Kid kicked off basketball team for hair

Stitch · Jan 8, 2011

franticscribe said:

Matt Stephens said:

First off I just want to make clear that before you read the rest of this, I'm not trying to sound like an ass. Innocent things I say on message boards sometimes come off that way.

In therms of the photo rights, keep in mind that Prep Rally is a Yahoo!/Rivals.com blog. I don't know if you follow The Dagger, Dr. Saturday, Ball Don't Lie or the other Yahoo!/Rivals.com blogs, but grabbing images and giving them credit is pretty common. Had this been a printed work, then you're absolutely not going to use a Google image search (though one time I had someone apply to work for me and their clips from a former college paper had a photo of A-Rod and the image was "courtesy of Google Images" ... another "courtesy of Photobucket." It had me a little baffled, but that's a whole other Oprah).

And with the minor thing, we ran into this whole legal thing one time when an angry parent was mad that their kid's photo was in the paper without consent and ended up having to use our attorney. Ultimately, we just changed our policy when it came to obviously underage folks photo's running in print (of course, whenever I cover community events with little league, I always check with the kid's parent before I interview the 12 year old girl who just won a race). I wish I could agree that Freedom of Speech was this giant umbrella we sometimes act like it is, but if that were the case, we'd have Federal Shield Laws to protect us, versus state-to-state dependence.

I hope that clears any confusion up.
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Sorry to continue the threadjack here, but it is a journalism board.

I'm well aware that many BLOGS! steal the intellectual property of others and think that a link or credit line is adequate. As Starman pointed out, the rights holder may never come after you, but if they did, you'd lose. There's no distinction between BLOGS! (or other Internet sites) and newspapers in copyright law. The question is did you have permission? If no, was it a fair use? Taking an excerpt of someone else's news story might be a fair use. Taking an entire photograph, likely isn't.

And back to the minors: If a kid is in a place where he or she has no expectation of privacy when the photograph is taken, such as on the court during a basketball game, then there is no legal issue with you running the photograph just because it has a minor in it. You may have an ethical or moral duty to ask permission first, depending on the circumstances, but you have no legal one.

Also, if freedom of speech were, as you described it a "giant legal umbrella we sometimes act like it is" then there would be no need for a federal shield law. It's precisely because freedom of speech does not protect journalists against the things that we believe it should (being forced to reveal identity of sources) that many journalists have pushed for one. May we someday yet get it.
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Another threadjack: A shield law is unethical because journalists get something no one else does.

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Kid kicked off basketball team for hair

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