All of the articles in OTB are made public, and yet you still retain copyright over them. If CNN decided to reproduce one of your articles in full without your consent and without attribution, would you be okay with that?

No, that'd clearly be theft. News sources do frequently print excerpts of my work and attribute it to me, which is fair use. And, if they decided to include my public bio photo as an illustration of a story about me, I wouldn't feel wronged in any way.

Again, if Ashley Alexandra Dupre had a portfolio of nude photos, suddenly made more valuable by the fact that she was newsworthy, and sites started posting them to make money, she'd have a legit claim. But there's no way in which her copright to these images has been diminished by their publication in the news. If anything, they've been enhanced.

Someone who is recognizable on a picture, even if taken in a public place, can stop publication if their interests (privacy or, with famous people, commercial intrests) outweight the added value of the portrait to the news.

IANAL, but she'd probabely lose the case, since in view of the money paid for her services her looks would be important for the newsvalue. But since someone generalized about who owns the right to publish a picture I thought I'd add the info.

If you put a photo up on MySpace, it’s public unless you make it available only to friends, in which case it’s private.

Making something available for public viewing does not grant the public any copyright over the work, not in print media, and not online.

All of the articles in OTB are made public, and yet you still retain copyright over them. If CNN decided to reproduce one of your articles in full without your consent and without attribution, would you be okay with that?

That means a copyright holder can sell something once, because once it’s used in a public fashion anybody can take it an re-use it without paying.

There are many definitions of "public" and we're mixing them. I'm talking about public goods as distinguished from private goods rather than public accommodations versus private space.

If you put a photo up on MySpace, it's public unless you make it available only to friends, in which case it's private. That doesn't mean I can resell Dupre's images out of context -- she still holds the copyright for that purpose -- but that I should be able to use them to engage in non-defamatory speech about her.

Movies shown in a theater are clearly private in that sense. They're made available for a single viewing to those who have purchased a ticket. But, if they put a copy of the trailer on YouTube and allow embedding, it's public and websites can use them as part of a discussion of the movie.

I can't take the TIME cover art and resell it because it's commercial work being sold by TIME. I should, however, be able to use a lower resolution and smaller version of the cover, with logos and so forth intact, to illustrate a piece I'm writing about TIME or something in that issue. For that matter, people are free to use the cover for purposes of parody.

Dupree is a public figure now and the images are indeed newsworthy.

George Bush is a public figure, that doesn't mean that any media outlet can take my picture of him and use it in their reporting without paying me for it. The argument doesn't seem to be that the media can't display her picture, the argument seems to be that the media didn't pay the photographer for the rights to use the picture they used.

It seems to me that when a copyright holder puts images in a public forum, that should render them public domain for the purposes of news reporting and commentary.

So any picture on the cover of Time magazine should be in the public domain? Any advertisement posted on a billboard should be public domain? Why stop there, how about broadcast video, once it's broadcast it's public domain. Or once a movie is presented in a public theater, it's public domain. That means a copyright holder can sell something once, because once it's used in a public fashion anybody can take it an re-use it without paying. Is that what you were implying, or did your statement just come out wrong?

"displaying an advertisement on your profile, or accepting payment or anything of value from a third person in exchange for your performing any commercial activity on or through the MySpace Services on behalf of that person, such as placing commercial content on your profile, posting blogs or bulletins with a commercial purpose, selecting a profile with a commercial purpose as one of your "Top 8" friends, or sending private messages with a commercial purpose;"

She has (or had) a link to the web site where her song is sold, and she has profited from it. It could be established whether or not she had sent private messages for the purpose of selling her song.

Unless she has been charged with a crime (and even then under presumption of innocence I am not sure how that would apply), then what has she done to make herself a public figure. If you say that because the news papers write about her, she thus is a public figure and loses certain legal rights that others have, then you have created a circular logic argument. The definition of a public figure becomes anyone the press wants to write about. Great for the press, not so good for average citizens.

I have to admit that given her career choice, she is not a sympathetic plaintiff. But then, that is the theory behind a lot of the tough cases that you look at the right/crime, not the person.

Hey, Buchwald: Your client is a whore. She was peddling that stuff to the highest bidder. And since prostitution is a crime, Ashley Alexandra Dupre's "revealing" photos -- to the extent that they were used to advertise her illegal services -- were a...