A historian copied a photo from a collaborative website and uploaded it to his blog, which is used for study and research, without crediting the creator, as the photo was uploaded under a fictitious username. Only after a long period of time, a woman who identified herself for the first time as the photographer of the photo, sought compensation, inter alia, for not receiving credit.
The Court rejected the claim for copyright infringement, inter alia, because the photo was fairly used and the creator of the photo could not be located with reasonable efforts. Copyright in a work grants the exclusive right to use the work or a substantial part thereof. As long as the work is used fairly, such as self-study, research, criticism, etc., it can be used even without obtaining the permission of the copyright owner and without consideration. Alongside this, the creator has the moral right that is intended to guarantee the creator, that his creation will be attributed to him "to the extent appropriate under the circumstances of the matter". When the copyright owner is unknown or is not located, it is permitted to use without giving credit, inter alia, if the user acted with due diligence to discover or locate the copyright owner of the work, as the case may be, before use. Here, before the photo was copied, the historian tried with due diligence to locate the rights owner, but the search led him to a blocked fictitious user and he could not know who the creator of the photo was when it was first published. Only after the alleged photographer contacted him did he learn of her identity and immediately removed the photo from the blog. Considering that the photo was initially uploaded to a blog in the field of history, for a scientific-research purpose and without profit, it was fairly used and there is no room for payment of compensation.