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Bella Hadid sued for posting a photo of herself without permission. Again

Model Bella Hadid recently posted a photo of herself on Instagram without asking for the photographer’s permission. And now, she’s facing a copyright infringement lawsuit. If all of this sounds as if you’re having a déjà vu – well, you almost are. The model was already sued over the same thing before.

The agency behind the photo seeks an injunction against Hadid’s further use of the image, but also damages for using the image in the first place. And if she loses, she will be able to pay at least $150,000 in damages.

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Photographer sues Paris Hilton for editing and posting photos without permission

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Welcome to another edition of Entitled Celebrity Gets Sued! This time it’s Paris Hilton’s turn. Photographer Claudia Fiorella Occhipinti filed a lawsuit against Hilton for editing her photographs and posting them on Instagram without permission.

Occhipinti had taken the images for a specific ad campaign with Hilton for her Electricity Perfume line. The photographer claimed that her images of Hilton could only be used by Hilton to promote her perfume “in media, on packaging, or in advertising, and that no sub-licensing is allowed.”

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Popular AI app Lensa opens the door to nonconsensual nudes of both children and adults

If you’ve scrolled through any social media feed recently, you’ve probably seen at least 32 AI-generated portraits that look like cartoonish versions of your friends. It’s all because of Lensa, an AI portrait app that surged in popularity almost overnight. And while it’s all fun and games on the outside, the hyped app has a dark side that we’re slowly beginning to discover.

As some users have noticed, Lensa seems to be inherently misogynic and makes women’s portraits overly sexualized, even when they’re created from just photos of a face. But it gets worse. It appears to be easy to trick the app into generating NSFW content. This leads to realistic, nonconsensual nudes of pretty much anyone, including both adults and children.

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Photographer loses case as Luxembourg court rules “not copyright infringement”

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Photographer Jingna Zhang has lost her case accusing artist Jeff Dieschburg of copyright infringement. The Luxembourg courts ruled on December 7th that the artist was not infringing on Zhang’s work due to “insufficient originality in the photo”.

Jingna Zhang has responded to the ruling, saying that she is “devastated by the copyright ruling in Luxembourg today, which stated that my work lacks originality and therefore will not receive copyright protection in Luxembourg.”

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Artist sues Cardi B and her photographer for copying his Marge Simpson illustration

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Rapper Cardi B recently got herself in legal trouble that broke the internet. On Halloween, she published photos of herself dressed like Marge Simpson in an iconic Thierry Mugler dress.  But as it turned out, the photo was inspired by work from another artist. And no, it’s not (just) Matt Groening.

The artist is now filing a lawsuit against both Cardi B and her photographer, and the whole case has reached the level of ridiculousness when it just becomes amazing.

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Photography Copycats – The fine line between inspiration and ripping off others

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This is a tricky article to write. I’m writing it because of observations I’ve made within the photography community, so here goes.

As photographers, we all know that copying other photos and reverse engineering them is part and parcel of our learning experience. We’ve all been on more or less the same journey, impressing ourselves with what we now know to be rather cliché shots that, at the time, we thought were amazing. I’m talking about selective colour, Dutch tilt, and all the stuff that we learn from and leave behind as we find our own photographic voice. There are some examples around of more extreme learning where photographers are literally cloning the work of others in a copycat fashion, and that’s what I want to try and pick apart today.

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Getty bans AI-generated art due to potential copyright issues

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Getty Images, one of the biggest stock image platforms, has banned AI-generated images. If you want to upload and sell work you created through DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, or any other text-to-image tool, you won’t be able to do it there.

The reason? Potential copyright issues. Getty is concerned about the legality of such content, so they want to protect the site’s customers from unwanted copyright claims.

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UK proposes new data law that could have serious copyright implications for photographers

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The Association of Photographers (AOP) have raised their concerns over a new exception to the UK’s data mining law which could have significant consequences for photographers. The new exemption proposes to freely allow the machine mining of all imagery published online for any use by anyone, including AI developers. It would cover both copyright works and those protected by the UK Database Right.

Currently, the Text and Data Mining (TDM) exception to copyright protection permits non-commercial purpose machine analysis of online content, provided that there is lawful access (such as a subscription). It is also limited to prevent the resale or reuse for other purposes and must be accompanied by acknowledgement of the source.

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Nikon denies RED’s infringement accusations, ready to prove it in court

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Earlier this year, RED filed a lawsuit against Nikon blaming them for illegally copying their video compression patent. Nikon announced the new version 2.0 firmware for the Nikon Z9, and RED claimed that Nikon illegally infringed on seven patents that deal with “a video camera that can be configured to highly compress video data in a visually lossless manner.”

However, Nikon isn’t ready to give in without a fight. The company recently answered to RED’s accusations, claiming that they deny every allegation of the infringement. And from Nikon’s statement, it appears that they’re ready to prove their claims in court and challenge RED’s lawsuit.

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Photographer loses contest prize after another artist claims he’d taken the photo

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Photographer Clancy Gebler Davies won the British Journal of Photography (BJP) Female in Focus Award last year. However, her winning sparked some controversy after another photographer accused her of, well, basically stealing the photo. He claimed that it was he who actually took the shot, and it resulted in the winning image being withdrawn from the Awards completely.

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