The Federation Council decided to liquidate profit from “borrowed” photos on the Internet: judicial absurdity

Senators have decided to eliminate the popular scheme of profit from photographs on the Internet. The cunning algorithm was adopted by lawyers. On behalf of the authors of the photographs, they go to court and collect substantial amounts from everyone who published the image on their page. Large media and scientific institutions are at risk, and the courts are inundated with lawsuits from representatives of photographers. Lawmakers considered this format of copyright protection not a fight against piracy, but abuse and a way to get rich quickly.

Getting an exorbitant fee for an ordinary shot taken on the run with the camera of an ordinary smartphone is, it turns out, not the dreams of homegrown bloggers, but reality. True, the money will have to go to court. But the scheme has already been put on stream and brings the plaintiffs from tens to hundreds of thousands of rubles for each claim.

It works like this: the photographer enters into a trust management agreement with the law firm and gives it at the mercy of taking care of all his pictures that are circulating on the Internet. Further, the company floods with claims everyone who posted the image on their website. Most often, media editorial offices, scientific organizations and universities that post a lot of publications and actively illustrate them are under attack. The claim contains an angry demand not only to remove the photo from the page, but to pay compensation to the author. Then the lawyers go to court, where they demand gigantic compensation.

As the senators affected by the scheme told, the bill most often goes to hundreds of thousands of rubles, but sometimes the amount of claims reaches up to five million – this is the maximum under the law for copyright infringement.

So, for example, St. Petersburg Mining University almost lost 100 thousand rubles for an innocent photo of a sand pit posted on the university’s website. In court, however, the demands of the representatives of the author of the photograph were reduced to 37.5 thousand rubles.

According to the President of the Federation of Intellectual Property Sergey Matveev, even the Ministry of Construction of the Russian Federation became a victim of the defenders of the rights of photographers:

– The Ministry of Construction posted a photo of a sewer manhole on its website. They took the picture from the Internet. Then it turned out that the author of the photo was a young girl who likes to shoot hatches. As a result, she turned to the Ministry of Construction with a claim for violation of her copyright, and they were forced to pay her compensation, something on the order of 20 thousand rubles.

Russian courts were inundated with lawsuits from law firms representing the interests of photographers. As was announced within the walls of the Federation Council Committee on Science, Education and Culture, the Eighth Commandment alone initiated 1,412 cases in courts to recover compensation for the illegal use of photos. More than 700 lawsuits from a similar company called “Landscape” and 451 from the company “Anti-piracy technologies”.

It is curious that even the originals – the so-called raw images that the photographer receives immediately at the time of shooting before processing the frame on the computer – the courts prefer not to demand from the plaintiffs. It is enough to bring to the court a paper from a notary, in which he writes that he examined the picture and confirms the authorship of the plaintiff photographer.

As experts complain, with the help of such an algorithm, the “authors” of popular Internet photos often become people who have nothing to do with the shooting process. Moreover, it is most often impossible to prove the fact of forgery: the courts refuse to appoint examinations of the authenticity of the photo.

Meanwhile, even a schoolboy can fake a digital picture. To do this, you just need to download the desired file with the image, change the date and place of shooting in the “properties” section and take the converted file to the notary. If the judge gets caustic and still demands to show the source, you can always refer to the fact that the picture was taken on an old smartphone and was lost a long time ago. After all, the law does not oblige authors to store such files. That is, the field for manipulation here is boundless, which law firms actively use.

– It often happens that the media takes a photo in social networks, asks permission from the person on whose page it is posted, receives such permission and publishes the photo in the publication. And then a “photographer” appears with a protocol from a notary and demands huge compensation from the editorial office, – said Matveev.

Moreover, often lawyers artificially increase the amount of compensation, demanding a fine for the same picture if it is placed on several pages of the same media at once.

The senators proposed several options for liquidating the scheme. The first is to amend the Civil Code.

– It would be possible to reduce the size of the fine from 5 million rubles to 10 thousand. In this case, it will simply become unprofitable to file such claims, ”said Dmitry Vasilenko, First Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Science, Education and Culture.

In addition, in the law, the senators proposed to distinguish between which pictures can be freely published and reposted, and which cannot. It is proposed to include any situational photographs in the first category. For example, an image of a fire, an explosion, an accident, and any event that can be filmed by several people at the same time. Such photos may be subject to free access without special legal protection. The second category is proposed to include pictures that are the product of the author’s creative work. For example, the photographer caught a good angle and shot a yawning hippopotamus or the tail of a flying comet. Such personnel should be subject to special protection.

Another solution to the problem is to allow all media, universities and other organizations at risk that publish a lot of pictures and do not always care about their authorship, to retroactively register ownership of all visual content posted on their Internet resources.