The Trump campaign may have violated United State copyright law by selling merchandise featuring the former president’s mugshot, legal experts have warned.

  • @[email protected]
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    21 year ago

    Woops I didn’t realize you were referring to the upper level comment and not the main post. My apologies!

    • @dogslayeggs
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      11 year ago

      No worries. The big issue is how does Georgia law apply to photographs taken by a state employee as part of the stated job functions for their official job. It’s one thing for an employee to take a photo while on the job, but when their specific job is to take an official photo then I think it would be ridiculous for that person to own the copyright and it not be public property (like NASA images). Should DMV employees own the copyright to license photos?

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        I’m not a lawyer but my layman’s opinion is that the state should retain ownership over the photo. To give an example, where I live a company began scraping mugshot photos and then compiling them into a newspaper that they distributed and sold for profit. It became really popular but it also drew a lot of negative attention since this company was earning money by spreading photos and arrest records of people that hadn’t even been convicted of a crime. The solution here was to just stop posting mugshots online, which was effective, but didn’t address ownership of the photos at all.

        This isn’t exactly a 1:1 comparison since Trump was the subject of the photo and also the one selling merch, but I think there’s a valid argument against allowing people to privately sell products based off work/production funded by the public.