Occasional Thoughts

Recently I've talked with a friend about the legal notice [de] with added costs against a Facebook user. A third user has posted an image of a rubber duck on that users timeline. However this image violated the copyright of a copyright owner. Yes, you've read correctly: In Germany you can be sued for a photo that someone else has posted on your Facebook timeline.

This triggered the question whether it should be allowed to sue unlicensed usages of only private usage context? Should it be allowed that private users are sued for downloading and posting picture a picture on their Facebook page?

At first I thought about that like a user and my immediate response was "no", fair, non-profit usages of images should be allowed and not be subject to legal actions.

However recently I got more and more into photography and therefore became also part of the copyright owner side. So I dug deeper into the topic and soon found critical problems around this thinking.