This looks like a trojan horse to allow Getty to gain a wide foothold around the web in a way they can control. There is nothing to stop them — in fact it's in their TOS — from adding ads to the iframe at some point. They will then be in a position of monetizing their images in a different way than licensing them, which mean they probably will not need to share revenue with the photographers.

Getty is currently owned by the Carlyle Group, which makes me wonder if this is part of a grand strategy to break the company up into sellable pieces. Having a segment with a internet-friendly, sharing, youtube-esque, business model and no existing liability to contributors is probably pretty attractive to them.

But my guess—nobody wants their nasty embedded frame on their site and this will be a dud.

In the entire history of the universe we have seen one example of life forming. It boggles the mind that from this one sample scientists think they know when, how, and where life can and can't form in the universe.

Thanks ak_hepcat.

Mrs. Grundy (a.k.a. @markmeyerphoto)

Kathy, I am a photographer and I am very familiar with copyright. I have also done a lot of work under federal contracts so I'm familiar with copyright in that context as well.

Your post has a headline, "White House Makes Full Copyright Claim on Photos." This is very simply untrue. Think of the ways people assert copyright: using the © copyright symbol, registering works with the copyright office, filing an infringement suit, etc.. I don't mean to say you need to do this to have a copyright, but to say that the White House is making a claim to copyright without doing any of the things we normally do to claim copyright things is misleading at best.

Claiming that works like the ones on Flickr cannot be used for commercial purposes is not claiming a right, but rather stating a fact. The statement is unnecessary, but it seems the White House decided it would be a good idea to remind people of the facts in light of recent events.

The only part that is a little baffling is the statement that the images may not be modified. It's also strange that this is not on the http://www.flickr.com/people/whitehouse page but only under individual images. I'm not sure what they are basing this on, but is certainly does not constitute a "Full Copyright Claim." It seems that the headline and article is written, not to illuminate or inform, but rather to garner attention and be provocative regardless of the facts.

If you look at the actual statement on their Flickr page (http://www.flickr.com/people/whitehouse/) you will see that they aren't making a copyright claim. They state why the photos have been uploaded (for news purposes—purposely vague I imagine) and then go on to indicate that certain uses are prohibited—basically commercial use. There are more reasons that copyright to prohibit commercial use. Appropriating a person's likeness for advertising, promotion, etc. for example is not a copyright issue, but instead comes from privacy torts. There is no reason to believe that if the White House wanted to go after someone for using an image inappropriately that they would use copyright infringement as the basis for their case. The original article misread the language and assumed the White House was claiming copyright ownership.

It's a real shame that email encryption never really hit the mainstream.

There is a story about the famous conductor George Szell, who once while conducting looked down at one of the cellists and said, "Madame, God has seen fit to put that beautiful instrument between your legs and all you can do is scratch it."

I feel a little like this when I see Windows booting up on a Mac. If the question is, 'who's to blame,' the answer is users who run Windows on a Mac and corporate goons who can't or won't figure out how to allow OS X to work within their infrastructure.

Not at all--it is GCI. More importantly, the reason I am still with them is that I, like many, many people, live in a market with no serious competition. That is the real problem.

To be fair, their service, other that this REALLY annoying DNS business has been decent.