More Copyright Basics: Don’t Be Cheap, Be Thorough

Let’s say you run a company, possibly even one that might be the most valuable company in history, and you’d like to make use of scarpe basket jordan a particular copyrighted image in marketing one of your products. The right thing, the smart thing, and the sane thing to do is to properly license that image, and to make sure that you have secured all the necessary rights to use it…. right?

Well, evidently, in just such a situation, Apple recently did not do the right, smart and/or sane thing. What it did was use the image in a way that the company had (allegedly) already promised NOT to use it.

As reported on PatentlyApple.com, Apple requested a high definition of an image created by Sabine Liewald for layout purposes only, and was “fully aware at all times that it had not acquired any rights to use the photograph in advertisements without obtaining additional permission from Plaintiff or Factory Downtown.”

Apparently, someone in Apple’s marketing department missed the memo, because, as the Patently Apple post relates:

Despite representing that it did not intend to use the photo and knowing that it had not obtained a license, Apple proceeded to copy, publish, and exploit Plaintiff’s photograph, including in its MacBook Pro advertising campaign, keynote addresses and related advertising materials without permission or compensation.

To be fair, Apple is an enormous company, and the allegedly infringing use of this image may well have resulted from poor communication within the company — but shouldn’t someone involved in the process of crafting their keynote addresses and related advertising materials have asked, somewhere along the line, “have we secured all the rights we need to all the images included in this presentation?”

There are many lessons to be learned from this Apple mishap, not the least of which is: “Don’t Be Cheap; Be Thorough.” One should never assume that all the legal ducks are in a row when it comes to using third-party content, particularly since defending yourself in a lawsuit is likely to be a lot more expensive than licensing a photograph.http://www.scarpe2016jordan.it/