Photographer killed the Video star?

This is very interesting...a photograper had one of her photographs (that she had posted on the web) used (uncredited) in an amateur video on YouTube, served them with a takedown notice and had it removed. Leaving aside Youtube's speed of action here when they don't seem to have quite the same urgency of action with other copyrighted content, this highlights a real cutting edge issue between Fair Use and Copyright on the Web.

Lane Hartwell, the photographer, said:

"I wasn't upset by the video itself," Hartwell said, but the brief flash of her photograph -- without compensation or credit -- still rankled. "I thought, 'Where does somebody just get the right to take this?'

"

The answer, traditionally, was the Fair Usage law*.

However, as Lawrence Lessig points out in his book The Future of Ideas, there has been a creeping extension of copyright to the content owners over the last 10 years or so, eroding many of the traditional conventions of Fair Usage, noting that .

... But this structural design is changing–both legally and technically.

This shift will destroy the opportunities for creativity and innovation that the Internet originally engendered. The cultural dinosaurs of our recent past are moving to quickly remake cyberspace so that they can better protect their interests against the future. Powerful conglomerates are swiftly using both law and technology to "tame" the Internet, transforming it from an open forum for ideas into nothing more than cable television on speed.

(Incidentally, Lane defends herself in this article in Wired Magazine, whom she has done work with, and not once in the article is Fair Usage brought up - shame on you Wired)

...and shame on YouTube...by any reading of the Fair Use rule this is very arguable - a lot more so than airing TV shows and MTV videos.

Richter Scale...take her photo out, get the guy to send you one of his own, and resend your brilliant video, taking care to mention Lane Hartwell for her role in the credits

As for Lane...what was she thinking - biggest opportunity ever to get her name in lights, and she winds up getting a reputation as a total killjoy to hordes of people across the planet who previously had never heard of her.

* which incidentally means you don't have to give credit for short excerpts, though it is customary usually to do so. Quite what a quick flash of a photo of someone else in a video collage counts as is I suppose the nub of the issue.

Update....read some more of the comments back and forth on this one in various blogs, and have decided that if there is a good place to make a stand for fair use rights, its here - to be allowed to show a photo of a fairly easily obtainable commodity (a well known face) that is shown as a photo-collage for about a second in a far larger creative work, should be a no brainer.