UK residents may need licenses to photograph their own things

1958 designer chair

In accordance with the amendments to the UK copyright law, owners of designer items will soon have to get a license to photograph even those objects that belong to them. These amendments have already been adopted, and now they are only discussing the date of their entry into force.

A similar incident is related to the fact that designer items like exclusive furniture and other items are protected by copyright. Amendments to the law back in 2013 change the validity period of copyright: if before it lasted for 25 years from the date of manufacture of the item, now it lasts as much as 70 years after the death of the author. It turns out that a typical copyright will receive a duration of one hundred years, and even more. It is still unknown when the law will take effect - some sources claim that this will happen in October 2016.

In principle, the rigidity of copyright laws in the UK is already difficult to be surprised - the exception to the law was recently canceledregarding music that you legally acquired. An exception allowed you to make copies of these musical works - and now such copies are regarded as illegal.

And now, photographers will need to carefully monitor which objects fall into the frame, and in which case pay a license for photographing designer objects. Publishers of illustrated books and magazines about the interior will also have a hard time. And if a British family has designer furniture in the household, then family photographs in which it will be visible will also fall under the law.

Many questions remain open - for example, how to search for information on whether a particular subject is the subject of copyright. Or, if the photographer usually holds copyright to a photograph, then why will the person who owns the rights to that subject have the rights to photograph the object? Creating a copy of music can also be called reproduction - but how to assess the claim that the photographs of the object reproduce this object?

A related case occurred in judicial practice in the United States in 2010: then the court granted the sculptor’s lawsuit against the American Postal Service regarding the use of a postage stamp of his Washington memorial dedicated to the Korean War.


Memorial and stamp with his image