CNN’s “The Moment” Project (Asking For Your Photos Of Barack Obama’s Presidential Oath) Raises Interesting Copyright And Licensing Questions.
With the goal of capturing “the most detailed experience of a single moment ever in history,” CNN and Microsoft invite inaugural attendees to send photographs documenting the moment that Barack Obama took the oath.
Participants are instructed to:
“1. Take one photo of the moment when Obama takes the oath. If you have a digital camera with a zoom lens, take three photos (wide-angle, mid-zoom, full-zoom).
2. E-mail each photo as soon as possible to themoment@cnn.com (one photo per message, 10MB size limit). Please only send in photos you took yourself.
3. Go to cnn.com/themoment to see all of the photos in our photosynth.”
And what is a “photosynth” exactly? Photosynth is technology developed by Microsoft and the University of Washington that creates a collage, a derivative work. Specifically, photosynth takes multiple shots of the same scene and reconstructs the 2D photos into 3D space. According to the web site, “depending on the number of photos, their resolution and the computing iron thrown at the project we should have a fully explorable virtual environment. It is a technology in its infancy. This is the first time a mass audience has been asked to participate. The technology takes all the submitted images from thousands of sources and angles to create a 360 degree visual image that can be viewed from different angles.”
And what about the copyright in those photographs by the amateur photographers? It is governed by pretty complicated and professional sounding terms of use.
After granting CNN and its affiliates a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide license to which the submitter retains only personal use rights (which some would call an illusory license, and indeed much more akin to an assignment than a license at all), that photographer “warrants” that he or she, the amateur submitter, has “the written consent of each and every identifiable natural person in any submission to use such persons name or likeness in the manner contemplated by iReport.com, and each such person has released you from any liability that may arise in relation to such use.” Which is a bit of a trick as there is no chance of the amateur having obtained such “written consent” on the Mall on January 20th; and that amateur just also agreed earlier in the terms of use that CNN does not have to inform what “use” will be made of the submission.
And yet, people seem to have blithely blown past all those words and have made their submissions nevertheless.
It’ll be interesting to see the copyright application for registration at the United States Copyright Office that CNN will be making. A daunting task, it will be to draft that application.