NYT: Legal Battle Over Vivian Maier’s Work

[r_a_feldman]

I am not familiar with the details of that part of the story. Did she fail to pay the rent and the contents were sold off by the storage company?

From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Maier):

In 2007, two years before she died, Maier failed to keep up payments on storage space she had rented on Chicago's North Side. As a result, her negatives, prints, audio recordings, and 8mm film were auctioned. Three photo collectors purchased parts of her work: John Maloof, Ron Slattery, and Randy Prow.[15] Maier's photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008 by Slattery, but the work received little response.[16]

Maloof had purchased the largest part of Maier's work, about 30,000 negatives, because he was working on a history book about the Chicago neighborhood of Portage Park,[17] Maloof subsequently purchased more of Maier's photographs from another buyer at the same auction.[1] Maloof discovered Maier's name in his boxes but was unable to discover anything about her until a Google search led him to Maier's death notice in the Chicago Tribune in April 2009.[18]

[cyrus]

Maybe Brett Weston's burning ceremony is the correct thing to do after all.

Or a will. Seriously folks, everyone should have a will.

[Jody_S]

Sadly (for us photographers), what value Vivian Maier's photographs currently have is entirely due to the marketing campaign conducted by Maloof. On their own, they were a bunch of 'junk' in a storage bin and millions of equally good images by equally talented photographers are binned all the time. I do believe the new lawsuit is sufficient to sink the project, because it depended on the carefully crafted marketing campaign that has just ground to a halt, which in turn was based on novelty. I don't think it will be possible to re-start it once the novelty has worn off and the next big thing has come along.

Since ownership of the negs themselves is not called into question, I would suggest to Mr. Maloof, if I could, that he commence selling those instead of prints of them. True, he can only sell each one once, but he has many thousands, and there is only so much of a market for this stuff anyway. He could then capitalize on the lawsuit rather then let it sink his whole enterprise.

As for the discussions on copyright, we are saturated with millions of images, and copyright law has a long way to go to catch up with the realities of the Internet, digital images, and the art market. Current copyright law exists to protect book publishers, motion picture studios and recording labels, not artists. Since no image was produced by Ms Maier (she didn't print these, thus no photographs were created), a case could easily be made that the entire copyright belongs to Mr. Maloof who owns the negatives and commissioned artwork to be created from them to his specifications. Or I could just as easily argue the exact opposite. But copyright law equates art with value (you can only sue someone if you can argue that you've lost money from the theft of your image), and the images 1) were not marketed or ever intended to be marketed by Ms Maier, 2) were never finished by her in a form that could be shared or sold, and 3) had no value before the intervention of Mr. Maloof, I conclude that this is a frivolous, ambulance-chasing lawsuit.

[richardman]

.. millions of equally good images by equally talented photographers are binned all the time...

I would like to see these millions of good images...

[Bill_1856]

For 200 years we had copywrite laws that (mostly) worked, until our Great American Congress at the instigation of lobbyists for Disney and other corporate giants somehow ($$$) managed to change them to give protection for absurdly long period of time, (170 years, or so).

[David Karp]

Another take: http://theonlinephotographer.typepad...le-royale.html

[jp]

Sadly (for us photographers), what value Vivian Maier's photographs currently have is entirely due to the marketing campaign conducted by Maloof. On their own, they were a bunch of 'junk' in a storage bin and millions of equally good images by equally talented photographers are binned all the time. I do believe the new lawsuit is sufficient to sink the project, because it depended on the carefully crafted marketing campaign that has just ground to a halt, which in turn was based on novelty. I don't think it will be possible to re-start it once the novelty has worn off and the next big thing has come along.

Since ownership of the negs themselves is not called into question, I would suggest to Mr. Maloof, if I could, that he commence selling those instead of prints of them. True, he can only sell each one once, but he has many thousands, and there is only so much of a market for this stuff anyway. He could then capitalize on the lawsuit rather then let it sink his whole enterprise.

As for the discussions on copyright, we are saturated with millions of images, and copyright law has a long way to go to catch up with the realities of the Internet, digital images, and the art market. Current copyright law exists to protect book publishers, motion picture studios and recording labels, not artists. Since no image was produced by Ms Maier (she didn't print these, thus no photographs were created), a case could easily be made that the entire copyright belongs to Mr. Maloof who owns the negatives and commissioned artwork to be created from them to his specifications. Or I could just as easily argue the exact opposite. But copyright law equates art with value (you can only sue someone if you can argue that you've lost money from the theft of your image), and the images 1) were not marketed or ever intended to be marketed by Ms Maier, 2) were never finished by her in a form that could be shared or sold, and 3) had no value before the intervention of Mr. Maloof, I conclude that this is a frivolous, ambulance-chasing lawsuit.

A very thoughtful post I like.
"You can only sue someone if..." is naive though; people sue each other for every reason under the sun.

[Jac@stafford.net]

[... snip very much I disagree with ...]
Current copyright law exists to protect book publishers, motion picture studios and recording labels, not artists. [...]

We can quibble over 'not artists', but I think I know what you intended. A point about copyright is also whether an artist was 'known' through other published work. VM certainly was not known.

But copyright law equates art with value (you can only sue someone if you can argue that you've lost money from the theft of your image), and the images 1) were not marketed or ever intended to be marketed by Ms Maier, 2) were never finished by her in a form that could be shared or sold, and 3) had no value before the intervention of Mr. Maloof, I conclude that this is a frivolous, ambulance-chasing lawsuit.

In spirit I agree regardless of some unfortunate wording above. This whole thing is a lawyer's paradise.

As for finished form we might think that only prints are the object, but the negative itself is considered a fixed medium (no pun intended.) Regardless of our lay opinions, an important thing to remember is that all copyright claims (presumably to bring monetary compensation) are judged in court on a case-by-case basis, and to bring an infringement case to a USA court the work must first be registered for copyright. Since VM was not a known artist, never previously published and the work had not been registered before publication, then property ownership is the issue and the case moves out of copyright.

[EdSawyer]

Everything is automatically copyrighted when it's created, including VM's work, whether she registered or published it or not.

[Jac@stafford.net]

Everything is automatically copyrighted when it's created, including VM's work, whether she registered or published it or not.

Of course, however to bring an infringement case to court it must first be registered by the copyright office, otherwise the issue becomes one of property rights.