refused to provide any detail about the alleged infringement. The dust-up was first reported last week by The Next Web, an online tech publication.

“We have no idea what we were infringing on. Which image/s or posts, specifically, have caused this?” Tikos wrote on the Cool Hunter Web site.

From there he goes on to say that he knows of two images posted on Cool Hunter without credit–both of them images found elsewhere on Facebook without credit, Tikos says. And then he digs himself in a little deeper:

“The other reason that could have caused the closure of our FB page is that we sometimes use images even when we do not know who has taken the picture,” he wrote. He goes on to say that everyone else–FB, Tumblr, Pinterest, and “millions of people and organizations share images – theirs and someone else’s – freely every day.” Tikos says he wants to give copyright holders credit if he can find them; his web site (and Facebook page, before it was taken down)  invite copyright owners to get in touch if they see their images on either site without credit.

As it turns out, others have had their Facebook fan pages removed without recourse or due process, The Huffington Post reported last year. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, internet service providers (such as Facebook) can protect themselves from liability for infringement by their users if they act quickly to take down infringing content.

Last year, Facebook told one site owner that it didn’t have time to judge disputes over copyright take-down requests, according to The Huffington Post report. FB said it was up to the site owner to contact the person who submitted the take-down notice–and get that person to withdraw the complaint. After The Huffington Post reported on the lack of due process given to those who lost their FB pages as a result of allegedly fraudulent DMCA complaints, Facebook issued a statement saying “Abuse of DMCA and other intellectual property notice procedures is a challenge for every major Internet service and we take it seriously.”

So are Tikos and Cool Hunter just victims of Facebook’s legal expediency?  Did Facebook overreact, as Tikos suggests, to a couple of alleged infringements without giving him due process, and a chance resolve the complaints?

The Next Web investigated, and reports that it got a statement from Facebook that said: “This [Cool Hunter] account has been disabled due to repeat copyright infringement under our terms and the account has been removed from the site accordingly. Additionally, we have thoroughly reviewed all related reports and have determined that we took the correct action in this case.”

OK, but in the name of transparency, how hard would it be for Facebook to post the evidence for everyone to see?

©Kristina Hill

The Southern Poverty Law Center has sued an anti-gay group for unauthorized use of a photograph of a gay couple in political attack ads in Colorado earlier this year.

SPLC sued the Virginia-based Public Advocate for the United States (PAUS) for violating the copyrights of photographer Kristina Hill of Brooklyn, New York. The suit also alleges that PAUS unlawfully appropriated the likenesses of the couple in the photograph–Brian Edwards and Tom Privitere.

Public Advocate of the United States, which SPLC classifies as a hate group because of its anti-gay propaganda, used Hill’s photo last spring in campaign ads against Colorado state senator Jean White (who had voted in favor of allowing same-sex unions in Colorado) and against Jeffrey Hare, a candidate for the Colorado house of representatives. The ads were distributed as mailers.

Hill’s image of Edwards and Privitere, shot during an engagement session, shows them kissing with a New York skyline in the background. Edwards ended up posting the image on his blog, with Hill’s permission.

PAUS downloaded the image, stripped out the background, and replaced it with backgrounds of two different Colorado landscapes for the unauthorized campaign mailers. PAUS superimposed text that read “State Senator Jean White’s idea of ‘family values?’” in one mailer and “Jeffrey Hare’s Vision for Weld County?” in the other ad.

White was defeated in her re-election race.

“I cringe every time I look at what once was one of our favorite photos,” Edwards said in a press release issued by SPLC when it filed the lawsuit today. “All I see now is the defiled image used to attack our family and our community. All we want is justice for the pain that Public Advocate has caused us. ”

An SPLC attorney said in the press release: “This was just a cheap way for Public Advocate to avoid having to pay for a stock photo to use in their hateful anti-gay attack ad. It was nothing short of theft.”

Hill, Edwards and Privitere are seeking an unspecified amount of damages.

Related stories:
Civil Rights Group Demands End to Use of Same-Sex Couple Photo in Anti-Gay Ad
Wedding Photographer Might Sue for Infringement Over Anti-Gay Attack Ad

Google has acquired Nik Software, the San Diego company that owns Snapseed photo editing software and other tools designed primarily for professional photographers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition is intended to help Google attract users to Google Plus, as part of a push to make that social media platform more competitive with Facebook. Facebook recently acquired Instagram to solidify its position as a platform for uploading and sharing images.

Snapseed and Instagram offer similar image editing and image-manipulation filters, but Instagram has 100 million users, compared to just 9 million Snapseed users, according to one published report. But Snapseed has more sophisticated editing tools than Instagram, according to New York Times columnist David Pogue. And last year, Apple named Snapseed “App of the Year” for the iPad.

Snapseed and other Nik products are currently available for use primarily on Apple devices. Now that Google owns Nik, Snapseed will soon be available for Android devices, significantly expanding the pool of potential users.

More information about the acquisition and its implications is available at The New York Times web site and at the NASDAQ web site.

PDN subscribers can also access reviews of Snapseed and other Nik software products through the links listed below.

Product Review: Nik Snapseed for iPad
Nik Announces Silver Efex Pro 2 Black-and-White Conversion Software
Nik Intros Color Efex Pro 4 Plug-in