Stock Photos - Copyright - Free Or Not?

The Sub-District Judge at the Noord-Holland Court issued an interesting decision in April 2017. A Dutch car company had placed a stock photo of a temperature gauge on its website, without permission. The stock firm, Masterfile, then formally warned the car company to cease this copyright infringement and demanded that they pay €3,200 for the unauthorised use of the photo. Not likely. It ended up in court. The Sub-District Judge held that there was absolutely no copyright on the photo. The car company won and Masterfile had to pay the costs of the proceedings (€7,294.92). This is a remarkable finding. It's a rare occurrence for a judge to find that a photo has no copyright protection, no matter how boring the subject matter of the image might be. Judges often find that the photographer's creative choices in relation to composition, lighting, exposure, white balance, shutter speed and so on all justify copyright protection, provided that the photo is sufficiently original