With thanks to the Wall Street Journal Law blog; It seems that the courts are getting set to further define if or when copyright can apply to ideas. In this case, a NYC Theater (pronounced Thee-aht-ter) director has gone at odds with a playwright and production company, claiming that his directorial staging constitutes a copyrightable element, for which he claims he is now owed over 3 Million Dollars for infringing performances.We all know the that ideas cannot be copyrighted. The basic premise throughout copyright law that a performance of a work must be fixed in some tangible form. This is a nobrainer when you look at a script for a play, namely words on a page = fixed. But how about the directorial choices that are made when bringing words on a page into an intangible form like a stage presentation. Those familiar will recall the copyright caveat, “Mere performance or display of a work does not automatically constitute publication”. But what about blocking instructions which are the movement instructions given to actors?

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This has been one of the busiest weeks I’ve had in awhile. It started on Monday morning at 9:00am, and ended Friday at 4:45PM. Eewww, it sounds like I have a real job! But this ‘fun’ just didn’t stop at 5:oopm when the whistle blew.

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Early this week, the stock photography blog, StockPhotoTalk posted an announcement regarding famed celebrity photographer Micahel Grecco taking on Gawker Media in a copyright infringement lawsuit. This looks like one of those precedent setting cases that takes on the idea of fair use and hotlinking of images by many blogs and blogger networks. Mr. Grecco’s attorney, Ed Greenberg writes of the suit:

… alleges that Gawker Media makes a practice of harvesting images from third parties and utilizing them without attribution or payment. The suit claims that Gawker Media makes daily use of images created by third parties without having obtained licenses to use such images.

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Photo: Yosemite Falls in Winter as seen from Yosemite Valley, California

Taken years ago, this image is a classic valley icon view. There are few things as brisk as being up before sunrise in winter, cruising around Yosemite Valley in search of good photos. Due to the high granite cliffs that wall in the valley floor, cold air sinks on clear evenings and becomes trapped with no place to escape. The result of this is that the valley holds an exceptional bone chilling cold air temperature. It’s guarenteed to wake you up and make you take notice of all your senses.

See more of my Yosemite Photos on my web site.
You can also order photographic prints or use in publications.

Thanks for looking, and comments are always welcome.

I’ve posted the following reply over at Problogger.net after seeing a recent series of posts making the blog rounds for a list of places where people can get free photos. For obvious reasons, I’m not going to bother reposting the list.

“… From the sites that I’ve seen from these lists, 85% or more of the images on the free sites are just plain bad pictures. Bad lighting, bad composition, flat, boring, and plain old Forgetable was the impression most of these photos left me with. Based on that, I wonder how business blogs and websites would spend so much time, energy, and resources building a professional web presence, and then be so attracted to decorating their site with bad photos – just because they’re free. It’s like asking if anyone would take Darren and Problogger seriously if it was decked out with cheesy neon icon bells & whistles, and adds with big dancing rainbows and bird chirping sounds. The long and short is that image counts, and unprofessional and thouroughly forgettable photos make a business site look the same; unprofessional and forgettable. Agree or disagree?”

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I just can’t understand how some people think they should be in business or call themselves a professional stock photographer. For example, on one of my stock photography agency forums, it was brought to our attention that there are cases where some members can’t decide whether to sell the same image as RF or RM / (L), so instead of picking one, they choose both. That is just, like, so lame. I mean like, fer shur – gag me with a pitch fork!

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This picture of Eagle Falls at sunrise in winter above Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe, California is sometimes a bit harder to get to than others.

See more Lake Tahoe Area photos on our main web site.

When the snow really starts building up, CalTrans closes the section of Highway 89 that goes along the sides of Emerald Bay. This particular year, there was a very long period of no new snow, so the road was re-opened, allowing me to get up well before sunrise to get this shot.

Tip: When photographing outdoors in cold weather, be careful to keep from getting condensation. If you bring your very cold camera gear inside, and it warms too quickly, you can have drops of water condense out of the air inside the camera or between the glass elements of your lens. These little drops of water can either cause soft images in the lens, or render the camera useless if the moisture gets into the circuits.

Anybody that tells you that Laws are Black & White have their heads in the sand. Laws are based and decided upon the interpretation of words. It’s that interpretation that makes the area of deciding on what the Law means very grey. A classic example of this is laid out in a great article at the DigitalJournalist. Written by Mickey H. Osterreicher, Esq. and Donald Winslow reporting, they highlight the back and forth appeals and reversals that have plagued the opposing parties in a pair of lawsuits against the National Geographic Society for copyright infringement.

The article starts by pointing out that:

(The US Supreme Court) ….”let stand a lower court ruling in one of the cases holding that current copyright law permits a publisher to create revisions of existing works and/or to reproduce a collective work in a new format…”

Damn Interesting has an excellent profile of German theoretical physicist Burkhard Heim, and his theory that by adding extra dimensions to space, electromagnetic energy can be converted into gravity, thereby warping space enough to potentially allow a spaceship to travel, well – pretty darn fast.

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Time Magazine has put out a collection of 24 images they call the Best Photos of the Year 2005. I must admit there are some graphic images, but I was hoping to see a lot more pictures. A good collection of 100 Photos would have been nice, but to have only 24 images seems, to use a media term, too sound-bitish. They are all very straightforward photojournalism images. At the end of the flash presentation, they ask you to select your favorite. I wonder if I’ve become jaded, as not too many of images that really grabbed and pulled me in. or yanked any kind of emotional chain, the way images of the Tsunami or 911 did. But what I miss most are the powerful and evocotive images of the small and the ordinary made extrodinary.

As a postscript, how come happy images so rarely make the news?