By: Simrit Hans

The ownership of a 1917 watercolor by Austrian painter Egon Schiele is currently being contested in a three-way legal battle. The painting, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, was purchased by award-winning documentary filmmaker Robert Lehman in 1964 from the Marlborough Gallery in London. In 2016, Mr. Lehman transferred ownership of the work to his family’s foundation to be sold at auction. It was the auction house, Christie’s, that recognized the painting’s potentially questionable provenance and contacted Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (IKG), which represents the Jewish community of Vienna, about the painting’s history. IKG recognized Eva Zirkl as the painting’s true owner. Ms. Zirkl, who has had other works by Egon Schiele returned to her, is the heir of Karl Mayländer, a Jewish businessman and art collector who was killed during the Holocaust. The third party to the dispute over the painting consists of the Robert Reiger Trust and heirs of Heinrich Rieger, Egon Schiele’s dentist and an early collector of his work, who also died during the Holocaust.

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Photo from FaceApp

By: Justin Brascher

Lately, chances are you scrolled though social media and came across a picture of someone you know, only they looked about 50 years older. Such technology is the product of FaceApp, an app developed by the Russian company Wireless Lab. The company’s purported AI technology can take a user’s face and alter the image with a number of different filters. The most popular of these filters is the aging filter, which took social media by storm last year, becoming one of the biggest social media trends of 2019. At one point FaceApp was the number one downloaded app in the IOS app store. However, concerns over FaceApp’s privacy policy and its connections to Russia quickly took center stage.

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By: Treja Jones

With technology on the rise, it’s become easier to monitor the security of one’s property. Accordingly, more and more homeowners are installing security devices and equipment outside their homes to capture suspicious activity and prevent theft or trespass. As the use of social media outlets continues to grow, allowing people across the world to share images, videos and announcements with one another, security companies are beginning to create features that allow product-users to share recorded security footage on the internet in order to alert neighbors of potential crime. Such neighborhood watch features work to make communities safer by keeping residents in the know about potential criminals lurking around the neighborhood. But does the use of security camera technology with the ability to publicly post captured footage violate Washington privacy laws?

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Photo by Cristian Dina on Pexels.com

By: Alex Nelson

The rise of social media usage across the world has been nothing short of meteoric. Nearly thirty-percent of the 7.7 billion people on Earth use Facebook. TikTok, a social media company that launched in 2016, hit half a billion users by mid-2018. Instagram users have increased to one billion since the app’s launch in 2010. The popularity of social media has created new markets and commercial opportunities for individuals who are able to amass large numbers of followers. Celebrities typically are able to get the largest number of followers and thus have the most opportunities to monetize their social media accounts. Kylie Jenner, for example, can earn up to an estimated $1.2 million per Instagram post. Although she is certainly on the high end of the spectrum for earnings per post, it is fairly common for a celebrity to pull in around $100,000 per post.

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Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán on Pexels.com

By: Emily Donohue

Many people argue that if a person legally purchases a copyrighted good, like a book, computer, or album, they should also have the right to sell. This right was recently affirmed by the Supreme Court in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, which dealt with textbooks purchased legally in Thailand and imported to the United States. The decision in Kirtsaeng hinged on the “first sale doctrine,” which is the common copyright principle that limits a copyright owner’s ability to control the distribution of a particular copy of their work once a legal first sale has taken place.

One would assume the first sale doctrine would also apply to legally purchased digital property, however, in the 2018 case Capitol Records, LLC v. ReDigi Inc., the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a federal district court decision holding the first sale doctrine did not apply to digital music files. The decision in the ReDigi case severely limits consumers’ digital copy rights and has a chilling effect on innovation in secondary sales markets for any digital property. Continue reading →