For the last decade, Marjorie Carvalho and her husband have produced Star Wars Action News, a podcast dedicated to Star Wars collectibles of all sorts. Predictably, they've had a lot to talk about, as waves of action figures and other collectibles have been launched in the run-up to the much-anticipated release next week of Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens.
On Tuesday, a Star Wars Action News staffer saw something he shouldn't have—and bought it. A 3 3/4" action figure of "Rey," a female character from The Force Awakens, was on display in a Walmart in Iowa, apparently earlier than it should have been. The staff member bought it for $6.94 plus tax, no questions asked. The following day, he posted pictures of the Rey figure on Star Wars Action News' Facebook page.
"Have we known this figure was coming?" the staffer, named Justin, asked in the post. "I just found her at Walmart—no new other figures."
A short time later, Carvalho got a surprising message.
"A friend texted my husband saying, hey, are you getting sued?" said Carvalho in an interview with Ars Technica. The image from the Facebook post was gone. "We looked and noticed we'd gotten a notice from Facebook saying our image violated copyright. It was confusing because our staff member, Justin, he took the photo."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 12 2015, @04:05AM
(same AC)
I never saw the Facebook page; did you? My comment was based only on what the story says: that photos were posted. It doesn't say there was any commentary, parody or criticism going on. Any of those would have solidly made this fair use. When you write "that's not what happened" do you mean that there was no accompanying article?
You might want to look at Ty, Inc. v. Publications International, Ltd. [harvard.edu]. Someone wrote books about Beanie Babies that were illustrated with photos of the toys. The federal district court said that was copyright infringement.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 13 2015, @09:32PM
If you own it you should be able to take pictures of it and distribute them. And even if you don't own it, if the owner puts it in a prominent public place, then the owner should not be allowed to prevent people from taking, keeping and distributing photos of it.
Now if you don't own something you bought.