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Hey! You Can't Take Pictures In Here!Hey! You Can't Take Pictures In Here!
USA Today has an interesting article for people who found digital cameras under their Christmas Trees; it's a <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2005-12-29-camera-laws_x.htm">guide to the laws about taking and publishing photos.</a> It comes down to: If you can see it without a telephoto lens (and usually even <i>with</i> a telephoto lens), you can photograph it and publish it. Mostly.
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USA Today has an interesting article for people who found digital cameras under their Christmas Trees; it's a guide to the laws about taking and publishing photos. It comes down to: If you can see it without a telephoto lens (and usually even with a telephoto lens), you can photograph it and publish it. Mostly.That applies even if you trespassed to get your photo--the law can nail you for trespassing, but not for taking and publishing the picture.
Mostly. There are exceptions, many of them having to do with privacy, defamation and, of course, security.
These days, publishing photos is something many ordinary citizens do when posting to a photo-sharing site like Flickr and Snapfish.
A blogger I know shot a picture in an office building. One of the tenants had boxes of medical records sitting around in an unlocked office, visible from the hall. He published a picture of the boxes, which started a little brouhaha: He didn't have permission from the building's landlord, someone said, so he wasn't allowed to take or publish the photos.
That turns out not to be the case.
What I discovered is that a lot of people have ideas - often very clear ones - of what is legal and what isn't, based on anything from common sense to wishful thinking to "I always heard…"
Trouble is, they aren't always right. If you've got a digital camera and like to shoot in public, it pays to know the real deal.
Via Lifehacker.
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