Using Internet Media and Blog Photographs for an Exhibition

[ringostarr]

Hello,
I would greatly appreciate, if some-one could please help me with the following issue.
We are organising a public exhibition, run by a few non-profit political organisations. There will be no money charged for the exhibition, and its purpose is to be solely for education and raising public awareness. The government will help with the space, and some politicians may even attend (so we need to make sure there is nothing illegal we do).

The objects of the exhibition will be photographs from a certain place in the world, depicting war, destruction, soldiers, etc. Now there are four main sources of these photographs we shall use:

1) pictures taken by unknown people with cell-phones or amateur cameras, that somehow found their way to the internet. For instance a random person took a picture with his phone of tanks being transported at night outside his window. Such images spread in the internet everywhere, and it is often impossible to find who originally took them or posted. Can we use these photos for the exhibition? If yes, do we need to get permission and how can we find whom to ask? Usually such pictures are found in blogs, forums, comments, etc.

2) pictures taken by bloggers, who are not professional journalists, but it is well known who took them. They just post them in their blogs as private persons, and everyone shares them. Do we need to ask for permission for these pictures? If we can't get a reply from the blogger, can we still use them?

3) Unidentified pictures from internet news sites. The problem is that one identical photo usually appears in dozens if not more different internet news sites, without any identification of who owns or who took it. If the same photo is used by many different news sites, how do we know whom to contact for permission?

4) Photographs from well known news websites, like BBC, Deutsche Welle, CNN etc. As I understand we should simply contact them to ask for permission, right?

Thank you!

[AndyJ]

Hi ringo,
The answer is pretty much the same for all the categories you have listed. Copyright exists in all the images irrespective of who took them and in what circumstances. The person who took the photograph will usually be the present owner of the copyright. In order to use the images you will need permission from the owner, and if that person is unidentifiable*, then it is theoretically impossible to obtain permission. There are a number of exceptions to the general rule, the most relevant for your purposes being the one that allows copyright works to be used for reporting current events, but this does not apply to photographs. The second way around the issue of anonymous works is to apply for an orphan work licence, but this is not a speedy process and could be relatively costly if you have lots of images you wish to use.
The category where you may have most success are those you found via the BBC, CNN etc. In theory these organisations will have already obtained permission so they should know the name of the copyright owner. Alternatively, they may have acquired all the rights, and so can license you to use the images. However many news organisations have a fairly cavalier approach to copyright in images of this sort and often just use ones they find and will pay up when/if the rightful owner comes forward later. (One such example here but there are dozens more).


*If you have the right software, it would be worth checking the metadata which may be embedded in some of the images you have found, as this could identify the authors, even though there are no visible copyright notices.

[ringostarr]

Thank you AndyJ,

I have read that if one uses pictures for educational purposes, or under "fair use", then one doesn't necessarily need necessarily to obtain the permission. Could the given case of the exhibition qualify as "educational" or "fair use"?

[AndyJ]

[ringostarr]

Thank you for the information!