That Time The Former White House Photographer Was Threatened By A Copyright Troll Over His Own Public Domain Photo

We've talked in the past about the fact that creative works of the federal government are in the public domain and cannot be covered by copyright. This is pretty explicit in the law. Back in 2009 we had called out the fact that the Obama White House was (usefully!) posting images taken by the White House photographer, Pete Souza, to Flickr - but that they were placing a restrictive license on them. Flickr had created a special public domain license specifically to deal with these photos, but still the White House was demanding restrictions it had no legal right to demand (the images are public domain). That happened a few times unfortunately.

Of course, the White House never went after anyone for any of this

That said, last month, Souza revealed on Instagram that a copyright troll shakedown operation, Copytrack, on behalf of WENN Rights International," sent Souza a note demanding payment for violating copyright law with one of his own White House photos that is definitively in the public domain (I'd embed the Instagram post here, except that Instagram's embedding feature seems to be completely broken, and we've been waiting for it to get fixed and now I'm giving up and just posting a screenshot instead).

Here's what his full post says:

You can't make this shit up...a present-day story about this photograph from 2009.

We were flying from London to Paris during President Obama's first overseas trip as president. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had joined us aboard the plane, and she and her staff were manifested in what's called the staff cabin. I made this photograph from the hallway looking into the small cabin. A month or two later, we posted this photo on Flickr as part of a gallery on the President's first 100 days. By doing so, it immediately made the photograph in the public domain. (There is no copyright involved in official White House photos.)

After I departed the White House in 2017, I included this photograph on my website in my photo gallery of President Obama.

Now I am being threatened with legal action for displaying this photograph on my website. Say what?

I've received a notice from Copytrack on behalf of their client WENN Rights International because I'm using an image without permission for this photograph that WENN claims they hold the copyright to. I've responded to Copytrack, and their response was that I am legally obligated to compensate our customer for the damage caused by this copyright infringement."

So to recap: I made this photograph. It is in the public domain. WENN is licensing this image for publication. Copytrack is threatening to file legal action against me for displaying this photograph on my website, since their partner WENN claims they own the copyright to the image.

As I said, you can't make this shit up.

So, not only are they demanding payment from the photographer himself, but on an image that is very, very much in the public domain.

Of course, once this started to get attention, WENN sort of apologized, but not really.

PetaPixel spoke to WENN CEO Lloyd Beiny who says that the takedown notice is an error.

Most photo agencies, including WENN, get sent PR photos from numerous organizations who appreciate their images being distributed to media outlets on their behalf. It would appear that is what occurred in this instance," explains Beiny.

Copytrack are employed by WENN to seek out and solicit compensation for photographers whose works have been published without obvious permission having been granted. On this occasion it appears that the photo in question found its way into a group of images being pursued by Copytrack in error.

That... is not very comforting. The idea that photo agencies get sent PR photos may be true, but what the fuck does that have to do with WENN/Copytrack then claiming copyright over them? None of that makes sense. And, here, for all the talk from Beiny that Copytrack is supposed to go out and solicit compensation" for works that have been published without obvious permission," is a weird thing for him to say when the issue here is that he sought fees for copyright infringement over an image in which he had absolutely no copyright interest at all, nor could he.

Of course, it turns out that we've written about WENN before. You may recall that a few years ago there was a lot of fanfare (and what appeared to be some stock pumping and dumping) when Kodak announced some sort of weird cryptocurrency scheme. It turned out that it was actually WENN, this copyright trolling firm, that was licensing Kodak's name to try out some sketchy cryptocurrency scheme (which, after reporters started pointing out how sketchy it all was, never came to be).

So not only is it a sketchy copyright trolling operation that dabbles in hyped up nonsense cryptocurrency ICOs, it's also trying to shake down photographers over public domain photos.