Reply to post: Re: is it OK?

Re: is it OK?

Have you ever been on holiday and thought that a photo of the family would be nice, yet there wasn't a suitable studio nearby to book for a photo shoot? Most people have been in this situation and have decided to just take a photo in public with random people visible in the background. When people do this, it is extremely rare for them to make sure that every single person who is in the background has signed a permission form.

If someone said that those photos are all illegal and should not be shared with friends and family then most people would assume you were using sarcasm to make some political point about the complexity of modern regulations, rather than seriously suggesting that you don't think people should be allowed to take such photos.

If I got a high quality camera with a nice long range zoom lense and went to beeches covertly taking photos of toddlers running around naked, so I could post them on my non-commercial website dedicated to the hobby of photographing naked children... people might be tempted to argue a different interpretation to the regulations.

Both of those scenarios are extremely similar, with the only real difference being the framing of the photo. The first photo has my friends/family in the foreground and the other people are in the background, while the latter is just a generic photo of a beech and I do not know any of the people who might be visible in it.

What point am I trying to make? Well I was trying to show how the real world is not a simple logic operation where you pass 1 or 2 variables to a function that returns a boolean.

To give the only answer to your question that can possibly be correct, yes. Any other answer would require a lengthy list of exceptions and rules, so the only person who can actually give you a valid answer is someone who responds "it is always OK to share otherwise lawful photos that you own the rights to".

If a for-profit news organisation wants to publish an article about the 9 year old girl who builds sophisticated bombs out of recycled parts and sends them to the homes of people who post ignorant nonsense in the comment sections of news websites, it is a bit strange to NOT include a photo of the person the article is about. I think it can be assumed that most parents would not sign a permission form for every news organisation wanting to publish the story... although for the record if TheRegister wanted to write such an article about my daughter then I would give them permission, on the condition that they remove the option to comment anonymously on that specific article. Unfortunately they would probably be able to publish it without my permission and therefore I could only enforce that condition by appealing to their sense of humour.