Reality of copyright enforcement internationally

[wreeder]

Here is a link to a video I came across that shows the reality of what it takes to enforce your copyright in another country. Tony & Chelsea Northup are American professional photographers and authors of their own series of books on photography. In this case, an Australian company hired a graphic artist to design a graphic that was printed on the back of an iPhone case that the company sold in Australia. The problem is the graphic consisted mostly of a photograph that Tony and Chelsea had created and used for the cover of one of their books. They never gave permission for the photo to be used on the iPhone case. The video shows what they had to do to resolve the issue.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUEbi4r8Pg0

William

 

[JCitron]

Very interesting video.

My brother's company sued someone for theft of artwork and non-payment for services. The ex-client ended up paying treble-damages for the copyright violation plus the labor for the artwork.

 

[pware]

They ended up getting about $US7,500 after lawyers and middlemen (intermediaries needed to negotiate the different legal systems) took their "cuts" from a $US35,000 (approx) settlement, and that was for a product that had commercial value in both countries.

But what if the product had no commercial value in the country where the copyright infringement had taken place? You could probably ask for damages but what if the copyright violator had little or no money, such as a "hobbyist"? For example, a 14 year old who copied your commercial artwork to reskin a Trainz boxcar uploaded to the DLS or who copied your DLS assets and released them under their kuid without permission.

A lot of "what ifs" but as the two presenters in the video pointed out, in most cases the best you can hope for is to have the offending work removed from the web site where it was illegally distributed. Once the lawyers get involved, nobody wins, except of course the lawyers.