Privacy of photographed subjects: Whose right is it anyway?

“Australia must begin to seriously consider the law-reform question of how best to protect the private rights of photographed subjects (now even St Kilda footballers might have an interest in the proposals!).”

Or so says an article by Jessica Lake a doctoral student at Melbourne University in her thesis “Privacy and the Pictures” published in today’s SMH. The article after making interesting comments on the development of privacy law issues with respect to photographs particularly of women, looks at the use and misuse of pictures on Facebook and at issues around images of women as they have developed in the US the article goes on to assert that:

“One approach is to tackle ‘privacy’ law reform, but we could also look more closely at the operation of property law, particularly copyright, that automatically awards rights to an image to the photographer, rather than the individual photographed. Why shouldn't these ‘scantily clad’ women be able to assert property rights for the images of themselves that seem to remain so inexhaustibly fascinating?”

Do you think that property law in the form of copyright in the subject of the photograph rather than the photographer is a solution to the problem of images being misused?

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