Okay! Now we're getting somewhere. Regarding Couleur's situation, a professional photographer with business interests to protect might already have registered a copyright on a very similar image of the Petronus Twin Towers.
If Couleur were to also try to register his copyright, the copyright might not be accepted because it is too similar to one already copyrighted. Presumably there are employees in the copyright office who are making some sort of artistic judgement on such issues. Didn't know this sort of thing happened. Seems a very expensive process to me.
I take it that Howard is
not saying that anyone who takes a photo and tries to profit from it is putting himself/herself at risk of being sued because it is coincidentally very similar to one which has been registered in the copyrights office.
Are there any precedents for such a situation where a photographer has innocently taken a shot of a well known public attraction, the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, the Eiffel Tower etc, and subsequently been taken to court by another photographer on the grounds that the other photographer took a very similar, almost identical shot from the same position and angle first?
Seems a bit farcical to me.
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]AFAIK the LOC does not check images against one another. Visit the links and read. There are a lot of interesting cases of infringment, and rather than making up all these hypotheticals, read about some of the real cases and how and why they were resolved. There have been many cases where similar images have been litigated. Here's a recent story. [a href=\"http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/newswire/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003581213]http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/newswire/arti...t_id=1003581213[/url] If this ad was created in the US there would be a compelling case for infringment.
