"Lawyers generally agree that an implied license allows people to freely display their tattoos in public, including on television broadcasts or magazine covers. "<p>Seems to me that the digital representation of someone is just another way of displaying themselves. If it's legal to do it in photos and videos, it's legal to do it in 3D models.<p>But even without that, I think it's unethical to claim ownership to any part of someone else's body and tell them what they can and can't do with it. (Laws are an obvious exception to this.)
Disregarding the insanity of being able to wave your rights to a commissioned piece of artwork, that you paid for, that's attached to your body...I think we really need to rethink how video game content licencing works in the context of copyright law. This is just the current iteration of a debacle that has been ongoing since the first days of video games. Depictions of everyday things are suddenly the property of the original creator of those things, even if they are commodity items or very simplistic depictions. A good example is when video game developers have to pay gun makers to depict their weapons in games. I love FPS games but I would rather not have my money ultimately funneled into the NRA lobbying machine.
The whole point of copyright protection was to prevent someone from freely duplicating a work and thereby depriving the original artist of profit, but in the case of a tattoo, I'd argue that every artistic tattoo is so slightly different from each other and labour-intensive to create that it should really be treated as "work for hire" and the human who owns the skin also owns the tattoo on it.
Honestly if I'm playing a Basketball game the last thing I care about is the detail on tattoos, just parody them...<p>This isn't such a crucial issue at the end of the day, I don't think you should be able to copyright a tattoo, the design may change as the person ages, or gets into a crazy accident, or whatever. Heck, when they die and decompose / get cremated it's all gone.
"He is just poaching on artists"<p>This is silly.<p>No game developer or otherwise is including an athlete's Tattoo as a selling or differentiation point for a game. Said another way, nobody is buying a game in order to see Lebron's Crown tattoo. If the artwork was original and not-player specific such that a user could purchase it as DLC or something similar to place on a custom character there would certainly be a case.<p>Seems like the legal construct of body artwork not being owned, but rather licensed to the person who it was tattooed on is the problem.
This sounds ridiculous to me.<p>So if someone snaps a photo of him or he is on TV the tattooist is going to get royalties? That goes for anyone else that is tattooed as well.
"What many people don’t realize, legal experts said, is that the copyright is inherently owned by the tattoo artist, not the person with the tattoos."<p>Now this will be my argument against having tattoos :)
If I hire someone to paint a portrait, and pay him it's mine isn't it? $5 or $5 million, that was the price agreed.<p>Why is the tattoo any different?
If you hire an artist to paint a landscape for you, do you have total ownership of that painting? Could you recreate it digitally and sell it? Assume no extra rights were explicitly transferred, just a standard commission of a piece of art, whatever that entails.<p>I would have assumed that the answers to these were both yes, but this article makes me think not.
I feel intent should matter, is the intent to show the tattoo art? or to make a likeness recognizeable? Mike Tyson has a tattoo on his head, is the intent to convey a likeness of Tyson? or to sell the tattoo as a brand in itself(t shirts and such as a logo)? I mean is it fair use?
It seems like it might be a gray area (and, unfortunately as such, something the courts need to resolve) but it's disappointing that NYT did not at least broach the topic and possible applicability of the Work for Hire exception.
By this line of reasoning, companies don't own the code their engineers write either. Art collectors don't own the art they paid for. Etc. What a bunch of bullshit. Have these people not heard of work for hire? The artists were paid for their copyright (in addition to the actual manual work). They no longer own the copyright. That's the whole point of the transaction. That's the only reason money was exchanged. No one in their right mind would get a tattoo they couldn't display; something the artist could really demand if they held the copyright. Does something this obvious seriously need litigation? That is some serious misinterpretation of copyright law. As bad as our copyright laws are, they can't possibly be this bad to allow these obviously bullshit cases to stand, can they?
I'm just hoping DannyBee posts something to this thread! (He's a lawyer).<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DannyBee" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=DannyBee</a>
One of the problems is that a lot of athletes are massively tattooed currently.<p>Tattoos were used since thousands of years for a particular job (apart of decorative purposes): They excel hiding needle marks. Tattoos with a pattern of multiple repeated x6 or x5 darkened areas arranged in a star or a circle could be particularly useful to mask a weekly routine of steroids delivered around some point of interest. In that sense some designs could be better than other and became equivalent to any other industrial secret for their owner.<p>And this is only a part of the history. Tattoos showing trade marks or copyrighted art are another problem.