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Comment by ugh | Hacker News Reader

That’s irrelevant. The thief might well not be able to force the victim to delete all the things he stored on the victim’s drive but publishing it is something completely different.

Just as an example, if you take a photo of me with your camera and I explicitly tell you to not publish the photo you are not allowed to [0], even if the photo is stored on your own drive. I can’t force you to delete the photo, you are free to keep it and show it to your friends but you are definitely not allowed to publish it.

[0] There are certain narrow exceptions in the respective German law but they don’t apply in this case.

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You're telling me that if you take my camera out of my back pocket while I'm not looking, take a picture of yourself with it, then give it back to me, I am not allowed to publish that picture? Under what law would you sue? In the US you may have a claim under a libel law or similar, but it would be hard to convince a jury or judge that I was libeling you with a picture you took with stolen property.

Personality rights. How the image was taken is not relevant to whether or not it can legally be published, especially if you do so for commercial purposes.

It would be illegal, yes. You are allowed to keep the photo but not to publish it.

Kunsturheberrechtsgesetzes (KunstUhrG) §22, first sentence: „Bildnisse dürfen nur mit Einwilligung des Abgebildeten verbreitet oder öffentlich zur Schau gestellt werden.“ (Rough translation: “Images can only be published with consent of the depicted.”)

Here’s the whole text (German): http://dejure.org/gesetze/KunstUrhG/22.html

§23 lists all the exceptions:

1. Photos with some sort of historic meaning.

2. Whenever the depicted persons are merely incidental to the actual subject.

3. Photos of gatherings, demonstrations and similar such events.

4. Basically, if it’s art.

The guy in the video is dancing. Dancing is art.

Settled.

In the US this is covered under the laws r.e. Personal release rights. So, yeh, you could be sued for doing such a thing. We have a reasonable amount of trouble with this on Wikipedia.

That's ridiculous. Unless we are in a private place (like your own home, a private club, etc..)

For example, if we are in a public park, and I take your picture even against your explicit wishes, as long as I do not make any commercial profit off of it, I am pretty much free to publish it in any way I want (flicr, etc.).

If I want to sell it or profit from it in some way, you certainly have some rights. But, basically, if you are in a public place you have no privacy rights against someone taking a picture of you and publishing it.

This is not the case in the US. See: Paparazzi pictures of just about any celebrity ever.

There is a different standard for celebrities in the US, probably everywhere.

Yes - they fall under "public figure" clauses, and lose a lot of their right to privacy.

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