By Jerald Fritz and Claire Magee

These days, news reporting is as easy as a quick Google search and a few right clicks.  Running a story about Jane Doe?  Save a few pictures from Jane’s most recent Facebook album, pull a video of Jane off of YouTube, find @JaneDoe’s tweets and the story has practically written itself.  Now you can relax until deadline, right?

Wrong!

Copying and pasting content from the web (including pictures and images) is just that – copying it.  And as the word “copyright” implies, you actually do need to have the rights to the content before you Ctrl+C your way to a news story.  The rule is the same for pictures and images as for written text.

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The fact that Jane has posted pictures to her Facebook account does NOT give you the right to telecast-print-post-archive those pictures.  She may have made those photos public, but it doesn’t mean you can.  Jane – or Jane’s photographer, you don’t actually know that Jane took them just because she’s posted them – still has the full panoply of copyrights in those photos.  The same goes for YouTube videos, blog entries, posts to Twitter, etc.  It also applies to Google images, even if they don’t seem to have an artist or photographer credit.  As you learned in kindergarten, it doesn’t matter whose toy it is.  If it’s not yours, you can’t take it home.

This is not to say the standard copyright exceptions don’t still apply.  The “Fair Use” doctrine still might allow you to use the picture or video in a limited number of circumstances (and it’s harder to get fair use for pictures).  But as each violation can put you on the hook for up to $150,000 - be sure to check, or be sure to get written permission before use.

*Jerald N. Fritz is Senior Vice President – Legal and Strategic Affairs and General Counsel, Allbritton Communications Company, Washington, DC.  Claire Magee is Counsel to Allbritton.  Allbritton and its affiliates operate eight network-affiliated television stations, a 24-hour local cable news channel and several newspapers and websites around the country, including POLITICO.com.

 
 

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Kind of missed a big exception

If you're a news reporter running a story, the photos you pull of Jane that she publicly posted are almost certainly going to be considered fair use for the newsworthiness exception. There isn't any "real" protection.

Mattttttttt . . .

That's in the last paragraph, Mat. And Newsworthiness is just one of the factors.