Legal Issues
As a photographer, you are confronted with many legal questions without always being directly aware of it.
This section compiles the most important aspects but can by no means be exhaustive. Furthermore, we at Tiger Graphics can only outline what the individual topics are about, but we cannot provide legally binding phrasing or information.
The most important aspects of photography law when taking pictures are:
- Copyright, which states that the image you capture belongs to you and you have the right to determine its use.
- The right to one’s own image, which states that you may only publish or distribute photos of individuals if they have consented. This does not apply if individuals were captured incidentally, for example in a landscape shot or at a concert. It also does not apply to figures of contemporary history, such as politicians.
- Freedom of panorama, which states that you may photograph buildings and permanent works, such as monuments, from public streets and pathways, and publish those images, provided you do not use aids like ladders or drones.
- Property and house rights, which state that owners of private buildings, businesses, or museums can determine whether and with what equipment photography is permitted there. For example, a concert organizer can ban the use of (certain) cameras and enforce such a ban.
When reading these aspects, you quickly realize that there are many gray areas regarding what is allowed and what is not:
- Are you just not allowed to publish photos, or do individuals have to explicitly consent to being photographed? Is a friendly smile sufficient, or do you need written consent? Does such consent include the editing of the image and its publication?
- When is a person considered merely “incidental” and when not?
- Who qualifies as a figure of contemporary history and who does not?
To clarify all these questions, lawyers are required, and the judiciary is well occupied with disputes over precisely these points. And to make it even more complicated: different laws apply in different countries. What is permitted here in Germany might not be allowed in other countries at all. And some things that are permitted in other countries (e.g., USA or UK) are completely out of the question in the EU and Germany.
In addition, there are many legal questions regarding the use of external images, such as the image at the top of this section. If you want to display images by other photographers as part of an exhibition or on a website, you need permission to use them. This also applies to illustrations like the ones found in this photography guide. The image in this section is subject to a license that explicitly permits its use; the illustrations in this photography guide were created by Tiger Graphics using TikZ under LaTeX. But even here, legal questions arise:
- Is a graphic that you redraw 1:1 from a graphic you saw considered your own work or not?
- Am I allowed to publish my own images elsewhere if I have, for example, sold them to a publisher?