Who Owns Your Face?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
On the other hand, that also means that no other faces can be copyrighted. So with suitably advanced surgical methods, one could change faces periodically. Maybe even on a whim. Perhaps one could apply technology being developed for androids.
0) https://www.quora.com/Can-you-copyright-your-own-face
Edit: Gelatin prosthetics can be quite realistic: http://www.imgrum.org/media/1204871196470265504_2263538440
So anyway, I doubt that one could copyright one's picture. But IANAL.
0) http://www.mtv.com/news/1872058/video-game-celebrity-lawsuit...
Your likeness is clearly something in the public. I can't sue people for looking at me without paying, for instance. Your likeness could very well be a trademark, though. Especially celebrities do business expressly based on their likeness. It is their brand and they can probably protect it. So you can't use that likeness/brand without their permission (as long as they protect that mark).
IANAL, of course, and I could easily be wrong.
Then it's a work of art right? And those can be copyrighted.
But then I suppose your new novel copyrighted artwork is subject to fair use for eg. drivers licenses etc.
AFAIK Facebook had to turn the facial recognition off in the EU, specifically for this reason.
Yes, occasionally it may degenerate (as the patent trolls show), but a social issue should be solved with social/legal means, not technical ones.
And yet, I doubt that the German laws that you cite would prevent the BND from collecting data, sharing with NSA etc, and so on.
So, say my AR software needs to scan an environment in order to function, but the law says that I cannot scan a particular "excluded" surface (e.g. a face), how do I determine which surfaces I must exclude if I cannot scan them first inorder to discern between a public surface or a protected surface? The law needs to regulate developed technology, but by the same token, technology must be developed to enable compliance with and also enforcement of the law.
It seems to me that the solution is a joint legal/technical one. The third factor is the willingness of humans to comply with the law. The fourth factor is the ability of citizens & government to enforce the law. To see where all of this could lead, we just need to look at what happened with the utter failureof the "do not call registry" (1).
1.) http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_bills/2016/05/rob...
The only solutions to this problem are legal solutions. It is a legal problem to begin with.
> The only solutions to this problem are legal solutions. It is a legal problem to begin with.
This is a flawed statement. Yes, "ownership" is a man-made construct (1). However, laws are only as good as our technical capacity to comply and enforce them. Take carbon emissions for example, MARPOL has put in place several tiers of ship exhaust GHG emissions controls (man-made limits) which are being implemented over several years because the technology needed to comply (and enforce) @ the ever-shrinking thresholds is still under development. However, industry is making progress and we are complying to avoid fines or operational restrictions.
I was initially riffing on MPPA dogma. But I wasn't thinking through the implications of fair use.
You could have a special tattoo design or a piercing. Or even just a hair style.
Of course, right or wrong, there is always just the money argument: go up against someone famous (or a company acting on their behalf) in court and see who runs out of cash reserves first...
Not sure of the implications of that for non-government applications of facial recognition technology, though. Sounds like an interesting potential test case.
What about genetic modifications to a naturally created thing? I wonder how closely tied to the copyright system the patent system is, seeing as they folded under pressure against the old rule of no patenting organic material, I wonder how far off copyright is from doing similar.
Despite the article's scary posturing about the matters of intellectual property that arise from all humans having a face, it fails to remember this basic concrete fact:
My face is a physical object - bone structure, musculature, skin, and the like - that is attached to me. And I unambiguously own it. Anybody who literally tries to steal it will be met with the wrath of actual facial self-defense.
On the other hand, once photons have bounced off this physical structure and made their way into a CMOS sensor it turns out that I don't own the content of the storage media contained by the devices doing the capturing.
Then, when someone take this same media and publishes it online, its ownership, in an organic sense, becomes wholly unclear. The only reason anybody can "own" a piece of media on the internet is because the state, via (often capricious) enforcement of intellectual property laws, says so.
In a more concrete sense, it seems quite clear that anybody can own and use any piece of media on the internet for any purpose; they just need to be informed that, for the moment, the state may exact violence upon - you guessed it - their face and other body parts - for doing so.
In fact, a much better case to use for analysis of the literal question of "Who Owns Your Face?" are laws banning gas masks, such as the emergency order at the WTO protests in Seattle in 2000. The implication of such an order, obviously, is that the state owns your face, and may use your mucus membranes as an attack surface for irritant chemicals to control you, and that you don't own your face in sufficient measure to take preventative action.
What I'm saying is: a crucial piece of thinking critically about civic virtue and property in the information age is to distinguish a thing from a representation of that thing. The former can clearly be owned and its owner is usually obvious. The latter probably cannot, and states who fail to recognize this will increasingly fall behind.
Speaking about it differently will frame the concepts differently, but the way that people frame a concept is an intentional choice (it's not an error because there's no right way to do it). You can disagree about the way to frame the debate (that is, the way to think about the concepts), but understanding the physics of light sensors doesn't automatically lead to framing this particular conversation differently. There are lots of valid ways of thinking about the issue that doesn't rely on understanding physics.
Now if I take that same picture and slap it on a boxcover for "shampoo" that I sell, I assume "famous person" could legally get me to remove the image. What "law" would they be using to get me to remove it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights#United_Stat...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-mask_laws#United_States
I, for one, welcome the oncoming privacy-enhancing cyberpunk fashion.
Just on a lark, I looked up whois records for hideyourface.com etc and found it is registered to Amazon.com [1].
Maybe its just me, but nowadays I am not feeling any better about that either. :-)
Maybe we'll all need a face changer like that used in Almost Human, season 1, episode 3.