Fan Picture Galleries and Reasonable Use

There is no provision for “reasonable use” under intellectual property rights law. We have “fair use” but that is a highly debated or contested area. Ever since personal Websites began making appearances on the Internet there has been a constant struggle between fans of science fiction and fantasy TV shows and the film and TV studios over use of pictures and film clips. That problem only became exacerbated when the news media came online and started publishing their pictures of entertainers and newsmakers.

You can find hundreds, sometimes thousands of Websites using pictures of actors without authorization. It is virtually impossible to find proper attribution for these images. Just because they are on the Web doesn’t mean they are in the public domain. And yet even in the Xenite.Org network we sometimes reuse these pictures. My rule of thumb has been that if I can provide reasonable attribution I should. In most cases I will crop or reduce the pictures in size so that I at least do not compete with the original providers.

But when you are just picking from random images on the Web, finding proper attribution and good quality images is not easy. Most fans don’t say where they got the pictures. In some cases, if the images come from scans of a magazine layout, say, you can make a good guess at whom to attribute pictures to. I tried to do that in Xenite’s Grace Park Pictures gallery, which is a shadow of the former section on Grace Park that Xenite used to publish. The images seemed to have survived the test of time better than the interview excerpts we had published there.

For some time I have wanted to update and improve Xenite’s Harry Potter Website but that takes far more work than I have time for. So I finally compromised and added an Emma Watson Pictures gallery that focused on some of her more stylish and elegant pictures as a theme. There I have tried to provide some attribution but tracking down all the sources is virtually impossible in the time I had to devote to this project.

As you can see from this Emma Watson picture in 2010 not everything the media publishes makes Emma look elegant (although I think that’s a pretty nice picture in itself). It sometimes feel safe to use publicity stills from the movie press kits, as those are often distributed to dozens of media sites and picked up by fan sites everywhere. But too many of those images are doctored by the fans (I think the fan creativity is a good thing but it makes it hard to be creative when you cannot find the originals).

One can only hope that both Emma Watson and her photographers appreciate the fans’ enthusiasm for their work. It will be a long time before we get all these issues sorted out. Current attempts to oppose anti-Internet piracy legislation are misguided and being supported by lies and deceptive marketing practices. There is big money at stake and most people don’t realize that the money has little to do with who owns the rights to the pictures, songs, and movies that are being redistributed without authorization.

At some point I would like to see a “Reasonable Use” compromise, one that calls for full and proper attribution, but we need better mechanisms to help intellectual property rights owners manage their rights than the disastrous Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That law was written primarily for the benefit of Internet Service Providers, and it places an unnecessarily huge burden of work on the shoulders of the IPR owners. The DMCA has, in fact, forced copyright owners to fall back on a sort of de facto “reasonable use” policy, but it’s unwritten and poorly understood and heavily abused.

Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the Emma Watson pictures.