The Trump campaign may have violated United State copyright law by selling merchandise featuring the former president’s mugshot, legal experts have warned.
The Trump campaign may have violated United State copyright law by selling merchandise featuring the former president’s mugshot, legal experts have warned.
Federal government works generally aren’t domestically copyrightable. They are considered to be in the public domain within the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States
ETA: I will add that that USA has some of the best protections for Fair Use. But Fair Use definitely doesn’t extend to selling it at that scale.
These are the tests for Fair Use:
This isn’t federal, though. This is state.
Yes exactly. It isn’t in the public domain, and so is still protected by copyright, and arguably fails the test for Fair Use. But OP’s earlier comment suggested they were not aware that federal works sit in the public domain.
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The law is a federal law though.
It is a federal law that only applies to federal works. This is a state case with a state mugshot that is a state work.
This isn’t accurate as there is no such thing as a federal work or state work nor is there any actual court case. The law covers the whole country and it’s explained in the first sentence of the article:
US Copyright law is a federal law about how copyrights are protected, but the posted regulation is about what federal work is copyrighted and NOT applicable to how state work is copyrighted. It even says it right there in the title: “Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States.” The jail photographer is not an employee of the federal government, nor is the trial an activity of the federal government. This photo was not a work by the federal government.
Woops I didn’t realize you were referring to the upper level comment and not the main post. My apologies!
No worries. The big issue is how does Georgia law apply to photographs taken by a state employee as part of the stated job functions for their official job. It’s one thing for an employee to take a photo while on the job, but when their specific job is to take an official photo then I think it would be ridiculous for that person to own the copyright and it not be public property (like NASA images). Should DMV employees own the copyright to license photos?
I’m not a lawyer but my layman’s opinion is that the state should retain ownership over the photo. To give an example, where I live a company began scraping mugshot photos and then compiling them into a newspaper that they distributed and sold for profit. It became really popular but it also drew a lot of negative attention since this company was earning money by spreading photos and arrest records of people that hadn’t even been convicted of a crime. The solution here was to just stop posting mugshots online, which was effective, but didn’t address ownership of the photos at all.
This isn’t exactly a 1:1 comparison since Trump was the subject of the photo and also the one selling merch, but I think there’s a valid argument against allowing people to privately sell products based off work/production funded by the public.