UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

[silicon_toad2000]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/29/err_act_landgrab/

Have you ever uploaded a photo to Facebook, Instagram or Flickr?

If so, you'll probably want to read this, because the rules on who can exploit your work have now changed radically, overnight. Amateur and professional illustrators and photographers alike will find themselves ensnared by the changes, the result of lobbying by Silicon Valley and radical bureaucrats and academics. The changes are enacted in the sprawling Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act which received Royal Assent last week, and it marks a huge shift in power away from citizens and towards large US corporations.

How so? Previously, and in most of the world today, ownership of your creation is automatic, and legally considered to be an individual's property. That's enshrined in the Berne Convention and other international treaties, where it's considered to be a basic human right. What this means in practice is that you can go after somebody who exploits it without your permission - even if going after them is cumbersome and expensive. The Coalition's new act reverses this human right. When last year Instagram attempted to do something similar, it met with a furious backlash. But the Act has sailed through without most amateurs or semi-professionals even realising the consequences.

The Act contains changes to UK copyright law which permit the commercial exploitation of images where information identifying the owner is missing, so-called "orphan works", into what's known in the jargon as "extended collective licensing" schemes. Since most digital images on the internet today are orphans - the metadata is missing or has been stripped by a large organisation - then millions of photographs and illustrations are swept into such schemes.

For the first time anywhere in the world, the Act will permit the widespread commercial exploitation of unidentified work - the user only needs to perform a "diligent search". But since this is likely to come up with a blank, they can proceed with impunity. The Act states that a user of a work can act as if they are the owner of the work (ie, you) if they're given permission to do so by the Secretary of State, acting as a regulated body. The Act also fails to prohibit sub-licensing, meaning that once somebody has your work, they can wholesale it. This gives the green light to a new content scraping industry, an industry which doesn't have to pay the originator a penny. Such is the consequence of "rebalancing copyright," in reality.

[GhostShip]

I can see this ending up in a serious legal quagmire, in most countries its illegal to take folks property (real or "intellectual" ) without due process of law and this act gives no recourse to someone deprived of the fruits of their work or the unauthorised usage of the work by the act and thus its illegitimate in most of the globe and the UK itself, as a signatory to the berne convention this legislation cannot stand up to legal challenge in a court as it deprives the owner of a work of his copyrights that are recognised globally.

My advice to those who may be affected is to watermark all your online images immediately or better still add a new logo to them that you register as a trade mark, that will then give you two avenues to chase those who take or use your work without permission.

For those like myself who freely give permission to those wanting to borrow images its still nice to be asked or credited and this act seems a bit of a low blow biased in favour of big business.

[silicon_toad2000]

i hope they're careful with the wording. service 'like' facebook, flikr.
whats the difference between flikr and dropbox or skydrive?
whats the difference between facebook and itunes?
whats teh difference between an image and a movie?
suddenly itunes legitimately owns all the hollywood stuff?
wording and loopholes in new legislation makes for a big mess sometimes.