> Isn't the problem here that she donated all her photos to the Library of Congress without clarifying what that meant?
No, because
> why the hell is Getty charging for public domain photos?
There is no amount of clarification there that allows Getty to charge for something. Either it's in the public domain, in which case they have no right to charge for use of the photos, or it's not, in which case they have no right to charge for the photos.
I'd wager that this is some sort of colossal business fuck-up that's not anyone's fault. Mostly because I can't imagine anyone so baldly stealing money.
People charge for public domain things all the time. I've bought plenty of books from the 17 and 18 hundreds on my kindle. Pay for the convenience and for them putting together a nice version.
What you're buying there is a copy. That's not the same thing as someone coming after you and saying that you need to pay them for the copy you have acquired.
Books in the 1700s and 1800s are no longer under copyright, they are now in the public domain. Anybody can sell them for whatever the market will bear. Since they are not longer under copyright, there is no longer a copyright holder whose rights they are infringing and thus nobody that can charge them for violating copyright law.
The question with Highsmith is whether she still holds the copyright or whether she put the pictures in the public domain. Answering this could be very interesting.
The other angle that I would expect to see come up is whether Getty can sue (or threaten to sue) over pictures that they clearly do not hold the copyright to. That seems to be a clear violation of racketeering laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeering
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain "Works in the public domain are those whose exclusive intellectual property rights have expired, have been forfeited, or are inapplicable."
Actually, the copyright those nicer versions sometimes claim already lead to this exact situation, with publishers making the case that the derivative work should be awarded new copyright.
Here however it is clear-cut, the photos are not modified.
That's actually not totally unreasonable. Also maybe getty ran some clever image recognition to auto tag them up and organise them all? That's all a useful charge-able service. Going after existing usage is clearly BS, though.
She just had her photo up on her website. They clearly went after her without any reason to believe she used their "clever organization" image searching service. These scumbags were probably using an image recognition bot to scrape the web for all usage and spraying everyone with legal letters.
Anyone is perfectly free to charge for content that is in the public domain. Getty still provides a service. For example the ability to search, preview, or download images. Bandwidth does still have a cost.
Of course it's also fine for someone to use Getty to locate a public domain image, and then acquire it for free from another source.
Getty sending copyright notices on works they know (or should know) to be in the public domain is a real problem.
That $2 pays for the physical paper copy of the book. You aren't buying a license though, because they can't legally sell you one. It's pretty clear here that Getty was selling something (licenses) they had no right to sell. Trying to enforce these fraudulent "licenses" was just the icing on the cake.
This misses the point. If you have the public domain ebook already, Amazon isn't knocking on your door asking for their cut.
Getty literally told the photographer she had to pay a license for her own work posted on her website. She didn't acquire it from Getty.
You can acquire a public domain ebook from somewhere else for free or you can pay 99c to acquire it from Amazon. But either way, you're not paying for a license to copy it.
That's the rub in this case it seems, that if Getty never took this action against the creator herself, who understood the situation and, I'm not sure they'd run into much stink about selling Public Domain images as a business component (they provide a service). Her catching them in the act is stunning.
I assume that the 99c one comes with some feature other than the text - e.g. convenience, formatting, something else.
The 99c is not a licence fee for the text of Ulysses, and if Amazon tried to sue me for having the Gutenberg version on my Kindle, they would get the Arkell v. Pressdram response.
it's perfectly fine charging public domain stuff(in the same way you can charge for distributing gpl'd stuff form third parties), call it a 'download fee' if that makes you uneasy
No, because
> why the hell is Getty charging for public domain photos?
There is no amount of clarification there that allows Getty to charge for something. Either it's in the public domain, in which case they have no right to charge for use of the photos, or it's not, in which case they have no right to charge for the photos.
I'd wager that this is some sort of colossal business fuck-up that's not anyone's fault. Mostly because I can't imagine anyone so baldly stealing money.