Or so says an article by Jessica Lake a doctoral student at Melbourne University in her thesis “Privacy and the Pictures”. The article after making interesting comments on the development of privacy law issues with respect to photographs. (particularly photos of women), looks at the use and misuse of pictures in Social Media like Facebook and at issues around images of women as they have developed in the US.
As Lake points out “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"?
Indeed why shouldn't a ‘scantily clad’ woman be able to assert property rights for images of herself taken without permission. To quote Lake this anomaly "seem to remain so inexhaustibly fascinating?” Indeed even where the scantly clad woman is a future monarch of England caught without consent in a private moment.
The notion that people's photographic images can be used freely without little or no right to protest or prevent it seems a gross oversight by the legal system. Certainly property law in the form of copyright rather than pivacy law would seem to offer a better solution. Property being held by the subject of the photograph rather than the photographer is a solution to the problem of images being misused.
