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Comment by oliwarner | Hacker News Reader

I take an amazing photo and give it to you with all rights to redistribute and sublicense it as you wish. You choose to redistribute it under a restrictive license for cash. As far as you know you're the only person selling this photo.

You see my photo being used in a national advert. The advertiser is not your customer. Again, you think you're the only person with the right to redistribute this photo, and infer that your rights to a licensing fee is being infringed.

As I say, they were stupid to treat this as if they had an exclusive license, but they had every right to redistribute under their license and ask for a license fee. Just as the recipient of that demand had the right to tell them go away.

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>I take an amazing photo and give it to you with all rights to redistribute and sublicense it as you wish.

This is not what happened. They never were granted the rights to sublicense it. It is in the public domain. They can use it, redistribute it, or charge you if you somehow use their services to do things with it, or even create derivative works which they then own. But they cannot relicense it or claim they own it, or represent the owner.

Now, the only thing I would let them bring forward as their argument is if they themselves were defrauded by somebody claiming ownership of the photograph. I see no indication that this is what had happened, tho.

> This is not what happened. They never were granted the rights to sublicense it.

This is not what happened. They were granted the rights to sublicense it. Placing a piece of work in public domain automatically grants others to do whatever they want with it including sublicensing it.

They were not granted the exclusive right to sub licence it.

Happy now?

The image was put in public domain. No further exclusive rights are required to sublicense it. You are allowed to pick work from public domain and sublicense it if you want to.

The whole example was about having exclusive rights so anyone that had the image must be infringing. That presumption is gone once the image is in the public domain.

The problem isn't that Getty is trying to license an image, the problem is Getty is contacting people already using a public domain image and trying to get them to pay them money to use it.

Since they were not given exclusive rights, how could they know that whoever used the picture was infringing their rights and had to pay them a license fee? They didn't.

That is not how grammar works... . The point is about exclusive sublicensing. Of course, they are allowed to sublicense it, nobody ever questioned that, but that has nothing to do with the discussion.

You can't have a sublicense for something in which no licensing rights inhere to begin with. I think you understand this very well and are choosing to pretend otherwise.

What "license" was sub-licensed?

IANAL, so honest question - is that actually true? Is it legal to sell a license to a public domain work? Is it OK to fail to tell the person you're signing the contract with that they don't need it?

That's sort of like me selling you a driving license - when you already have one, and I don't actually have any authority to grant or rescind that permission either way. I mean; sure... you will have the permission after the sale, but it's at least a pretty dubious construction.

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