PhotoLegal asks Home Secretary to drop s44

I’ve written asking her to drop the appeal against the European Court’s decision and to abolish or reform s44 to make sure we can all go about our lawful business of taking photographs in public places without fear of harrassment.

An unhealthy society?

How have we allowed ourselves to become so narrow minded to make an embarrassed grandfather feel obliged to delete his innocently taken photos fearing he has been labelled a predatory paedophile?

Photo Competition: Freedom – Results

The competition has now closed, and we’re pleased to announce that the winner of the canvas that has been generously donated by canvasRus is Kelly Cole. Congratulations to Kelly for her image ‘The freedom of an empty beach and the open sea …. pure bliss!’.

Have Britain’s Police become an instrument of terror?

The British Journal of Photography has today published the results of 46 freedom of information requests that they made to every police force in the UK asking if the force have requested authorisation to use S44 of the Terrorism Act 2000 to stop and search people without suspicion to prevent terrorism.

The exercise has revealed that every police force in the UK has requested use of the powers at some point, with the sole exception of Derbyshire. Even more disturbing is the attitude of some forces to the request, including Cambridgeshire who even had the temerity to suggest that BJP itself could be a terrorist organisation!

PhotoLegal LIVE! We’re almost there.

In just ten hours time we kick off series 2 of PhotoLegal and we’re putting the finishing touches to plans which we hope will allow us to bring this series to you live!

We’re trialling the system tonight, so the live webcast will be exclusive to just 50 listeners.

Hot News: A new Day dawns for PhotoLegal

Well, we’re gearing up for a second series of PhotoLegal, and we’re really chuffed at the response to series 1 (almost 10,000 downloads).

Series 2 will have a new co-host. Kate Day from the Telegraph, who you will no doubt be aware joined us in episodes 3 and 7 of series 1 as a guest, is joining James, Phill and me to bring you your fortnightly digest of news and discussion about the legal issues which affect us as photographers. We’re putting out a news release today (text below), but wanted you to be the first to know.

Want to write for PhotoLegal?

If you’ve got a perspective on legal issues facing photographers that you’d like to write about for PhotoLegal, please get in touch with us via the contact page. We’ll be happy to let you write an initial post, then if readers like what you do, we’ll give you an ongoing contributor login so you can write occasionally when you have something to say.

Photo Competitions – Petition to the Prime Minister

Our next episode when we return in September will be a discussion on rights grabs by photo competitions and we’ll be joined by a representative of Pro-imaging – an organisation which is currently running a campaign to identify competitions which harvest rights from photographers. They have published an ‘Artists Bill of Rights’ which sets out uses which they consider to be reasonable use of images entered into competitions and encourage competition organisers to write their terms and conditions to comply with it.

Episode 7 will be a questions special, then we’re taking a break

Episode 7, to be recorded on Thursday 16 July and released on Tuesday 21 July, will be a questions special. Ask us anything you want about photography, legal or otherwise and we’ll do our best to answer.

All change on the PhotoLegal Express

We’ve now recorded five episodes of PhotoLegal and released four. It’s been a successful enterprise beyond our wildest dreams, with over 1,000 downloads each time an episode is added. We’re really very grateful to you, our listeners, for the support you’ve shown.

Now that our processes have settled down, we need to make some changes. We hope these will improve your listening experience and access to information, although please feel free as ever to let us know in the comments if this is not the case.