Copyright in the mountains and beyond
Due to a recent copyright claim on the Hiking Buddies website, I thought I would provide guidelines to avoid future incidents. Such a claim recently led to a significant fine and threatens the integrity of the Hiking Buddies website.
Copyright owners can demand financial retribution for the unlawful use of their work, which can be very expensive, so in order to avoid that, we all need to make sure that anything we upload on the Hiking Buddies website or in the Hiking Buddies Facebook group can be used freely.
Because this can be a very complicated matter, please be very careful and only upload a picture to Hiking Buddies if you are sure that the usage is allowed.
Use your own pictures where you can and only use pictures from strangers if really needed and check for the license of such pictures that they can be used really freely.
Read further to find out what to look out for if you want to upload pictures
Disclaimer:
Most of the provided information concerns German copyright law because this is where my expertise is at. There might be some differences in other countries' copyright law.
So, if want to upload a photo on Hiking Buddies (or other websites for that matter)
please check:
- It is a picture of somebody else?
In this case, you need to be quite careful, this means you will need to check certain things listed in paragraph 1
Is it a picture you made yourself?
Great, this means that you are owning the copyright.
However, there are still some things to consider, please follow up reading through paragraph 2
1. If it is somebody else’s picture:
In this case, you in general need the permission of the copyright owner of the picture in order to use it.
It is safest to assume this for any picture on the internet unless otherwise stated.
A copyright is valid for 70 years after the death of the author, so usage of very old pictures and maps is generally fine.
It is in general not a smart idea to just search for a google picture of a mountain and illustrate your hike with it without checking the image / website the picture is displayed on.
Just because somebody uploaded a picture on another website like outdooractive or bergwelten.com does not mean that this picture can be used somewhere else without their permission.
Licenses
Some pictures are provided under a license, this means that they can be used, provided one adheres to the rules of this license.
Licenses can vary from very strict ones which are demanding payment, naming of copyright owners and only allow certain use cases to ones allowing all use.
The most famous licenses which allow usage by others are called “Creative Common” licenses.
Even with these however, different rules may apply.
For example, the usage might be free, but the copyright owner can demand that they are named and a link to their website is being provided. A license could also forbid that an image would be edited.
If these rules are not obliged, using the picture is illegal.
It is best to use very broad licenses, allowing non-commercial use.
If attribution of name or license is demanded, for a usage of an image in a hike description, you could do this in the description field of that hike
For how to properly attribute, read further here:
https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/best_practices_for_attribution
How to find usable images
Google image search
allows searching specifically for Images with Creative commons license.
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/29508?p=ws_images_usagerights
However, as I said, a creative common license does not necessarily mean that the image can be used without any obligations, and images might wrongly appear here, so one still has to be careful.
Bing image search:
In the Microsoft search engine, there is a better separation between the licenses.
https://help.bing.microsoft.com/#apex/18/en-us/10006/0
Same as with Google, Microsoft does not give any guarantee that licenses are properly attributed.
Flickr:
Allows to search for licenses as well
https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
There are also some specific homepages for free images to be used, some of them are:
- You can also use the pictures from the past events
2. If it is your own picture:
Great, you own the copyright then.
In general, any picture has a copyright, provided it contains some creative step, the threshold for this however is very low.
Using your own pictures makes things easier but there is still some stuff to take into account, depending what is on that picture:
a) People:
In general, you do need consent of people you are taking pictures from (well, technically for distributing, i.e., uploading a picture)
This should not be an issue in regard to the usual pictures of Hiking Buddies on a hike or the obligatory mountain top selfie.
However, if you take a picture of a stranger during the hike, take into account that technically he or she needs to agree to have their picture taken, provided they can be identified on the picture.
There are some (applicable) exceptions to this rule:
- If they are only accessories to a picture of a landscape or other location
You do not need permission if you take a picture of the landscape and there are some strangers somewhere appearing on the picture as well.
It must be clear that the focus of the picture is the landscape, so that the picture would work without the people on it.
There should also not be a single person or small group of people who are somehow exposed in a special manner in the picture.
- If they are part of an assembly, procession or similar event
You do not need permission to take photos of big events where a large group of people meet purposely, provided a large number of a group is in the focus of the picture and not a single person.
- Pictures of contemporary history
While some Hiking Buddies might be quite famous by now in our circles😉, in general that rule probably is rarely relevant in regard to Hiking Buddies. But let’s say after a new year's hike you return to Garmisch to the traditional new year's ski jumping, you would be allowed to take pictures of the athletes for this reason.
In general, your interest in uploading the picture needs to trump the interest of the person on the picture, so for that reason please be especially careful if you upload a picture of an embarrassing event of one or more people, or one where somebody got injured i.e.
b) Things
In general, pictures of things (which legally includes animals) in the outside are fair game.
Fixed Statues, art works and buildings can be photographed and uploaded without permission.
For art works or statues, this would not be the case if they are only temporary in nature.
So if it’s clearly a temporary exhibition, the distribution might not be allowed (for example the wrapped German Reichstag of Christo)
If you take pictures of a building or a garden belonging to somebody, you are however only allowed to do so from a public street or path and only from the normal viewing angle.
You would not be allowed to take (and distribute) pictures of areas you illegally accessed.
Similarly, if you pass by a property with a two-meter-high hedge, using a selfie stick or drone to take a picture of the garden behind this hedge would not be allowed.