Problem: people get naked at the Burning Man festival. People take pictures of them and post and/or sell them on the Internet.
Burning Man’s "solution": they steal the copyright (PDF) to all photos taken at the festival.
The Burning Man spokesperson says:
"Our main concern in enacting the policy was to be able to create this weeklong cultural bubble where people can express themselves without worrying about their image being plastered all over the Internet," she said, reiterating that Burning Man wants to be able to take down these images if the poster refuses.
"There are a lot of nude people out here, and this protects the school teacher from Iowa who doesn’t wasn’t want to appear on a porn site," she said. "I acknowledge that the copyright law is heavy-handed way of handling this, but it’s the only tool we have right now.
More here at The Legal Satyricon and here at XBIZ (which is a porn industry news site and may have NSFW ads).
I’m not a lawyer, but I think a saner approach would be to have a photo agreement that states that you aren’t allowed to do whatever they object to, and specify a very heavy remedy if you do it anyway.
Via Jonathan Block