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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kirispupis, post: 7596312, member: 118780&quot;]For what it&#039;s worth, a major hobby of mine is photography. The art has run in my family. My father photographed the Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri and the aftermaths of the first atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A member of my family has been in the photo business for the last 100 years. On my side, my images have been used by the BBC, numerous travel organizations, and they have hung in hospitals and various businesses. Last year, I was selected to provide all photos for a coffee table book of Seattle available at many local shops. Most of that info is unnecessary, but I am familiar with copyright laws from publishing not only my book, but several others for charity.</p><p><br /></p><p>When you take a photo of a coin, that&#039;s your photo. It doesn&#039;t matter if it&#039;s &quot;artful&quot; or not, nor does it matter if you sell the coin. You still own the photo and may use it any way you wish. It&#039;s the same thing with real estate photography (which I also have done). The photographer still owns the photos no matter who owns the house. If the sellers fire their agent and use another one, that agent has to pay the photographer for the photos because neither the seller nor the agent own them. Note that in the case of real estate, the photographer may be limited in how he <i>uses</i> the photos unless he received a property release at the time he took them, but property releases don&#039;t apply to coins in your own possession at the time. For another example, I once licensed real estate photos to commercial ad agencies for their uses, even though I didn&#039;t own the house. I was able to legally do this because I owned the house myself <i>at the time</i> I took the photos, so I of course had a full release, signed by myself.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now in terms of auction house photos, many of these have employees photograph the coins and include (or should include) licensing agreements in the employment docs stating that all coin photos are the property of the auction houses. In the past, I&#039;ve done similar things for retail establishments that want full ownership of their images. I of course charged them more for that.</p><p><br /></p><p>So, technically when someone here posts a photo from an auction house, they&#039;re breaking the law. That being said, unless the image is being used in a malicious and damaging attack against the auction house, it&#039;s not in their best interest to do anything. They&#039;re far happier with the positive advertisement saying &quot;look at this coin from so and so&quot; than with the negative backlash that would come from enforcing their copyright. Only if the image were to be used in a large publication or some other commercial use would they likely object.</p><p><br /></p><p>Finally, since this is a coin group and not a photography one, I&#039;m adding photos of my Lysimachos tetra that I purchased a few months ago. The portrait isn&#039;t as nice as many of those currently going for thousands at auctions, but I paid only a fraction of that. It&#039;s from the Perinthos mint and I believe it was minted in 283/282 BCE, or maybe up to a year after his death (so 280 BCE). I purchased it from Dr. Busso Peus Nachfolger, who mentioned that it may be an unpublished variant, and I haven&#039;t found one exactly like it. 17.08g.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]1308263[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1308264[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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