I went through my list again on Courtlistener (if someone has a PACER
account, please contribute more relevant documents). Philpot seems to
have rushed to voluntarily dismiss a number of cases at the end of April
2019.
Possibly not coincidental, this happened mere days after the judgement
in Philpot v. WOS. So, maybe a good precedent helps reduce confusion and
litigation.
That is (surprisingly for Texas?) the most balanced of the Philpot cases
I've seen so far.
<https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.txwd.938619/gov.uscourts.txwd.938619.43.0.pdf>
Luckily the judge has not followed the steps of some obscenely bad
previous cases. You find everything you may expect:
* earning just 10 $ in ads from an article make the usage prima facie
commercial;
* a concert photo is probably original;
* you probably can't copy an entire photo verbatim and then claim the
usage was insubstantial;
* that the photographer is usually a volunteer with no income from his
work is relevant but doesn't make his copyright unactionable;
* it can matter if you at least try to give reasonable attribution, for
instance with a link to the file description;
* you can't just speculate on the other person's practices and motives
to get their copyright registration or other right summarily invalidated.
So, let's pick some suitable precedents with reasonable conclusions as
example to inform contributors and reusers about their rights and the
(often very simple) steps which help stay safe. For instance, it's clear
that linking back the file description on Commons never harms, even if
it might not be sufficient.
Federico
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