11/06/2025
Today friends, we learn a little bit about copyright.
About two weeks ago, I got an email from a company in Germany called RightsDefend (formally known as Copytrack also known as RD Legal GmbH...they need to change their name every now and then for some reason🙄). Anyhoo...they accused me of illegally downloading one of their clients photos and using it on MY webpage. Fun fact: this is not our webpage and we have absolutely no way of posting to this webpage...that, again, is not ours. Imagine running a gopher museum for five years and not having dozens of your own photos. We do...lots of them. I knew this was shady as one of the photos they claim I downloaded, is one I would never use for social media. I reported to them the above. Not our webpage, no access to post on said webpage. They did not care and insisted we pay $750 Euros (times two photos=$1500 Euros) for the use of their clients photos or retroactively pay the licensing fee which was slightly cheaper.
We have had many people photograph inside the museum and welcome that they do so for their own PERSONAL USE. People who take photos for commercial purposes (to make profit from) for things like books, magazines, tv shows, require a contract or permissions authorizing them to shoot in our facility. This is standard and every photographer, videographer, cameraperson, influencer (making profit) knows this. We weigh each request on its own merits. It is part of being in business. If National Geographic needs a release form, so does everybody! I requested to see their clients signed contract with us (it does not exist) as well as a financial statement listing the income said client made from selling our images. They have failed to produce these items yet continue to harass me. You will also note the cite German law, not Canada's This company does not seem to have the best reputation according to online searches. This company has shown negligence, falsely accusing us of copyright infringement on an not owned or operated by us. They have demonstrated no professionalism or accuracy in verifying their claims, instead attempting to intimidate and extort us based on false information.
I have filed a complaint with the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre and will file in Berlin as well. If it persists, we will seek local help for defamation, extortion, and harassment. Their practices are reckless and lack integrity.
This does not mean that we should not take copyright seriously. It's a thing. If a professional or even layperson takes a photo of the Mona Lisa and copyrights it, that image belongs to them. A photo of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre...that is another story, and the museum may have a claim. There are many images that are not copyrighted and available to be used by anyone....look for those ones when you take an image off the internet. It gets more confusing.
Again, I will use Mona. She is a few hundred years old which means she is public domain, thus not subject to copyright, and you can be freely reproduce her. Copyright is complicated, especially for museums that are not necessarily the artists, but holders of the art. In Canada, copyright lasts for 70 years after the death of the last surviving author/artist. If the photographer simply took a photo of an exhibit, they might have a right to that photo. What makes the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum unique in this is that all of the displays were CREATED not just assembled with other peoples stuff. All feature unique artwork in the dioramas. Anthropomorphic taxidermy and miniatures (if not mass produced or copied from another source) are considered individualized art just like a sculpture. None of the artists involved in creating our dioramas have been gone for 70 years...many are still here. This equates to the photographer VIOLATING OUR COPYRIGHT. They had no legal authority to photograph anything in our museum and certainly none to profit from those actions.
We have had a policy for decades and a copy is posted in the museum, but we will be adding it to our social media and webpage to avoid confusion. In conclusion, you can indeed be sued for using someone's photo or art work if it violates copyright law. Are all companies representing copyright on the up and up? Probs not. Be careful out there folks.
As always...our crowd-funder because its growing moths https://www.zeffy.com/en-CA/donation-form/save-the-world-famous-gopher-hole-museum
