A photographer having one of their images used without license is all too common today. A photographer achieving some level of compensation for having their work used without permission is less common today. Then again for a photographer to experience both of these things and then be branded as some evil hater of the arts using social media tools - that's a new one.

Jay Maisl, who recently celebrated his 80th birthday, has recently experienced all of the aforementioned. One of his iconic photographs of Miles Davis (used as cover art for an album by the same) was used by Andy Baio without license on another album cover. The copyright infringement case was recently settled with Baio paying Maisel $32,500.00 USD. Unfortunately the story did not end there. It seems that Baio and other interested parties decided to make use of the web as a forum to "tell their side of the story" so to speak. Mr Baio blames the whole incident and his payout on the fact that "fair use" as it relates to copyright laws is poorly defined and a moving target. The interesting thing about his position is that Mr Baio took care to obtain to rights to the actual music he was using on the album itself.  Seems like he was less confused about "Fair Use" when it came to the music.

If you want to read more about this I'd suggest the below blog post by Jeremy Nicholl.

http://www.jeremynicholl.com/blog/2011/07/04/how-stockbroker-andrew...