ABSTRACT
This article explores how profound technological developments in photography have problematised concepts of the photograph, authorship, and originality in Australian copyright law. Radical technological change has resulted in highly automated and ubiquitous photographs, inviting questions about what constitutes a ‘photograph’ as defined in the Australian Copyright Act, when a photograph is sufficiently original, and how the definition of an ‘author’ of a photograph as the person who ‘took’ it should be interpreted. The paper is the first to analyse these issues, ameliorating the relative dearth of serious scholarly investigation of the contemporary photograph under Australian copyright law and a paucity of judicial attention. The article considers the meaning of ‘photograph’ and ‘photography’ under the Australian Copyright Act and how software and explains how new practices in a ‘post-photography’ world challenge those concepts. It then explores photographic originality and investigates how increasingly automated modes of photography diminish if not eviscerate originality in contemporary photography. The article then focuses on photographic authorship, interrogating the statutory definition of the author of a photograph as ‘the person who took it’. The article proposes a number of copyright law reform suggestions to better align copyright law with contemporary photographic technological developments and artistic practice.
McCutcheon, Jani, Point and Shoot: Originality, Authorship, and the Identification of the Copyright Work in Modern Photography (August 19, 2020).
First posted 2020-10-09 04:53:46
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