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Comment by yellowbkpk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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