Future of signed photos in the hobby?

[seanofjapan]

The copyright to a photo belongs to whoever took the photo, who can then assign that right to somebody else through contract. I have no idea who the current holder of the copyright for most old photos is, it could still rest with the photographers themselves in some cases, or have been sold by them to big news services in other cases.

I have a lot of signed photos that I got in the 1990s of players who appeared at shows/shops, etc. Most of the time the photos were provided by dealers at the shows/shops, and they seemed like they had just been spit out of a printer. I doubt they bothered to track down the copyright owner to get permission. Probably a lot of signed photos are like that and their production constituted a copyright infringement.

In most cases its not worth the time/effort of the copyright holders to go around trying to crack down on all these unlicensed photos directly. But if you have one entity (like a photo news service or something) which has been assigned the copyright to a large number of old photos, I wouldn't be surprised if they had a lawyer who decided to use the system Ebay has to demand the removal of infringing material for sale.

I don't actually know that any such powerful copyright holder exists, or if they would make an issue of it (they wouldn't have much financial incentive to do so, but that doesn't mean they won't, lawyers representing copyright holders can be very aggressive sometimes even where it doesn't make much sense for them to be so). It is definitely a possibility I think. Proving that a specific photo is infringing might be difficult though, its not like identifying a bootleg CD where its really obvious.

The worst that would happen though would be that selling those photos on ebay might become a pain/impossible. They could still be sold elsewhere though.