A ruling by the Court of Rome could soon limit the range of action of newspapers which have increasingly resorted to social media in recent years to find images. Apparently this practice adopted so far by newspapers is not correct at all since, according to the IX section of the Court of Rome, the publication of photos on Facebook on the page of whoever took them "does not involve the complete transfer of photographic rights".
The freedom to use the contents published by users with the 'Public' setting "does not in fact concern the contents covered by users' intellectual property rights, with respect to which the only license is the non-exclusive and transferable one granted to Facebook".
On the basis of this important principle, established by the IX section of the Court of Rome, the author of some photos, assisted by Studio Lipani Catricalà & Partners, he obtained compensation from a newspaper that had published the photos themselves without any authorization.
The Capitoline section of the Court, specialized in business and intellectual property matters, in fact, recognized the indemnifiability of both the pecuniary damage and the moral damage connected to the failure to recognize the paternity of the photographs and, therefore, established the existence of a prejudice caused by the publication of the photos without the authorization of the author and without the indication of his name.
The case arises from the publication of some photos in the personal Facebook page of a young photographer taken by himself in a well-known Roman disco. The photos had then appeared, unbeknownst to the author, in a national newspaper accompanying a series of journalistic articles, relating to the phenomenon of frequenting night clubs by young people and, subsequently, also reused by some programs national television.
The sentence first of all clarified that the publication of a photograph on the personal Facebook page, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, constitutes a "serious, precise and concordant presumption" of ownership of the photographic rights by the owner of the pages on which they are published. Having made this premise, the Board, having examined the license conditions of Facebook, established that "the possibility of using the information published with a 'Public' setting on the social network does not constitute a generalized license for the use and exploitation of the contents covered by intellectual property rights in favor of any third party who accesses the Facebook page". On the contrary, the freedom of use "only concerns the information and not the contents covered by intellectual property rights"
Attachments: Judgment 67932 (1).pdf
