Digital Commons Network^™

How Photographs Infringe, Terry S. Kogan

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Courts and commentators have lavished attention on the question of what makes a photograph original and entitled to copyright protection. Far less attention has been devoted to the issue of how photographs infringe. This is the first Article to systematically explore the different ways in which a photograph can steal intellectual property. Photographs can infringe in two ways: by replication and by imitation. A photograph infringes by replication when, without permission, a photographer points her camera directly at a copyright-protected work—a sculpture, a painting, another photograph—and clicks the shutter. A photograph can also infringe by imitation. In such cases, the …