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He published the image online, publicly, himself. It's kind-a hard for him to claim it's violating his privacy.

EU privacy laws does not work that way.

EDIT: To expand slightly: That you have published something yourself, in one context, does not automatically imply that publication in others contexts is ok. It may be sufficient in this case, because the article is hardly all that controversial, but you can not automatically assume that publication implies consent for publication elsewhere.

I wish people would give more consideration to this (whether they are legally required to or not).

> you can not automatically assume that publication implies consent for publication elsewhere.

I'm not automatically assuming that - the guy explicitly licensed his photo as CC-By-Sa - I don't think any reasonable person would assume that means "don't republish" or "republish, but only where I approve"!

First of all, I was responding to your statement that publication in one context is sufficient to imply that there's no privacy issue. It is not that clear cut - privacy is not binary.

The recent controversy over the "right to be forgotten" is a good illustration: The "right to be forgotten" is not something that is explicitly part of law, but the result of an interpretation of EU privacy rights and the interplay with freedom of expression. The outcome of which was a judgement to allow people to reduce the level of exposure of information even when that information was already out there, and despite deciding that removing the information from the source in that case was going too far.

Secondly, copyright is by no means the only law that governs your ability to publish something, and in Europe "any reasonable person" ought to at least consider that depending on their specific country and specific circumstances they may run afoul of one or more other laws if they republish without checking with the photographer and subjects in the case of photographs that includes people.

The license only governs the rights to reproduce the image, but depending on other laws and situations, privacy rights, moral rights (droit d'auteur/authors rights) and portrait rights may all come into play (moral rights belong to the author (photographer); portrait rights lie with the subject - both are usually non-transferrable in the countries that recognise them; basic moral rights are explicitly recognised by the Berne convention).

Actually, Berne Convention and thus copyright covers this under the description Moral rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights).

In the US, slander and libel is mostly used to cover this. For example, the publishers are liable if they cause harm to the reputation of the photographer or anyone in the pictures.

It was more difficult than I thought it would be to counter your argument, as there hasn't been a judgement on the exact same circumstances, so I think downvoting you is unjustified. But I still think your legal reasoning is flawed.

First, "It is not clear whether or not the right under copyright law to copy an image is always sufficient to give you a right to publish the image" is misleading - yes copyright does cover the right to publish, what you're getting at is the special protection of the publication of people's images.

Secondly, looking at it from this angle, the Von Hannover judgements of the ECHR provide a number of criteria for judging the lawfullness of publication. One of them is the earlier behaviour of the person in consideration, from which (given the circumstances of him publishing the picture himself) it is easily derived that this publishing cannot reasonably be considered unlawful. Also the other criteria (is the publication harmful, circumstances the picture were taken etc) don't point at anything that would indicate that whoever published this picture, did so unlawfully. When you look at previous judgements of the ECHR, it is highly unlikely that a case would even be admitted because it seems self-evident that the person depicted didn't think through the effects of putting his picture online and/or doesn't like who is re-publishing his picture. Which is not a valid legal argument.

FWIW yes I have a law degree but have never practiced.

> But I still think your legal reasoning is flawed.

I did not make a legal reasoning. I pointed out that the issue is not clear.

> Secondly, looking at it from this angle, the Von Hannover judgements of the ECHR provide a number of criteria for judging the lawfullness of publication.

You can't only look at the ECHR, as the ECHR is not itself law and the national laws implementing it in each state subject to it differ greatly. The ECHR is relevant because it is the source of most of this legislation, but as long as the national laws implementing the principles are not in conflict with the ECHR, the can - and often does - add additional restrictions. Which is why I pointed out that the issue is not clear and that simply pointing to the license is insufficient.

As I pointed out, in the UK (which I used as an example only because I live here) it is clear that copyright is insufficient to control your right to publish. In fact, in addition to the Human Rights Act, the Data Protection Act and the Copyright, Design and Patents Act both add additional restrictions that may prevent or limit publication beyond copyright. I don't know the extent of legal restrictions in the rest of Europe.

I'm not sure what we're arguing any more - if it's 'is in abstract terms copyright the only legal protection of content distribution' then the answer is an unsurprising and boring 'of course not'.

But if we're talking about this specific case, there is a) copyright, and b) the additional rights of those depicted in a (potentially) copyrighted work, which in terms of the ECHR boils down to art 8 vs art 10. (privacy vs freedom of speech). Which, as I argued before, when measured against the criteria the ECHR laid out for the application and interpretation of the European Convention on Human Rights, can only be reasonably explained one way in the current case.

More specifically, I do not see how national legislation can, in this case, give the GP any right to ask the website that uses his picture to take it down while still be within the bounds that the Court laid out in previous rulings.

Of course I'm just typing here between compiles with a quick Google left and right to roughly check the general validity of what I'm saying, so I did not do an extensive study on the implementations of various relevant laws in all signatories to the ECHR. So if you have any national legislation that you think would give the GP a case, and that would hold up when brought before the ECHR would be held in compliance with the Convention, then we can proceed from there.

You seem to be talking about something totally different.

How am I talking about something totally different?

Your comment implied that simply looking at the license was sufficient to determine whether or not there is a right to publish, and that is not always the case. All I did was point out that other rights also comes into play.

> The European Convention on Human Rights, Article 8 grants a right to privacy.

The Fourth Amendment grants "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures", except that it doesn't, as evidenced by "Aggressive police take hundreds of millions of dollars from motorists not charged with crimes": http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/investigative/2014/09/06/st...

The moral of the story here is that laws don't actually grant any rights. The rights we have are not bestowed upon us by governments, but are inherent to all of us by virtue of being human.

Laws don't apply to the ruling class and their cronies and enforcers. You need to see that there's no room for doubting that claim anymore. Not after zero Wall Street bigwigs have gone to jail for wrecking the world's economy, and not when police officers are actively just plain looting people.

Words on a piece of paper somewhere don't magically prevent people with political power from abusing you in the here and now.

EDIT: Downvoters? Care to tell me how I'm wrong?

I don't really see how people have down-voted you other than the fact that they don't agree with your opinion and I really don't think that should be an excuse to just grey out someone's opinion unless it is downright stupid/misinformed/ or extremely offensive.

Is it not better to have the opinion visible and actually have a constructive argument about that vs down-voting it to the point at it is barely readable.

+1 for you, Good Sir :)

Presumably you were downvoted because the comment completely derails from what was under discussion. (EDIT: For what it's worth, I didn't downvote you, but I did think it was a bit of a weird digression)

And while I agree with you in theory that "laws don't "actually grant any rights", that's a matter of ideology. For all practical intents, they do.

E.g. in the specific case of the European Convention on Human Rights, it has the effect of granting rights by preventing signatories that have subordinated themselves to it from enforcing laws that try to take those rights away. The UK for example, have had parts of terror legislation struct down as a result, and have complied.

Sure, it was a bit of a weird digression. But I figured it would be useful to you.

> And while I agree with you in theory that "laws don't "actually grant any rights", that's a matter of ideology. For all practical intents, they do.

Practical intents? Well, here's a practical example: if laws actually affected/defined rights, then the government could just pass a law that says "it's alright to kill innocent bystanders", and people would have no problem with it.

But we both know people would consider such a law illegitimate (and insane), exactly because passing a law that says it's alright to kill people doesn't actually make it moral to do so. In other words, rights are not defined by laws, even in practice.

> it has the effect of granting rights by preventing signatories that have subordinated themselves to it from enforcing laws that try to take those rights away

So once a government signs a paper that says X, it can't sign another paper that says not-X? Or alternatively, if a government promises it'll be good, it can't then be bad?

If government A promises to be good, but is bad, will governments B, C and D then invade A to force it to be good? Or will they go give A a stern talking to? Or will they perhaps impose economic sanctions that hurt their own economies too?

You see, signing a law that says a government will be good is nothing but PR, in practice.