QuizLaw: How We Love it When Bloggers Screw the Man

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How We Love it When Bloggers Screw the Man

So, from what we understand, People Magazine was the first to secure exclusive American rights to pictures of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s Namibian love-child, Shiloh Nouvel Pitt-Jolie for a hefty $4.1 million. For their part, the British tabloid, Hello! magazine then secured overseas’ rights for $3.1 million, all of which will go to several charities of the couple’s choice [we’re guessing most will go to People for the Ethical Treatment of Ugly People (PETUP)].

Unfortunately for People magazine’s parent company, Time Inc., Hello! magazine’s photo cover was immediately leaked and picked up by several stateside blogs, most notably the fantastic DListed, and thereafter Nick Denton’s flagship blog, Gawker.com. Attorneys for Time, Inc. - presumably upset that they didn’t have paparazzi swarming Jennifer Aniston to get her reaction shot to the photos - immediately emailed DListed and Gawker (among other websites), asking them to take down the photos because they allegedly infringed upon People’s very expensive exclusive rights. And though DListed, which doesn’t have the Yahoo! backed resources of Nick Denton, immediately removed the photo, Gawker took a stand, citing the fair use doctrine and refusing to remove the allegedly offending photo, which can be seen in thumbnail size here.

Indeed, our new blogging hero, Lockhart Steele (the Editor in Chief of Gawker Media) even had the tenacity to respond to People’s legal counsel with this gem, “Should People wish for us to substitute a cover of its magazine featuring the image in lieu of the Hello cover, we’d be amenable.”

For those of you more interested in the legal aspects of this story, it does seem that Gawker Media has the upper hand, since fair use laws do make exceptions to general copyright laws for commentary and criticism. Fair use laws, however, only allow you to reproduce a small part of the copyrighted work for commentary purposes; here, Gawker only posted a small 150 pixel thumbnail image.

Likewise, weighing our understanding of what the fair use laws allows in terms of discussing a now newsworthy legal matter against our own tiny monetary resources, we have taken it upon ourselves to publish a 56 pixel image of the photo in question. (Source: Defamer, via DListed)