schlitt.info - php, photography and private stuff ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ :Author: Tobias Schlitt :Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:34:46 +0100 :Revision: 2 :Copyright: CC by-nc-sa =============================== Removed 1100 photos from Flickr =============================== :Description: After some heavy discussions with Kore and others I researched about German law in respect to individual rights on photos yesterday. Thanks to Arne, who gave me a good starting point (German) for my research. In the end, Kore was mostly right with his interpretation, what made me remove about 1100 photos from my Flickr gallery. All of those showing people dedicatedly where I do not feel to have the explicit permission to publish their pictures. I'll try to explain the reasons, my personal issues and possibly solutions in this article. After some heavy discussions with `Kore`__ and others I researched about German law in respect to individual rights on photos yesterday. Thanks to `Arne`__, who gave me a good `starting point`__ (German) for my research. In the end, Kore was mostly right with his interpretation, what made me remove about 1100 photos from my `Flickr gallery`__. All of those showing people dedicatedly where I do not feel to have the explicit permission to publish their pictures. I'll try to explain the reasons, my personal issues and possibly solutions in this article. .. __: http://kore-nordmann.de .. __: http://arne-nordmann.de .. __: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recht_am_eigenen_Bild .. __: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tobiasschlitt/ **Disclaimer**: No, I'm not a lawyer, so the following summary might a) be incorrect legal terminology and b) misinterpreted. German law first of all gives every person the right to decide if a picture (s)he is shown on might be published or not. Nobody may publish a photo (or a drawing) of another person without her/his explicit permission. This restriction of artists is only loosen in some cases, where the creator of a picture might publish it without explicit permission. Still the shown person can investigate under such circumstances. These cases are basically (§ 23 KUG): - If the person shown is part of contemporary history. - If he/she is only shown as an attachment beside the main aspect of the picture (landscape, architecture, ...). - If the photo was taken on an assemblage and does not show the person explicitly. - If the picture is of higher artistic nature and it was not made as an remittance work. It think the right of people, shown on a picture, to decide themselves if their pictures may be published or not, is a very good thing. Some people don't want to be published anywhere, others just take care that no offending pictures are published. However, I'm quite sad about my own decision to remove such a large amount of nice photos from my Flickr pages. I only left pictures online where either no person is visible, where the visible person gave me their explicit permission to publish pictures, where the main subject of a picture is landscape or architecture or where a larger crowd of people is shown on a public event. I'm not quite sure about the legal situation for those still public pictures in the end. I personally consider an open source conference an assemblage and therefore the pictures of conference crowds are still public. However, if anyone feels offended by being visible on such a picture, please let me know and I will remove it. In contrast, I'm not sure if people that are celebrities in the open source / PHP scene are not part of the contemporary history. Can an auditorium full of people be considered an assemblage? Is an open source (un)conference a public event? Isn't Rasmus Lerdorf part of the contemporary history? Wouldn't Linus Torwalds be? If they are, aren't Marcus Börger and Kore Nordmann, too? I'm really sad to feel the need to take a lot of nice conference memories offline. A few people hacking in a corner on IPC spring in Amsterdam, a (possibly by now famous) speaker giving his first talk, the LAMP area on earlier days Linuxtag and many more are no more visible to any of you anymore. However, I do not want to offend anyone or even get into legal issues. Therefore I'd beg all of you that have ever seen me with a camera, please **send me a short email and grant me the permission to publish the photos** again. You all know that I would not publish offending pictures and for you and other attendees, a good amount of public memories are missing. A short email saying something like "feel free to publish pictures of my person that you have taken and will on conferences and other events" should work fine to give me a basic permission. You still have the choice to make me unpublish certain pictures or to revoke this right again anytime. Please make sure you sign your email in some way to avoid faked permissions. Thanks in advance! I would be quite curious what people think about all this? Are you happy that I removed these photos? Do you think it was unnecessary? Do you think all other photos showing people must be unpublished, too? Would you mind your photos being online? Are you a lawyer and can enlighten me about the details in this direction? How do you handle this issue when taking photos (especially at conferences)? I also thought about possibilities to avoid such legal quandaries in future. One possibility IMO would be, to ask people for a permission while they register for a conference. I think most people don't have any issues with having photos published they can be seen on, as long as they are not obviously offending (like someone lying drunk on the sidewalk or the late night striptease in the hotel bar). For events like the recent PHP Unconference this could be a solution in my opinion. Still you have the problem here that you don't know all people in person and might not be able to decide if someone is on a picture who rejected his permission. One of Kores arguments were that I don't have the permission to publish pictures while a professional journalist has it (in some way). He stated that you can usually identify a journalist as such and people know that if they are photographed by such a person, their photo might be published. For me, as only someone who runs around on geek events with a large DSLR, people only asume that I will keep the photos only for me in private. I might print some shirts for the next conferences that state "Attention: I will publish my photos on the internet" and make sure that people notice I'm taking a photo of them. Maybe that would resolve the issue? At least that saves me for asking all 200 people for their permission. On the other hand, they could still refuse to have seen my shirt in front of court. However, they could also doubt that I asked them in person unless I have witness. So, this does not make much difference. Comments and discussion highly appreciated. .. Local Variables: mode: rst fill-column: 79 End: vim: et syn=rst tw=79 Trackbacks ========== Comments ======== - Kore at Sat, 03 May 2008 14:24:15 +0200 Thank you for this summary on this topic. I really like this blog post (and not only, that I am mentioned as a "part of the contemporary history". :-) Sent you the permission for my photos :). - Jonathan Street at Sat, 03 May 2008 16:03:53 +0200 It would seem things are quite different in the UK. From my experience people are more uneasy if you take photos and then don't publish them. I can understand why german law might forbid the publishing of photos taken of someone without their permission but drawings seems strange. How accurate do the drawings need to be? Would a stick figure still count? "One possibility IMO would be, to ask people for a permission while they register for a conference. [. . .] Still you have the problem here that you don't know all people in person and might not be able to decide if someone is on a picture who rejected his permission." You could require their permission as a condition of attendance. That would be a slightly uncomfortable solution though. "One of Kores arguments were that I don't have the permission to publish pictures while a professional journalist has it (in some way)." Personally I think this is totally wrong. Particularly in the tech community I would strongly suspect that amateur bloggers/social media participants publish vastly more photos than 'professional' journalists. I suspect this would stand up both in terms of gross number of photos published and percentage of photos taken. I would also feel a lot happier to have my photo taken by an amateur than a professional journalist. I would feel a lot more confident that it would be used in a way I felt to be appropriate and that I still had some control over it with an amateur. "He stated that you can usually identify a journalist as such" Fair enough if we're contrasting with someone taking a quick snap with a camera phone but isn't one person with an SLR just like any other? "On the other hand, they could still refuse to have seen my shirt in front of court. However, they could also doubt that I asked them in person unless I have witness. So, this does not make much difference." If you took a photo offline as soon as asked by the subject how would it be treated under german law. Would it still go to court? - Toby at Sat, 03 May 2008 16:30:00 +0200 Hi Jonathan! Thanks for your input! I'm not sure, how exact a drawing must be. I think it is enough if someone could potentially recognize the person. At least I heard stories about judgements where people were condemned because there was only part of a (quite normal) tatoo visible on a photo. The person wearing that tatoo was identified by someone else, without being visible completly. I agree with you on the point that in tech communities you must be aware that people who take photos should asume you will put the online. However, you cannot asume that, I guess. At least, in front of court that argument would not count. Requiring permission for photo-publishing would keep quite some people away from conferences, I guess. Geeks are very sensible here regarding their privacy rights, since our government does not take much care about that in the past years... :/ About taking the photo offline: I think there are very few persons that would go to court for such things, if you remove the photo as soon as they notify you. At least, as long it did not produce serious harm to have it published at all. I personally don't care much about others publishing photos of me on conferences. However, many people see it as good style to ask for their permission before publishing any images. After all, its just to secure myself, since people could theoretically punish me for publishing their faces without explicit permission. Regards, Toby - Jonathan Street at Sat, 03 May 2008 17:22:17 +0200 "I agree with you on the point that in tech communities you must be aware that people who take photos should asume you will put the online. However, you cannot asume that, I guess. At least, in front of court that argument would not count." I can't decide whether laws such as these are the last bastions of hope for our privacy and civil liberties or archaic nonsense holding us back from a 'golden age' of openness and equality. I suspect, and hope, that the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I think this is a conversation that is going to continue for many years. - Evert at Sat, 03 May 2008 17:59:07 +0200 Even though the law might say you need explicit permission to publish people's pictures; I think no sensible court will put you behind bars if the 'offended' person will ask you to take the picture down and you do it right away.. If you don't do it after they asked you, you might be in trouble. I also think that law is in place as a tool to fight for example public humiliation. Yes, technically its against the law, but yea.. so is smoking dope. I can't help wondering what sparked this? Just a random discussion about these laws or did someone actually complain? - Kore at Sat, 03 May 2008 18:15:01 +0200 The real problem is a bit different. We all now that everything you put online once - even for a short time span - will be mirrored somewhere. Let it be google, or archive.org. So if you let people upload the image once, you won't be able to remove your image from the "net" anytime in the future. I think this is one reason to really ask people beforehand. - Jonathan Street at Sat, 03 May 2008 19:27:04 +0200 I would suggest you avoid phrases such as, "We all [k]now . . ." Making assumptions about what other people know is, in my opinion, slightly arrogant and doesn't help the discussion. From a technical perspective I'm not even sure the statement is correct. I believe the google archive copy is regularly updated so an archived image would be dropped soon after being removed from a site. As for archive.org and their wayback machine an image would be retained but their crawl is far from complete or timely. The possibility of a random robot picking up the image and storing it somewhere does still exist though the likelihood is very small. How is the term 'publish' defined in german law? Would putting a physical copy of a picture on a noticeboard count? Sending it with a letter? An email? - Edward Finkler at Sat, 03 May 2008 20:01:55 +0200 I don't know that you'll ever take a picture of me, but if you do, I grant you permission to publish it! It's interesting how different German law is from the US. Changes the whole game, as it were. - Toby at Sat, 03 May 2008 20:04:43 +0200 Thanks for your permission, Ed! Would you mind sending this by email and possibly (GPG-) signed? I'm curious, how is this handled in the US, actually? - Manuel Pichler at Sat, 03 May 2008 23:29:28 +0200 With this comment I give you the permission to publish my photos. - Stefan Priebsch at Mon, 05 May 2008 09:49:28 +0200 > How is the term 'publish' defined in german law? As the definition of "publish" probably goes back to times when there was not internet and electronic publishing, the definition would probably be a huge playground for lawyers. Still, I agree that it can be hard to "remove" stuff from the internet. This should not be a problem for that one or two odd photos of somebody who's not really famous, or not famous at all, like me. [preachment] Perhaps it's just a reminder to ourselves that we should generally behave a little decent when in public? [/preachment] As for Toby's decision to remove the photos, I think, above all, he did a great job in getting a discussion started. As I personally know that he would not post any really annoying pictures of mine (not that there are any ... hopefully), or I could just email him asking to please remove that one or two pictures, I have absolutely no problem in granting him permission to publish pictures of mine, as I previously did by a GPG-signed email. Stefan - Edward Finkler at Mon, 05 May 2008 23:42:12 +0200 I'm not a super-expert, but my understanding is that in the US, the photographer owns all rights to the photo in almost any case. You can take a picture of nearly anything and anyone so long as you were not trespassing while doing so. Those present in the photograph do not have any rights (again, for the most part) to block publication or use of the photo. (this does vary from state to state, and also varies a great deal depending on how the image is used. You might want to look at http://www.danheller.com/model-release.html) An example you might have heard of is Google Street View, which gives street-level imagery for certain locations in the US on Google Maps. Some people expressed concerns about seeing themselves in photos, or having photos show the insides of their homes through a window, but Google is well within their legal rights to use those images as they see fit. It's a bit odd that photography is like this in the US, but other mediums like video are not. I think they are considered more "invasive" and right to privacy is more strictly enforced, even in public areas. - Geoff Birrell at Tue, 04 Sep 2012 17:19:22 +0200 " Removed 1100 photos from Flickr " I exactly could not understand why did you take this decision, but it all yours, you must be right at your place. Have fun in your life, God bless you! Regards Geoff Birrell