Who is the owner of an edit?

[lyonsroar]

I'm just curious on a point.

Lets say I work for a company and we had a staff gathering on paid time. We decided we wanted a group picture of everyone together. A staff member (not myself) takes a picture of the group and posts it to the companies FlickR page. I (staff member) notice that the sky is blown out so I decide to replace it with one of the skies from my photo stock. I also do some basic global editing (curves, etc) and some content aware fill of power lines, etc. I replace the sky and do the editing on my own time, took about an hour. So now we have a composite image 1/2 mine and 1/2 the company's. I emailed the person who took the original picture at the staff event my edit and they liked it and said they would use it for promotional materials, etc.

My question:
Who is the owner of the composite picture now? :er:

**I don't ask because I want royalties or anything, just curious...**

 

[Kerbouchard]

The original photographer is the owner of the image. Your creation would be an 'unauthorized derivative work' and is, in most cases, a copyright violation if done without permission.

 

[c.cloudwalker]

You may own the part of the final image that is yours originally but you don't own the edit. To own the edit you would need to own the original photo.

And in this case, considering nobody asked you to do anything, if this were to go to court, you would probably lose.


This is a very interesting question in this day of digital photography. Changing an image around by PSing it does not make you the owner of it. If you had been asked to contribute part of an image of yours to this composite, you could claim dual ownership but this was not the case here.

 

[lyonsroar]

The original photographer is the owner of the image. Your creation would be an 'unauthorized derivative work' and is, in most cases, a copyright violation if done without permission.

HAhaha. Dare them to take me to court over it. That would be freakin' hilarious...

You may own the part of the final image that is yours originally but you don't own the edit. To own the edit you would need to own the original photo.

And in this case, considering nobody asked you to do anything, if this were to go to court, you would probably lose.


This is a very interesting question in this day of digital photography. Changing an image around by PSing it does not make you the owner of it. If you had been asked to contribute part of an image of yours to this composite, you could claim dual ownership but this was not the case here.

I just thought it was an interesting case. They won't make any money off of it that I am sure of. They're also not interested in copyright anything...