You are clearly confusing a legal requirement with a good practice. It's absolutely a good idea to get a model release and I'm not trying to suggest otherwise. However it's mostly required for editorial and advertising photography because the potential lawsuit risks are so high (and typically people doing advertising have the dollars to be forced into big payouts).

Go read up on Arne Svenson - he shot artistic photos of his neighbors through their open windows. A lawsuit against him was dismissed last year and the judge said ”An artist may create and sell a work of art that resembles an individual without his or her written consent".

The Svenson case is even more egregious because it covers photographs taken without any consent (written or otherwise). I see why it's an obvious target but I don't think changing the rights of photographers and other artists is an appropriate response to this.

Generally no. You can indeed take artistic pictures and hang them in a gallery, for sale, without a release.

It's certainly prudent to have a release and I wouldn't consider shooting someone without one, but you don't NEED one unless the image will be used for advertising or promotion.

They can indeed sell them to stock agencies without a release, Shutterstock accepts images under an editorial license which aren't subject to the same rules as their commercial license.

Photographers who also publish images need releases to protect themselves, but there is a distinction between making an image available for sale (even via a website), which is not considered publication in a form that would require a release, and the use of the same image to promote a product or service in a way that would require a release. Whether or not publishing a photo via the internet requires a release is currently[when?] being debated in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. It is likely that any and all exposure to the public of unreleased photos via any vehicle will constitute civil liability for the photographer.

It's clear that you (as the photographer) can't license the image for use in advertising without a model release, but for anything considered artistic the rules are much more vague. Now I'm not sure exactly where I'd class revenge porn sites, but art is a broad term.

Generally a model release is not required for artistic work or for anything that could be considered "newsworthy". It's good practice to get one to cover your ass but unless it's being used in something like advertising then it's not required (in the US)

The problem is that generally, in the absence of any other agreement, the photographer owns the copyright to the image and can give that image to whatever site he or she chooses. In certain situations they might not be able to accept payment for it, but exhibiting their work is really their right.

If you are letting a partner take images of you then you are, without any further agreement, letting them do what they choose with that image.

Within current law, the only reasonable way to solve that is to have a contractual agreement in place first that allows you to recoup civil damages from the other party if they use the image in a way that you don't expressly consent to.

Except on cases where the vengeful partner took the pictures and also owns the copyright

We tried for years to get time warner to deliver cable to our offices in a small town. They gave us installation quotes around $20k, but then when we tried to actually follow through with that, they didn't seem interested.

In the end, the holy grail was to offer them our telephone service. I don't recall exactly how we started that conversation but they examined what we were paying centurytel for a 23-line voice t1 and offered to undercut them, and since it was a new install, they ended up running fiber instead of copper. With a three year commitment to around $700/month in business phone service, they did the install (about 2000' if i recall correctly) at no charge. Once that was negotiated I said that sounded great, but could they run coax too so we could sign up for their business grade cable internet - and it wasn't a problem.

So i suppose if anyone in your subidivision runs a business, you might be able to use that as the carrot.

I find dhl to be the most inconsistent.

They left a $2k laptop on the doorstep
But required a signature for a replacement battery from the same supplier for the same laptop
They left $1500 in cash in a Travelex Currency Services envelope sitting in plain view
The required a signature for a cellphone case.

I don't think you are right, open source projects virtually never provide services for any kind of fee.

What you often find are that companies who develop open source projects provide services for a fee. However if they were trying to give money to one of those companies then surely they'd just sign up for enterprise support and never use it.

The real issue is that most open source projects aren't under the property of any corporation or foundation. The majority of projects are a solo or small group of developers that work together. Asking a random group of developers "Hey, can you guys form a corporation and invoice us for some service and we'll give you $5k" just isn't appealing. In parts of europe it'd cost more than that just to establish the corporation and set up a bank account that can take a US Dollar remittance.

The other issue is that the project has to find something to do with the money otherwise it's taxable for them. Most open source projects have few real expenses, source code hosting is effectively free, most hardware was probably not bought specifically for the project, and most of the development tools are free as well. If they are just going to pay it out to developers then they need to find some equitable way to split that up, and few projects are started with that in mind.

The easier approach would be to write to key developers on the projects, request a trivial feature and offer to pay them as consultants to develop and open source the feature for you. More developers are familiar with that model and it removes the problem of having to deal with the "project" as a whole and the fact that it's likely not any kind of tax entity.

Yeah I was pretty shocked in France to order my "bifteck bien cuit" and still have blood pour into my frites when i cut into it.

Now I've grown up I really want to go back :)

Bullshit. TMobile upgraded my TMo Dash (HTC Excalibur) to Windows Mobile 6 before the iPhone even came out.

The difficult place I lived had 4 discrete tax rates depending on where in the zip code you were.

If the government publishes a list by zip code and manages a central escrow account so I don't have to piss around sending checks to every county then that'd satisfy me.

Have you actually done that?

There's nothing particularly trivial about it. Even if software calculates the number this means that each small business will have to remit payments at least quarterly to 50 different authorities. That's a major pain in the ass. Even if it takes less than an hour per state, that's someone's full time job for a month of the year.

The consider that some states tax shipping, most don't, and I believe some states even tax free shipping at the actual value. NY doesn't tax clothing under $100. Georgia doesn't tax energy efficient products between Oct 5th and 7th. All kinds of states have exemptions for school supplies, but I'd bet they don't consider the same set of items as "school supplies".

Plus if this goes ahead, then county sales tax will surely be fast on its heels. That get's into extra special levels of stupidity - in the town I used to live in, you only had to pay for the transit district if the land your house is on was annexed by the city after 1992. Even ordering stuff from the national retailers online, most of them just gave up and asked me which tax rate applied to me.

Don't get me wrong, i have no issue with sales tax as such, but it needs to be simple or it'll really hurt small online retailers (I suspect it'll actually be a win for Amazon). I'd rather see something like a flat 5% or 8% that your remit to the federal government and they do the work of dividing it up.

I can't see why it wouldn't work. The extruder just appears to be melting the pellets and shaping them as filament, then the filament is melted in a 3d printer to make an object, I can't see why you couldn't repeat unless there's some chemical in the ABS that becomes weaker with each melt and set cycle.