This lesson covers copyright infringement and asks students whether certain situations are fair or not in the warmup. I have added one more with a relevant topic that might attract middle school minds: You take a picture with a brand name in it, and the brand uses it as an advertisement on their instagram.
Ariana Grande has been sued twice by the same photographer due to her putting up pictures of her wearing her brand with links to her store, without crediting or reaching out to him. A lot of people get upset by this, since it is a photo of her, but it is a great and relevant example of how copyright works!
good catch. There are a lot of things out there like this. One of my favorites that I use is the selfie that Ellen Degeneres took at the Oscars. Never a legal issue, but it could have been and there is a lot of complexity resulting from a spur of the moment 10 second selfie.
And like many of these issues, the lawsuits either disappear or are settled out of court and case law is hard to find. Even the Digital Millenium Copyright Act has been largely untested in court.
Even the famous monkey selfie resulted in an out of court settlement where the photographer whose camera was snatched by the monkey to take a selfie agreed to donate some of the proceeds to a charity as a result of profiting from the photo taken by the monkey who stole his camera.