Is permission needed to repost others personal photos?

Question

There is this girl who has been taking personal photos of other people’s bebo and myspace pages and reposting them on her public xanga site without the owner’s permission. She refuses to take them down claiming there is nothing wrong with what she is doing.
I've always thought you needed permission and I'd be pretty pissed of if I spotted someone using my personal photos...but is she actually allowed do this?

Answer 1

YES you DO need permission.
The photo taker is generally taken to be the copyright holder (rights holder anyway) and if requested they MUST remove them

IF they do not, LEGAL ACTION can be taken.

Answer 2

You definitely need permission. Copyright law is probably one of the least understood laws by the general public.

You do not have to give any copyright notice that your photos, web pages, stories, films, etc. are copyrighted anymore. Once the item is published for public consumption, it is automatically copyrighted. So just because the photo or web page doesn't say, "Copyright 2007 by ABC corp", that doesn't mean that the author or photographer doesn't own it. If you do own such material, however, it's smart to include a notice to keep from having to deal with uninformed thieves.

In general, if you didn't take the photo, someone else owns the rights to it. There are some exceptions such as stuff that is in the "Public Domain" but that stuff is typically very old (yes, again there are a few exceptions).

If you didn't write the web page, you almost never have the right to reproduce it. If you didn't write the article or book, you almost never have the right to copy it. It's nearly always a "no-brainer".

Many people "steal" a portion of a web page because there's a section of copyright law that says you can do so if it's "fair use". That's typically used to quote an article among other purposes. Again, I've seen tons of examples where someone claiming "fair use" is obviously not in compliance with copyright law. If you think you've found some "little tricky way" to get around copyright law, you're probably mistaken.

This is an area for lawyers. If you're not an expert in copyright law, you're probably in violation of the law if you're using anything that was written, photographed, or otherwise produced by someone else.

Answer 3

Yes, she definitely does need permission for posting them, not only for posting someone else's photos, but also permission from the people in the photo. That is why sometimes a person's face is blurred out on tv, because they refused to be shown on tv.