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Publishing Railroad Photos - Legal?
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I enjoy taking railroad-related pictures, and have submitted a few to TRAINS over the years (unfortunately none have made the cut, but that's a different issue!). I also upload a fair number of shots to Internet sites such as Railpictures.net. I'm even more prolific in taking pictures of commerical airplanes, and have nearly 600 shots on one of the most popular airliner photo web sites. <br /> <br />That web site has recently been faced with an interesting issue that could have ramifications for rail publications. A photographer took a picture of a business jet from public property and uploaded it to the web site. A few days later he was contacted by the law firm of the company owning the jet demanding that the photo be removed and the original destroyed as the logo on the jet is a copyrighted work - the claim is that the photographer is infringing on the copyright by photographing the logo and publishing it for public consumption. <br /> <br />This seems at first blu***o be a baseless claim by the legal firm, but upon doing some cursory Internet research, I'm wondering if it might hold up in court. There doesn't seem to be a specific exclusion in the Copyright Act for photographing a copyrighted work, and the doctrine of Fair Use doesn't even seem to cover this area. Do we have any lawyers out there who might be able to provide a more intelligent answer? <br /> <br />What's all this have to do with TRAINS Magazine? By extension, if it is indeed a violation of copyright law to publish a picture of a copyrighted airplane logo on a web site, how is that any different than taking a picture of a C44-9W with BNSF's new logo and submitting it for publication in TRAINS or any of the other rail hobby publications? After all, TRAINS is a for-profit enterprise and both the photographer and TRAINS make money from use of the BNSF logo in this case. I suppose it's possible that TRAINS has explicit and blanket permission from all railroads to show their copyrighted/trademarked images, but that seems a stretch.
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