After the Cologne Regional Court backtracked last week in the RedTube scandal and should never have authorized the release of the controversial IP addresses, it has now delivered another highly controversial and questionable ruling with decision 14 O 427/13: The author of stock photos from a specific image agency must also be named when his images are accessed directly via their URL.
The said judgment in the first instance concerns the Pixelio image database. Specifically, a photographer who sells his pictures on the platform free of charge obtained an injunction against a blogger. During the hearing, the plaintiff also stated how the direct access to the image could have been prevented without naming the author. With the help of jQuery it is possible to prevent right-clicks on images:
$(function() {
$('img').each(function() {
$(this).bind("contextmenu", function(e) {
e.preventDefault();
});
});
});
Such scripts can be easily circumvented and are therefore useless and ineffective. Embedding the source information directly in the image file is also problematic, as the image then no longer corresponds to its originally published state, and this approach is aesthetically unacceptable. Millions of such images are freely accessible and easily obtainable via Google image search.
If this legal ruling is shared by other courts and is common practice for the correct use of stock photography under licensing law, this has enormous effects on the use of image (and video) material by photo agencies - the required mention of the copyright notice is in practice hardly feasible.