Posts Tagged: "photo"

U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York recently entered an opinion and order in a copyright case involving the famed “Last Sitting” photographs of American movie star Marilyn Monroe. Although the case will continue to proceed towards a trial, Judge Engelmayer resolved various issues in the case including a determination that the owner of the copyrights to the Last Sitting photographs is the trust of the now-deceased photographer who took the photos and not Condé Nast, the publisher of the magazine Vogue where the photographs first appeared in 1962.

On November 20th, both Peter Gene Hernandez, the American singer-songwriter-producer who goes by the professional name Bruno Mars, and New York City-based Warner Music Inc. were named as defendants in a copyright case filed in the Southern District of New York by Burbank, CA-based photographer Catherine McGann. The lawsuit targets Mars’ social media use of a photograph of himself taken by McGann when Mars was performing as an Elvis impersonator as a child.

A complaint was filed in the Northern District of California on behalf of Naruto, at the time a six-year-old crested macaque residing in the Tangkoko Reserve located on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi… The plaintiffs argued that Naruto is the author of the monkey selfie and has the right to own and benefit from the copyright to that photo. “Had the Monkey Selfies been made by a human using Slater’s unattended camera, that human would be declared the photographs’ author and copyright owner,” the complaint reads. Although the plaintiffs acknowledge that claims of authorship by members of species other than homo sapiens are novel, they argue that 17 U.S.C. § 101 defines authorship broadly enough that Naruto should be afforded a claim of copyright ownership.