George W. Bush Used Top Google Results For All His Paintings; Will He Be Sued For Copyright Infringement?

from the w-is-an-appropriation-artist dept

You may have heard the recent stories about former President George W. Bush's new exhibit of paintings of world leaders. There's been plenty of chatter about the former President picking up painting as a hobby since leaving office. While many may have assumed that he used his experience in meeting with those world leaders in order to have an accurate representation of what they looked like, the truth is that he just pulled results from Google Image search result for each one. Literally. Some people have gone through and done Google Image searches on each of the subjects he painted, and discovered that the paintings were clearly all based on either the very first result, or very near the top search result. Yes, that's right. George W. Bush is an appropriation artist.

Many of those images are from Wikipedia, where they're under Creative Commons licensing, but others are clearly covered by copyright. As Animal New York notes, the image of former French President Jacques Chirac comes from a photo of the cover of Chirac's book cover, where the copyright on the photo is actually held by the Associated Press. The Animal New York article is probably correct that it's unlikely that the Associated Press will go after the former President for copyright infringement, but only because it's hypocritical. In the past, the Associated Press did, in fact, sue Shepard Fairey over his iconic image of President Obama, that was also based on an AP photo. Fairey (stupidly) did himself in by trying to destroy evidence and then lie about it, seriously harming his case, and distracting from the central question of whether or not his image was fair use. But, the AP has sued others over that image as well, so you never know.

While the chances are minimal, it certainly would be interesting to have a case in which, of all people, George W. Bush, becomes the poster child for fair use.

Filed Under: appropriation art, copyright, george w. bush, image search, paintings, photographs, shepard fairey
Companies: associated press

BSA Caught Using Infringing Image For Its 'Snitch' On Your Colleagues Anti-Piracy Campaign

from the hypocrites dept

For many years, we've written about the Business Software Alliance's (BSA) ridiculous snitch program. This is where the organization (which represents a bunch of software companies, but more or less takes its orders from Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and Autodesk) promises to give people large cash rewards for snitching on friends and colleagues who happen to be using unlicensed software. The BSA insists that this is one of their best tools -- which they then use to raid small companies for questionable "audits" that often completely destroy those businesses. The BSA forces those companies to pay huge sums of money -- all of which the BSA keeps. As for the claims of big rewards for snitches, the BSA is incredibly misleading on that front. A few years back, they started promising "up to $1 million" for snitching. In exchange, we promised "up to $1 million" if anyone could show the BSA actually paying out $1 million. Someone looking into the BSA's payments found that the highest they'd paid out to snitches at the time was around $5,000 with many getting less than that. In other words, the BSA has never had much of a reputation for intellectual honesty.

The good folks over at TorrentFreak have now also found that the BSA also appears to be a bunch of hypocrites as well. Having launched a new "snitch" campaign on St. Patrick's day, it appears that the organization failed to license the photo of the "pot of gold" it used on Facebook. Yes, that's right, on the very campaign where the BSA is asking people to snitch on unlicensed software, it appears to have used an unlicensed photo. The image appears to have come from CakeCentral. When Torrentfreak reached out to the BSA about the licensing of the photo, suddenly the image disappeared from the BSA's Facebook page replaced by an image of an obviously fake pile of money. That seems fitting, given that their promises of giving people lots of money is equally bogus. Either way, the BSA is lucky that photographers don't have an equivalent organization that busts down doors and suddenly demands huge payouts. I'm sure it was just an oversight by the BSA and that some intern or someone failed to get the license. But, the BSA itself never forgives such minor "oversights" by the small businesses it destroys with its snitch campaign.

Filed Under: copyright, hyprocrites, licensing, photographs, snitch
Companies: bsa

The Intercept Releases Photos To The Public Domain... But Unfortunately Locks Up Text Content With Copyfraud Claims

from the kudos-and-boos dept

We already wrote about the launch of The Intercept, the first new publication from Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media, helmed by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, and about its first big article about the NSA's use of questionable metadata in telling the CIA where to drop bombs from drones. However, the other article that the publication launches with is also worth noting. It's by photographer Trevor Paglen, who rented a helicopter and took aerial photographs of the headquarters of the NSA, the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) which builds spy satellites, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which maps and analyzes imagery caught from those spy satellites. As Paglen notes:

My intention is to expand the visual vocabulary we use to “see” the U.S. intelligence community. Although the organizing logic of our nation’s surveillance apparatus is invisibility and secrecy, its operations occupy the physical world. Digital surveillance programs require concrete data centers; intelligence agencies are based in real buildings; surveillance systems ultimately consist of technologies, people, and the vast network of material resources that supports them. If we look in the right places at the right times, we can begin to glimpse America’s vast intelligence infrastructure.

But here's the part that caught my eye:

These new images of the NSA, NRO, and NGA are being placed in the public domain without restriction, to be used by anyone for any purpose whatsoever, with or without attribution. They can be found on Creative Time Reports, which commissioned this piece, as well as on Flickr, Wikimedia Commons and The Intercept.

Download high resolution images of these photos: NSA, NRO, NGA

Here are the three images: NSA:

NRO:

NGA:
Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that First Look/The Intercept is nearly as open about the text of its articles. They have a big copyright symbol on the bottom and no Creative Commons or other permissive license. In fact, their copyright statement appears to go to the other extreme, pretending that fair use and other user rights can be ignored -- and seems to go beyond what copyright allows, moving into the territory of copyfraud.

The Intercept is made available for your personal, noncommercial use only. All content and other material on this Service is the property of First Look Productions or its licensors and is protected by U.S. copyright laws, other copyright laws, and international conventions. Except as explicitly provided in these Terms of Use, you may not reproduce, distribute, display, perform, create derivative works from, or otherwise exploit any of the content or other material on this Service. You may display and occasionally print or store single copies of individual pages of the Service for your personal use, provided that you keep intact all credits and copyright and other proprietary notices, but you may not otherwise reproduce, store, or distribute copies of any content or other material found on this Service, in any form (including electronic form), or exploit any of the content you find here for any commercial purpose, without prior written permission from the copyright owner.

That statement above ignores even the possibility of fair use, which you can't do. I'm sure it's just boilerplate that First Look got from some lawyer, but for a publication with such lofty goals, and which used one of its first articles to release images into the public domain, you'd hope they wouldn't have started out with such a bogus copyright statement.

Filed Under: copyfraud, copyright, glenn greenwald, photographs, pierre omidyar, public domain, the intercept, trevor paglen
Companies: first look media

Statutory Damages Strike Again: AFP & Getty Told To Pay $1.2 Million For Using Photo Found Via Twitter

from the that's-a-lot-of-scratch dept

Back in 2010 we first started covering a really bizarre case involving photographer Daniel Morel, the news agency AFP (Agence France-Presse) and Getty Images. There were multiple levels of insanity involved in the case. First, Morel had taken photos of the aftermath of the big earthquake in Haiti. He'd posted some of those photos to the service TwitPic (which isn't Twitter) and then linked to them via Twitter. A different photographer, Lisandro Suero, copied the images to his own account and tweeted to the world that they were available for licensing. AFP started using those photos, uploaded them to Getty (they have a partnership) and credited them to Suero. Morel, reasonably, wasn't happy about this and sent a nastygram to AFP. And then it started to get bizarre: AFP sued Morel. And, no, it wasn't just for declaratory judgment. They sued Morel claiming that Morel's claim against them was "commercial defamation." Seriously.

It was pretty clear from the very beginning that AFP screwed up royally, and then compounded the problems by choosing to sue the guy who actually took the photos. AFP then took it even further, claiming that Twitter's terms of service allows them to use any photo anyone posts to Twitter without getting a license. That's wrong. First, the clause that AFP points to is very clearly about the person uploading the photo granting a license to Twitter, not to anyone else to use beyond Twitter. There is no way anyone can read it honestly the way that the AFP's lawyers claim to have read it. Second, the photo was uploaded to TwitPic, so AFP was looking at the wrong terms of service anyway. They eventually realized this and pointed to a similarly misread clause from TwitPic. The court told the AFP that it had clearly misread the terms of service not once, but twice. And for reasons that I cannot fathom, rather than working out a settlement, AFP stuck to its guns, leading to a trial last week.

That last link has some of the details of the procedural screwups that continued to plague the case, including Morel's problematic responses to discovery efforts. However, in the end, there were still eight awards for copyright infringement, which would qualify for statutory damages, and then another potential 16 awards for DMCA violations. Incredibly, the jury awarded the maximum of $1.2 million in statutory damages ($150,000 per infringement), finding that the infringement was willful. On the DMCA violations, the jury also awarded additional damages for the DMCA violations. His lawyers are apparently claiming that maximum $400,000 there, but other press reports say it's just $20,000, though that would be below the $2,500 minimum per 16 violations, so I'm not sure that's right. The lawyer also seems to indicate that attorneys' fees were awarded as well, though the linked article above is very unclear on the details, appearing to mixup the various awards.

Either way, it's pretty clear that AFP and Getty have to pay up big time. As I stated early on, AFP (who is known for its own copyright maximalist tendencies -- including suing Google for linking to its stories) clearly acted egregiously both in its initial effort and then in the lawsuit itself. Nearly every choice AFP appears to have made here was bad. It shouldn't have used the photos the way it did. It shouldn't have responded the way it did. It shouldn't have argued the ridiculous legal argument it tried. And it never should have let the case continue, rather than figuring out a way to settle. It is, of course, entirely possible that Morel wouldn't settle at a reasonable rate (his actions in the case were... hardly stellar). But, everything about AFP's actions were ridiculous.

That said, $1.2 million? Even though this was commercial use... And even if the infringement was willful... And even if AFP's conduct was and remained egregious throughout this whole ordeal, it seems insane to argue that $1.2 million is a reasonable award for sharing 8 newsworthy photos. The statutory damages provisions of US copyright law are way out of whack with reality, and this case is just the latest in a long line of examples.

Filed Under: copyright, daniel morel, photographs, statutory damages, terms of service
Companies: afp, getty

Sweden Makes It Illegal To Take Photos In 'Private Environments' Without Permission

from the how-will-that-work? dept

Here on Techdirt we've had stories about how the ubiquity of digital cameras is changing the way we look at public events and art. But as has also become clear, the ability to take photos of more or less everything we see brings with it certain problems -- especially if what we see are police. So it was perhaps inevitable that the politicians would start to get involved, in order to "solve" some of those problems. Here's a rather extreme example from Sweden, as reported by TechHive:

Sweden's parliament has voted in favor of a law that bans taking pictures and filming in a private environment without first getting permission from people in attendance. Critics say the law is too ambiguous.

The Swedish Committee on Justice said the law, which goes into effect July 1, is needed since photographs or movies secretly shot in private settings can seriously violate an individual's privacy, and protection has been inadequate.

Well, that may be true, but it's hard to see how exactly this is going to work if you want to take a picture in a very crowded room, say -- how exactly are you supposed to get everyone that might be in a photo, to agree? Does it have to be in writing so that you can prove it? And what about if it's not a room, but still a "private environment"? Come to think of it, what exactly is that, anyway? From the article:

The law doesn't specify what constitutes consent or define a private environment. For example, what happens if a journalist invites a business executive to a reception in the journalist's home and secretly photographs the executive committing a criminal act, asked Maria Ferm, member of parliament for the Green Party, during the debate.

That underlines how this is likely to be used: to stop revelations of wrong-doing by public figures in private places. At least the new legislation is aware that this is an issue:

An exception from criminal liability is made if the act is justifiable in view of its purpose and other circumstances, and that provision includes journalistic work, according to the committee.

But until the exact limits of that provision are defined, along with what "justifiable" means, it seems inevitable that the new law will have a chilling effect on investigative journalism in Sweden. That's rather ironic, since you might expect that the abundance of digital cameras today would lead to the rich and powerful being caught out and called to account more often, not less.

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Filed Under: photographs, privacy, private environments, sweden

Canadian Anti-Infringement Enforcement Company Caught Using Infringing Photos On Its Website

from the casual-infringement-for-all! dept

IP "enforcement" is a Herculean task (according to the enforcers), one that requires so much time and energy that those pursuing infringers barely have time to make sure their own backyard is clean. Many in the copyright industry (or closely affiliated) have been caught infringing on others' copyrights: hosted infringing material. SOPA pusher Lamar Smith. NBC Universal. Righthaven. The US Copyright Group. The list literally goes on and on.

Here we are again, discussing an entity so concerned with outside infringement, it can hardly be bothered to notice the infringement within its own walls. Canipre, the Canadian "forensics software" company that has hunted down IP addresses for a "million pirates" on behalf of lawsuit-happy studios like Voltage Pictures ('Hurt Locker,' anyone), has decked out its (rather overdramatic) website with the unlicensed photos belonging to others.

Canipre, as a company, offers to track down people who are illegally downloading copyrighted material from record companies and film studios. According to their website, they have issued more than 3,500,000 takedown notices, and their work has led to multimillion dollar damages awards, injunctions, seizure of assets, and even incarceration.

In a recent interview, Canipre's managing director Barry Logan explained that it's about much more than just money—he's hoping to teach the Canadian public a moral lesson:

"[We want to] change social attitudes toward downloading. Many people know it is illegal but they continue to do it... Our collective goal is not to sue everybody… but to change the sense of entitlement that people have, regarding Internet-based theft of property.”

Well, it seems the "sense of entitlement" goes all the way up. Here's a screencap of Canipre's website that features a self-portrait by Steve Houk.


We'll quote Vice here:

So, just to be clear: Canipre has written "they all know it's wrong and they're still doing it." Referring to copyright theft. On top of an image that they are using without the permission of the copyright holder. On their official website.

Houk says no permission was given to use his photo. He contacted Canipre directly to discuss its infringement and to point out that is was "disheartening" to see a company claiming to "champion intellectual property rights" obviously disregarding the rights of others. This led to Canipre's marketing director firing off a volley of emails and phone calls before finally deciding to pass the buck.

Logan claimed that the company used a 3rd party vendor to develop their website and that the vendor had purchased the image from an image bank.

I pointed out to Logan that if that was true, he had basically paid his vendor to rip off other people's creative work. Logan told me that he would contact his web provider and have the image removed. He also told me that he would provide me with the name of the website developer and the name of the image bank where they obtained my photo.

So, it's important that Canipre maintains a presence on the web that properly (and noirishly) delivers its message on the importance of intellectual property rights, but not important enough to dot i's, cross t's and make sure its "third party vendor" isn't simply grabbing images from "the internet" (or image banks with their own infringement problem).

Logan has yet to provide the name of the developer or the image bank, so it still remains somewhat of a mystery which 3rd party vendor slapped Houk's photo onto an IP enforcer's website. And this photo, taken by Sascha Pohlflepp. And this one, taken by Brian Moore. At this point, all of the infringing photos have been taken down, but only after Vice called attention to Canipre's actons.

The ironic thing about the last two photos is that they're both Creative Commons-licensed, meaning all Canipre (or its vendor) had to do was properly attribute the photos. But neither could be bothered.

Now, some might say that in the scheme of things, Canipre's infringement is nothing compared to the infringement it's fighting. But here's the difference. Canipre is a company that helps studios like Voltage sue alleged infringers based on not much more than an IP address. File sharers aren't turning a profit or presenting themselves as righters of the world's wrongs. If you're going to put yourself in the position of "educating" people (via mass lawsuits) about the importance of the intellectual property rights you're being paid to protect, you had better make sure you're not stepping on the IP toes of others.

Filed Under: canada, copyright, infringement, licenses, photographs
Companies: canipre, voltage pictures

States Continue To Make Photographing Or Taping Farms A Crime

from the because-farmers dept

Over two years ago, we wrote about an absolutely insane proposal in Florida that sought to make it a felony to photograph farms without permission. The bill tried to position it as "protecting farm intellectual property," but everyone knew the real reason: farmers were upset about animal rights activists photographing and videotaping animal cruelty and revealing it to the world. We hadn't heard much more about that until just recently. A month and a half ago, On the Media had a segment about how these kinds of bills were showing up in more states, and now the NY Times has done a big article on how these "ag-gag" laws are being pushed by lobbyists heavily influenced by big farm groups.

It appears that the positioning of these bills has moved away from "protecting farmer IP" and over to claiming that animal rights activists are involved in terrorism for exposing animal cruelty. Now, we certainly believe that some animal rights groups go way overboard in their campaigns, though they often just make themselves look silly when they do so. But these laws just seem crazy, and a clear restriction on First Amendment rights.

But a dozen or so state legislatures have had a different reaction: They proposed or enacted bills that would make it illegal to covertly videotape livestock farms, or apply for a job at one without disclosing ties to animal rights groups. They have also drafted measures to require such videos to be given to the authorities almost immediately, which activists say would thwart any meaningful undercover investigation of large factory farms.

ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), a group famous for writing legislation for members of Congress, has a "draft bill" along these lines, which argues that the effort is to prevent attempts to use images and video to "defame the facility or its owner." That's insulting. First off, we already have defamation laws. If farm owners are defamed, let them use those laws. Second, truth is an absolute defense to defamation, and if they're taking a picture that accurately represents what's going on, it's difficult to see how that could, in any way, be any form of defamation. Third, and most importantly, just because one might use some tactic to defame someone (even if it's highly unlikely) that's no excuse, at all, for seeking to ban the activity entirely.

In the end, it's legal efforts like this that make people especially cynical about the political process. It's pretty clear that there's no good reason for such laws. Rather, the entire purpose is to protect some farmers who don't want their practices exposed.

Filed Under: activists, ag gag, farms, free speech, photographs, videos

What's Wrong With This Picture?

from the change-of-focus dept

As you may have heard, there's been an election in Rome recently. These kind of events tend to bring out the crowds, and NBC had the clever idea of finding a couple of pictures showing roughly the same view, but eight years apart. They look very similar, except for one rather striking detail: in the first, from 2005, there are a few mobile phones visible; in the second, taken recently, tiny screens are visible everywhere in the crowd -- it seems as if practically everyone is using their phone to take a picture.

An article in the Huffington Post rightly points out that the two pictures aren't strictly comparable: the older photo was taken shortly after the death of Pope John Paul II, when his body had been carried across St Peter's Square. That contrasts with the rather more joyous event of the new Pope Francis speaking to the public for the first time after his election.

But the same article also notes that other pictures taken at the time of the election of Pope Benedict XVI a few weeks after the death of his predecessor show a similar scarcity of people holding up their phones to take pictures. And a moment's reflection will confirm that nowadays there is an almost reflexive urge to use our smartphones with their high-quality cameras to capture anything of note that is going on around us, in a way that wasn't the case when cameras were separate things (to say nothing of when some kind of physical film had to be loaded, emptied and developed in order to use them.) The huge numbers of pictures on Facebook alone -- 220 billion as of October last year, rising by 300 million each day -- also bears witness to that.

This raises many interesting questions, for example to do with how people nowadays relate to their memories, and what the existence of so many photos means for privacy and surveillance. But here I want to consider one other aspect.

Judging by the Facebook numbers quoted above, there are now probably trillions of digital photos in existence, with billions more being created each day. It goes without saying that this wealth of fixed (and moving) images is unprecedented in the history of mankind. That also means the things that could be done with those images are also unprecedented, because new scales bring new possibilities. For example, by combining millions of pictures taken by thousands of people of the same location at different moments it would be possible to create interesting four-dimensional digital artifacts -- navigable 3D worlds that change with time.

Except, of course, that you can't, thanks to the way that copyright is automatically attached to creations once they are fixed -- for example, by storing a digital photo. To use all those images for this kind of reconstruction would require every single one of them to be licensed under a suitable Creative Commons license that allowed them to be re-used. Even the simplest of them -- CC-BY -- would be hard to comply with, since attribution would need to be available for every photo that made even the smallest contribution to the different composite images for each moment of time. Ideally, billions of images would be placed in the public domain, allowing any kind of use, but that's surprisingly hard to achieve, because of the prevailing presumption that copyright should apply to everything, for as long as possible. Certainly, it's not something we can reasonably hope huge numbers of people might do routinely.

This inability to tap into the incredible collective wealth of a trillion digital images stored around the world imbues that recent picture of thousands of people holding up their mobile phones in Rome with a certain melancholy. The blurred screens receding into the distance become a symbol of all that we cannot see thanks to copyright laws whose original focus on protecting small numbers of hard-to-produce works from copying is no longer appropriate.

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Filed Under: memories, photographs, pictures, pope

'No Photos From The Sky' Bill Trimmed Back, But Still Could Create Felons Out Of Kids Playing With Toy Drones

from the silly-law dept

A few weeks back, we wrote about an absolutely ridiculous bill that was proposed in New Hampshire that would have made it illegal to do any aerial photography, if the images showed any "residential dwelling." As we noted, this would make things like various mapping services illegal. Given the criticism, it appears that the bill's sponsor, Rep. Neal Kurt, decided to rewrite it, limiting it to just "drones," after admitting that the whole idea for the bill came after he saw a toy drone for sale in the mall. Kurt appears to have an overactive imagination when it comes to those toy drones, because he's worried about them firing lasers, if the text of the bill (HB 619-FN) is any indication:

II. “Drone” means an unmanned flying machine that is capable of:

(a) Capturing images or sounds of objects or people on the ground, in or about buildings or structures, or in the air;
(b) Intercepting communications on the ground, in or about buildings and structures, or in the air; or
(c) Firing a bullet, LASER-type ray, other projectile or any kind of lethal or non-lethal weapon.

Unfortunately, the bill is still way too broad. While mapping programs may be legal, any use of a drone to photograph a person or people becomes a felony. Also if you photograph the inside of a building. From the sky. Maybe that's via the lasers. The only way around this law is to get "prior, written consent" from the person photographed.

This is the kind of bill you get when you have a politician with an overactive imagination, who sees a toy drone and can only think "bad things will happen with this," and refuses to consider the many cool things that can be done with drones today. Chris Anderson built a whole company after being inspired to build drones with his kids. If this bill passes, and he's in New Hampshire with his kids, having fun, teaching them things about building things, physics, aerodynamics and more, they could all become felons if their drone takes a photo of someone without "prior, written consent." That's just silly.

Thankfully, it sounds like most of the people who went to a hearing on the bill spoke out against it -- including a Brigadier General from the US Army who pointed out that the federal government has "exclusive sovereignty" over airspace, and the State of New Hampshire does not.

First to testify was a Brigadier General from the US Army. He began by firmly reminding the committee that the airspace above New Hampshire was not owned by New Hampshire, but by the United States of America, and therefore controlled by the FAA. One of the committee members challenged him as to where that authority came from. The General was kind enough to quote chapter and verse. There were no more questions.

It's a bit disappointing to see that the ACLU is pledging "strong support" for the bill. Yes, I understand the concerns and worries about domestic drone use by governments for surveillance purposes -- and I support efforts by various groups to build transparency and clear rules around such usage -- but this bill goes way beyond that.

Filed Under: airspace, drones, new hampshire, photographs, privacy
Companies: aclu

United Airlines Kicks Travel Writer Off Of Plane For Photographing His Seat

from the not-how-you-attract-customers dept

This one is from a few weeks back, but it's worth catching up on. In an age when pretty much everyone has a camera in their pocket via their telephone, it's fairly crazy to try to enforce "no photography" rules -- especially in places where they don't make any sense. And, yet, for reasons that are not at all clear, United Airlines apparently has the following "no photography" rule for passengers on their airplanes: But, of course, who would actually pay attention to something like that? Tons of people take photographs on airplanes. I've done it plenty of times. Yet, on one United flight a few weeks ago, apparently a flight attendant was being extra vigilant and running around the airplane demanding everyone stop taking photographs, even falsely claiming that it violated FAA regulations (it doesn't). One of admonished passengers was a travel writer and a frequent United Airlines flyer, Matthew Klint, who blogs regularly (and positively) about the airline. He took the following photo: The reason was that this was the first time he'd been on a plane with this configuration, and he intended to blog about it, as he's done many times in the past. The flight attendant ordered him to stop, and he did so immediately. But then he decided to just let the flight attendant know why he had taken the picture, and that led to a ridiculous chain of events ending with him getting tossed off the flight.

Naturally, the FA's warning bothered me and I felt the need to explain myself. I signaled for her to come back and asked her to hang my coat. I then said this verbatim—

"I want you to understand why I was taking pictures. I hope you didn't think I was a terrorist. Here is my business card [offering her one]. I write about United Airlines on an almost-daily basis and the folks at United in Chicago are even aware of my blog."

She took my jacket but refused to take my business card saying, "No, that's okay," then saying, "I did not know that" after I explained my reason for taking pictures. I again emphasize, I took no more pictures.

Just a few minutes later, he was told that the captain was ordering him off the plane. Klint eventually was able to speak to the captain who insisted that he had disobeyed the flight attendant, when he makes it clear he had not. It became a he-said/she-said debate and the airline, of course, won.

After the story started to get some attention, United reached out to Klint and claimed they were launching an "extensive internal investigation."

Klint is, quite reasonably, pissed off about the flight attendant lying about his actions. And he feels United needs to earn back his trust (and he notes they have not offered any sort of apology). However, it seems the bigger issue is the whole "no photography" rule. It's likely this was a rule that's supposed to protect the "privacy" of fellow passengers, but it's clearly one that was being misapplied by this flight attendant, who apparently stopped quite a few people from taking such pictures.

Yet, in an age where everyone has a cameraphone, the idea of stopping photographs in a settling like that isn't just silly, it's counterproductive and can be used (as in this case) to escalate a perfectly benign situation into a complete mess.

Filed Under: airplanes, flights, photographs
Companies: united airlines