News photo agency Sipa Press has filed for bankruptcy in Paris, following the bankruptcy of its parent company in Germany in October. The fate of the photo agency–including the possibility of liquidation–will be decided by a French court on December 6, according to Le Journal de la Photographie.

Sipa, which was founded in 1973 and is currently the French distributor for Associated Press, Rex Features and other international agencies, was acquired in July 2011 by DAPD, a German media company. DAPD was established in 2010 with ambitions to compete against more established news services in France and Germany. In addition to the Sipa Press acquisition, DAPD had launched two other companies–Sipa News, a wire service providing both news reports and photos, and French Language Service (FLS), a French-language wire service staffed by journalists formerly with Associated Press in France.

But DAPD ran out of money, and declared bankruptcy in Berlin on October 2. DAPD was one of eight subsidiaries of a larger holding company– HQTA AG–that ran short of cash and declared bankruptcy at the same time. Three hundred employees were affected. The German government has stepped in to pay their salaries, and HQTA says it will lay off 100 employees by December 1.

Meanwhile, the bankruptcy of DAPD left Sipa Press, Sipa News and FLS without enough money to operate, forcing DAPD’s representative in France to declare bankruptcy on behalf of the Sipa group and its owners, according to the report in Le Journal de Photographie. The 127 employees of the three companies have been told their November salaries will be cut in half, and paid in mid-December.

Le Journal de Photographie speculates that Sipa Press will be put under receivership (court-appointed management) and reorganized, while Sipa News is likely to be liquidated.

Sipa Press was launched in 1973 by Goksin Sipahioglu. Along with Gamma and Sygma, it was part of a triumvirate of once-legendary French picture agencies. But all three agencies fell on hard times during the 1990s because of changing technology and markets. Sygma was acquired by Corbis, but was eventually liquidated. Gamma merged with Rapho, another French photo agency, and is now part of an consortium called Eyedea, which was rescued from bankruptcy in 2010.

Related:
Sipa Press Founder Goksin Sipahioglu Dies

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.

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

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

Artist Shepard Fairey was sentenced to 300 hours of community service and fined $25,000 today in a federal courtroom in Manhattan today for destroying documents, falsifying evidence “and other misconduct” in his civil litigation two years ago against the Associated Press (AP). He had faced a maximum of six months in jail.

Fairey pled guilty to the criminal charge last February. The US District Attorney in Manhattan announced Fairey’s plea shortly after he settled his civil case with the AP over his unauthorized use of an AP image to create the “Hope” poster that became an icon of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign for President.

“Shepard Fairey went to extreme lengths to obtain an unfair and illegal advantagein his civil litigation [against AP], creating fake documents and destroying others in an effort to subvert the civil discovery process,” US Attorney Preet Bharara said in announcing Fairey’s guilty plea.

AP claimed copyright infringement against Fairy in 2009 for unauthorized use of the image of Obama to create the Hope poster.

Fairey tried to pre-empt the claim by asking a federal court judge to declare that the Hope poster amounted to a fair use of the AP photograph. In seeking that declaration, Fairey gave “factually untrue” information about the image he had used, the US District Attorney said. Specifically, Fairey claimed that he had used part of one AP image to make the poster, when in fact had used a substantial portion of a different AP image.

Fairey admitted the discrepancy in 2010, saying he had made a mistake about which image he had used. He said he then tried to cover up the mistake. (His fair use defense was arguably stronger with the image he originally claimed to have used.)

The US Attorney began a criminal investigation after Fairey’s admission, and concluded that he had created “multiple false and fraudulent documents” which he presented to AP during the discover process in the civil litigation.

The US Attorney also said Fairey tried to get one of his employees to mislead investigators.

Prior to pleading guilty to the criminal charges, Fairey had settled his civil litigation with AP on mostly undisclosed terms (the two sides did agree to share proceeds from licensing of the Hope poster image, however).

Courtesy of Belarusian News Photos/www.BNP.by

Anton Suryapin, a photographer detained by agents from Belarus’s state security agency (still referred to as the KGB), was released on August 17, according to Reporters Without Borders. He is being charged with “organizing illegal migration”; authorities accused him of helping the pilots who airdropped 800 teddy bears carrying pro-democratic messages throughout country on July 4. Amnesty International reports that Suryapin is a journalism student at Belarus State University and that he was arrested on July 13 after uploading images taken of the “Bears for Belarus” demonstration to the Belarusian News Photos Web site.

The event was engineered by the Swedish advertising firm Studio Total. It has created tension between the two European countries and resulted in president Aleksandr G. Lukashenko firing a number of officials, including the foreign minister and head of air defense, because the plane entered Belarusian airspace undetected and without permission.

Mountain Light Photography has accepted a $2,600 settlement offer from Thomas Barbèy, and Muench Photography has withdrawn its infringement claim against the photo montage artist, according to court records in the case.

Muench and Mountain Light filed a joint claim of copyright infringement against the Las Vegas-based artist, alleging unauthorized use of two separate photographs. The case was filed in US District Court in Los Angeles.

Barbèy created an image that he titled “Rhinal Congestion” (it shows multiple rhinos in a snowscape), allegedly using parts of an image owned by Muench called “El Capitan in Winter, Yosemite National Park.” Barbèy was also accused of using a photograph called “Quadruple Falls at Dawn, Glacier National Park,” shot by the late Galen Rowell of Mountain Light Photography, to create a photo montage titled “Pitcher Books.” (Photos here).

Mountain Light accepted Barbèy’s settlement offer of $2,600–including $1,600 in damages and $1,000 for attorney’s fees–along with Barbèy’s promise to stop marketing the “Pitcher Books” image. (Mountain Light had no possibility of winning statutory damages in court because it had not registered the “Quadruple Falls” image prior to the alleged infringement).

Despite offering payment of $1,600 for damages, Barbèy said in court papers that his offer was not to be construed as an admission of liability for infringement, or an admission that Mountain Light had suffered any damages.

Meanwhile, Muench’s attorneys have filed notice with the court that Muench Photography was dismissing its claim against Barbèy.

Attorneys gave no explanation for dismissing the claim, and they were not immediately available for comment. Muench Photographer was also not immediately available for comment.

Barbèy has admitted use of the Muench and Mountain Light Images in comments he has posted to the PDNPulse blog. He said he created the montages “well over a decade ago.”

His attorney told PDN last week that the claims against Barbèy were without merit. The attorney said Barbèy would successfully defend against them on fair use grounds, and by invoking the statute of limitations for copyright claims.

Related story:
Self-Proclaimed Photo Montage Virtuoso Is Sued for Stealing Photos