How do laws affect photography of non-humans in public when people may be in the frame? Given that this is taking place in a public area where one would not have an expectation of privacy, what legal restrictions exist on photography of people where they are not the subject of the photograph? For instance, say that I am taking a photograph of a popular statue, and people happen to be in the frame? Assume this is in Australia; New south Wales, specifically, but I am interested in answers for other states also.
Let's put to bed the myth of privacy that is at the heart of your question: in R v Sotheren (2001) NSWSC 204 Justice Dowd said “A person, in our society, does not have a right not to be photographed.” In general, you can take photos of people; statues have even less privacy rights. There are limitations mainly related to voyeurism and commercial use, which are discussed at http://www.4020.net.
It is any law protecting me from the people that distrubute a video of me falling the stairs and shared without my permision? No. Your permission is not necessary for distributing or watching that video. The recording was from your workplace, where your entitlement to privacy is quite limited unlike few settings such as (1) your attorney's office in the course of obtaining legal advice for which the disclosure was needed, or (2) your home. Even if such an entitlement existed, your decision to share that recording with the person who was with you generally constitutes a waiver of your right to privacy regarding that incident. The waiver would apply even if California had some legislation akin to the EU's GDPR. Your description nowhere indicates that that person had a statutory or equitable duty of confidentiality. It is also highly doubtful that you would wish to block the distribution of the video if people instead of mocking you expressed something pleasant or encouraging to you. people who I don't even know their names come to me to comment about the video and joke about not falling again. That is not unlawful in and of itself. Since the matter does not involve a protected category such as sex, race, religion, or disability, pursuing a claim of hostile work environment would be quite a stretch. It would also be futile because any relief would not cover outsiders who watch the video and feel like joking about it. The notion of harassment entails a pattern of conduct (meaning that a person engages twice or more in that conduct) that causes a reasonable person to feel annoyed or concerned for his safety. Even if someone engages makes a few jokes that cause you to get annoyed, any petition for restraining orders seems unlikely to succeed. Sooner rather than later, the jokes will get old and people will move on.
What you're describing is generally permissible in the United States. The photographer has copyright in the photograph itself, not in the items photographed. This means that they have copyright in the way that they composed the photograph -- what background they placed it against, lighting, camera placement, etc. -- but not in the ancient manuscript. If you are strictly transcribing the text of the script, you're not infringing on anything that's copyrighted. If you make a sketch, there's more potential for infringement, but I suspect that you would not be working to faithfully copy the angles of the shadows as much as you would working to faithfully copy the image and condition of the artifact. Even if you were, calling that a copyright infringement would require that the image truly be copyrighted, and I'm not 100 percent convinced that they would be. Copyright is only available to original works of authorship, and that means that the author has to make some meaningful efforts to create something new out of the copyrighted elements discussed above. But what has the photographer done in that picture of the Coronation Oath? It appears that they've photographed the book head-on, as it's displayed by the museum, with lighting as provided by the museum, in an effort to recreate the display one would see while visiting the museum. Is that really sufficiently "original" to merit copyright protection that could be invoked to prevent someone from drawing a duplicate? I doubt it. But that picture of the Ge'ez book may be different. Someone appears to have grabbed the book, opened it up under weird lighting, kept their hands in the photograph, and otherwise actually composed a photograph that may not be particularly artistic, but is nonetheless difficult enough to duplicate that it can be considered original. So let's be generous to the copyright trolls and assume that the sketch you're imagining is protected. Even then, that only raises the question of whether the copy is a fair use. You haven't said anything about how the hypothetical copier would be using these materials, but I have a hunch that the idea isn't to launch a multimillion dollar merchandising enterprise. If the idea is more academic or cultural, you'd have a better claim to fair use. Again, you can review this fair-use explainer to get a better idea.
To do so I used some images and Gifs which may be under copyright but since I don't earn money for myself and there is no company backing me I was hoping that there is some protection for private persons like me who just want to showcase the project. Sorry. If your website is public facing (i.e. not password protected and available only to family and close friends), you need to follow copyright law. There is no exception to copyright just because a project is run by an individual for non-commercial purposes. I am also insecure about the GDPR regulations since I give users the ability to create an account and try it out. Your profile says you're in the EU. Then you need to comply with the GDPR. Is there any way to protect me against greedy lawyers and companies? Could I write something like: "This website is a peace of art" and save myself with arguments like "artistic freedom" or "free speech"? Nope. A controversial website run by Peter Sunde had at one point a "free speech" disclaimer (similar to the one you propose) posted. However, Sunde did never use this defense in court: Finnish court slaps Peter Sunde with €350k fine. If he had shown up in court, I am pretty sure the court would have told him that such a disclaimer has no legal merit. The only protection that will make you completely safe is to adhere to the law.
I assume these are digital photos that were electronically transferred (not prints physically delivered). If they were prints physically delivered, he owns those prints, since you used to own them but you unconditionally transferred ownership to him by giving them. No backsies under the law. The photos are protected by copyright law, which means that the person who took the pictures has the exclusive right to make copies, disseminate them, and authorize making copies. In order for anyone to make a copy, they need permission – a license – from you. In the world of pre-planned business deals, the copyright holder writes up a document granting B some right to use the protected material, which typically means "you can install it on your various devices but may not give copies to others". In this case, however, you didn't create an explicit written license. So if this ends up in court, the question is what implicit license you granted. The courts will not decide that you granted him the license to unrestrictedly sell or give away copies of the protected material. The most likely outcome would be that he can only keep his copy, i.e. he will not be forced to erase the copy that you sent him. What the courts would do is try to discern what license you most likely intended to grant to him. There is a provision in copyright law that allows a licensee to make backup copies of a computer program (17 USC 117), but a digital photo is not a computer program. So the lifespan of the copy that you sent would be the lifespan of the phone (I assume) that you sent it to. Since actually using a digital photo technically requires making a copy (from disk storage to computational memory), there is a legal direction (dead-end) that you could go where the photo could exist on the phone, but never be opened again. Again, the courts would have to discern what license you probably intended w.r.t. ever opening the photo – obviously you intended that the file could be opened / viewed any number of times. You could argue that the license which you granted was conditional, i.e. "you can have and use these pictures as long as we are a thing", but establishing that this was part of the license would be tricky. Free digital content often has some "as long as" condition attached to it, i.e. "you can use this program as long as you are affiliated with University of Whatever". I don't consider a conditional license to be a ridiculous interpretation, on the other hand the particular court (judge) might decide that people who sext should be forced to live with the unpleasant consequences of their decisions. If we exclude such a line of thinking, I don't see a compelling counter-argument that your ex-partner inequitably loses a right by construing the license as conditional. I don't know if there is any case law that addresses this: at any rate, copyright law would severely limit what he could do with the pictures (the tort "invasion of privacy" also limits dissemination).
There are several misunderstandings here. First of all, the US exclusionary rule applies only to evidence gained by the police, or by people acting as agents of the government, and not always to them. Secondly it applies only in criminal cases. The question does not say which state this would be in, and these are largely matters of state law, so it makes a difference. But I don't know of any state where taking a video without explicit consent, in a place where the person has a right to be, is a crime. In some states it would not even be a tort. If a video is taken without the subject's consent, that may be an invasion of privacy, and the subject might be able to sue (not "file charges). In such a case the video itself would absolutely be put in evidence, and if it recorded verbal permission to take the video, the case would be promptly dismissed, quite possibly with sanctions for a frivolous lawsuit. Even if the video were taken by a police officer, and was presented as evidence in a criminal case, the office could testify to the verbal permission. That would be enough for the judge to view the video as part of a suppression hearing (which is not before a jury). If the judge saw and heard verbal permission to take the video, that would be an end to the motion to suppress, unless it was claimed that the permission was somehow coerced or faked, and evidence supported such a claim.
If this was anywhere in the United States, it was perfectly legal to post the photo. The First Amendment allows people to freely share information, including pictures. People commonly believe that they have the authority to control who takes a picture of them and under what circumstances, but that is generally false. Anyone with a camera is generally free to photograph anyone or anything they want out in public. You've also used the copyright tag on your question. The person who took the picture owns the copyright. Since that's the owner, there's presumably no problem with her posting it. Instead, it would be illegal for you to post that photo without obtaining a license from the homeowner.
For the US: I believe 17 U.S. Code § 120 applies here: 17 U.S. Code § 120 - Scope of exclusive rights in architectural works (a)Pictorial Representations Permitted.— The copyright in an architectural work that has been constructed does not include the right to prevent the making, distributing, or public display of pictures, paintings, photographs, or other pictorial representations of the work, if the building in which the work is embodied is located in or ordinarily visible from a public place. So long as the building is located in or visible from a public place, anyone should be allowed to distribute models of the building Edit (more information, but I believe original answer still suffices): So we know from 17 U.S.C. § 102(a)(8), that architectural works are copyrightable, and the extent of this copyright protection extends to copyright over the blueprint itself and/or the right to produce the building. This seems to only mean that an architect would own copyright in a model of a building if he specifically creates a sculpture of the building and then copyrights it. It doesn't appear that designing a building or having blueprints of it grants the creator rights over a sculpture of the building, the rights to such a sculpture would have to be obtained seperately. TL;DR You should be allowed to sell models of a building so long as they are not models based off the actual blueprints of the building, and that these models haven't been manually copyrighted by the architect beforehand. (i.e making the building hasn't granted a copyright over models of the building beforehand)