A copy is a copy and a copyright breach

A COPY of a photograph is a copy, regardless of how it's made. A court in Luxembourg confirmed this in May, ruling that Luxembourgeois painter Jeff Dieschburg had breached the copyright of US photographer Jingna Zhang. He had reproduced a photo of hers in paint, flipped left-to-right. She Tweeted: “Using a different medium was irrelevant. My work being ‘available online’ was irrelevant. Consent was necessary.”

Jeff Dieschburg’s painting, left, of Jingna Zhang’s photo, right

Image © Jingna Zhang

Zhang won on appeal against the ruling of a lower court on 7 December 2022 that there was “insufficient originality” in the photo. She then wrote that the basis of the district court ruling was that "the model’s pose in my photo is not unique... If having a unique pose is the premise for copyright protection of an image, then nearly all portrait works in the world will not have copyright protection."

The Freelance still thinks that the most entertaining example of the appeal court's doctrine is that of the NUJ member who in 2002 won compensation after a reconstruction of damage done by the 1995 Kobe earthquake appeared in the Natural History Museum. The court ruled that the display, labelled "Mixed media: marine plywood, oils, 4-inch RSJs and a wrecked car" was a copy of his photo.

Jingna Zhang has also now joined three others in suing Google over using their work in training “AI”:

© Mike Holderness