Can a person get in trouble for using an altered photo ID? I am not 18 yet, actually 17. And I found this awesome way to make money online, but it requires you to be at least 18 years of age. The website asks for a photo of your ID at the registration. So I changed a 9 to an 8 in my DoB on a photo of my passport. Can I get into any sort of trouble for using this slightly adjusted photo of an ID? (I personally believe that I won't since I don't have any bad intentions, I'm doing it just for the sake of making a bit money online for myself.) I'm just not sure if it could count as forgery (since I've photoshopped it myself) or any type of misdemeanor. EDIT: How about if I use ID from another country?
Your passport is not yours, it is owned by the government and altering it, even in a digital copy, is a serious crime. For example, passport fraud in Australia attracts a penalty of 10 years jail or a fine of 1,000 penalty units (currently $180,000).
It doesn't really require anything beyond your say-so that it is what you say it is; that would be enough to satisfy the requirement for authentication. From there though, as with any evidence, it's going to be up to a jury to decide how much weight to give the evidence. So the more you can show them to prove that the record is real -- and to knock down any questions the opposing party will raise -- the more likely they are to believe it. So if you just bring a printout that looks like it could easily have been forged, the jury may be thinking about that. If you can bring in a data forensics expert to say the document couldn't have been faked, that's probably going to help. Addendum: As a practical matter, I wouldn't expect this to be much of an issue. Unless you're dealing with a savvy opposing party, the authenticity of e-mails seems to be generally assumed. Courts (1) generally assume that parties aren't perpetrating frauds; and (2) are generally run by judges with little to no technical savvy, who don't realize that one could forge an e-mail, let alone all the different ways it could be done. I've personally entered countless e-mail printouts without them being questioned, even though either party could have just gone down into the e-mail thread and changed what the other side had said earlier in the conversation. To avoid the issue, though, it might be that sending the e-mail to a Gmail account would elimimate the question.
You have a contract - they have fulfilled their obligation (they paid you), if you do not fulfil their obligation (not to post it online) then you are in breach of the contract. Your obligation continues even if you gift the money back to them. If you breach the contract then they can sue you for the damage that they suffer. Presumably this would be damage to their reputation and for a public figure this could run into millions of dollars. In demanding additional money from them beyond what you are legally entitled to you are, at least, flirting with the crime of extortion/blackmail. This would not be a matter for them to sue you for, it would be a matter for the DA to prosecute if they chose to make a complaint. There doesn't seem to be a defamation issue here because you are not stating anything that isn't true. Now, the extent of the agreement appears to prohibit you posting it on the internet, however, the spirit of the agreement is that you will keep the information secret in all respects - that is likely how a court would look at it. Of course, if someone does steal the information from you then you haven't broken the agreement but you would probably have to prove that it was stolen when they sue you.
There are several legal issues regarding this kind of image manipulation. Copyright The first is Copyright. From the description, the modified images are derivative works. Making or distributing derivative works requires the permission of the holder of the copyright on the original (source) work. Some open source licenses (such as the Creative Commons licenses that do not include an ND clause) grant such permission in advance. Otherwise permission must be requested from, and granted by, the copyright holder or the holder's agent. In the absence of permission this is copyright infringement. If advertised widely for a fee, a copyright suit is more likely, and might result in sizable damages. The holder might not grant permission, or might charge a fee. A lack of any answer from the holder must be treated as a &quot;no&quot;. Right of Publicity In some jurisdictions a person has a &quot;right of publicity&quot; in his or her own image or likeness. This generally means that photos or images of the person cannot be used commercially without permission from the subject. In some places this right is limited to the use of such images in advertising, not as art subjects themselves. I don't know the extent of such rights in England and Wales, or elsewhere in the UK. In the US this varies by state. But if such rights apply, use of such images without permission can result in a suit and significant damages. Defamation If showing an image of a person with added tattoos would tend to bring that person into disrepute, or make others think badly of that person, for example if the added tattoos were Nazi or gang symbols, then distributing such an altered image might be defamation. This would only apply if people actually thoguht the tattoos indicated that person's choice or attitude, or if reasonable people might think so. Conclusion Before making this a business, even a hobby business, one would do well to consult a lawyer with IP expertise. There are significant legal risks here, which are increased by doing this for profit, and advertising it on the net. It might well be that in many cases appropriate permissions can be obtained free or cheaply, but it is not safe to assume this.
I recognize your difficulty, and I'm not sure about the formal legality of it (which would go to the materiality of the alteration, which if material would probably be a presentation of a false document to a TSA officer). But more practically, when you present your boarding pass and ID to the TSA officer before going through security, their system checks your boarding pass against the boarding pass in the computer system. If those don't match, you are sent back to the ticketing desk. My wife and I had to do this on a recent trip simply because folding up our boarding passes to put them in my wallet caused smudging that was enough to cause the TSA system to conclude that our boarding passes weren't in the system. This also triggered heightened bag searches and pat down searches for both of us going through security the second time around. In your shoes, I'd try my chances with a TSA officer accepting the ID v. boarding pass mismatch with your brief explanation instead. Due to the limitations of airline software, discrepancies between IDs and boarding passes are common enough for reasons like the inability of airline software to handle two word surnames, very short surnames, hyphens, and apostrophes.
As long as you are not claiming to be this celebrity, which would be impersonation, then you are not doing anything wrong or illegal. Since it is your own name, you can use it.
The part about "If I'm the owner of the content, surely I have the right to request its deletion" is the problem. Sure, you have the right to request, but you can't legally compel. You have an agreement with them, according to which you got something, and they got something. You can't then take back the thing that you gave them, which is permission to use. You didn't give them the IP itself, which you still hold. Here's an analogy. You may own a car, and can give a person permission to use the car (let's say "if you bring me back a pound of cheese from the store"). You cannot later change your mind (especially after you've gotten the cheese) a say that you retract that permission and therefore they actually stole your car. When permission to use is given, as long as the conditions for granting permission are satisfied, you can't un-give permission.
BAD idea It is one thing to upload the phonebook and associated pictures for use of the owner of the phonebook. It isn't a fair use of the phonebook pictures - and you might not have a license anyway, as some people associate photos with numbers that they don't have a license to associate with anyway. But what if instead of a photo of the person, the first photo someone associated with the person is a photo of something like... crack cocaine, a photo of someone in a very compromising situation, just genitals, or some other thing that is just as tasteless or possibly criminal to share? In that case, your company is possibly committing defamation, and in case sharing or possessing of the image itself is illegal, your company is now the actor and liable. Depending on the content of the picture, distribution of pornographic material (possibly even underage material of that sort) could be up that alley just as much as hate speech through symbols, usage of banned symbols (such as swastikas in Gernamy) and many many others.