from the well,-at-least-they're-not-monkeys dept
You may recall, from a few months back, the copyright debate we had going back and forth over the question of whether or not
monekys could hold the copyright on some photographs they took. The general
conclusion was that they could not, and the photos taken were almost certainly in the public domain, contrary to the claim of the guy who owned the camera, and the news agency he tried to "license" the photos to. That said, what if you have a similar situation involving a human? Photographer Mirjam Letsch has an interesting blog post on her site, in which she notes that while walking through an Indian bazaar with her camera dangling on her shoulder,
a kid grabbed the camera and took five quick photos, some of which are pretty nice. Here's just one, but click through to Letsch's site to see the rest:
As she admits in her post:
I really liked the creative result when I later saw these images! Don’t know who owns the copyright though!
While it may depend on the specifics of Indian law, in the US and many other parts of the world, it's likely that the kid almost certainly holds the copyright,
technically, though the likelihood of him ever enforcing those copyrights is minimal at best. Similarly, it's unlikely that Letsch holds the copyrights on the images, but thankfully, this doesn't seem like a case where anyone wants to fight over the copyrights, but rather is an opportunity to just see some cool photos taken in under unusual circumstances.
Filed Under: copyright, india, photos, street
