Blogger battles Army: Seeks Ted K’s aid in copyright fight

The Boston Herald ^ | 01/31/2006 | Jay Fitzgerald

[Panerai]

A local blogger is appealing to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy to help him fight the U.S. Army over copyright claims to a heartbreaking photo he took of a young Iraqi girl mortally wounded by a terrorist explosion.

Michael Yon, a former Green Beret and an embedded blogger journalist in Iraq, took what some consider one of the more famous photos of the war last May — of a U.S. GI cradling a dying Iraqi girl.

The U.S. Army later released the photo, which was flashed around the world and prominently displayed by newspapers, broadcast stations and Web sites.

But Yon, who uses Massachusetts as his blogger base of operations, said he never intended to allow the Army to distribute the photo to commercial operations and he’s now seeking damages. He said he may file a lawsuit within days, claiming thousands of dollars in damages.

“I never authorized this distribution and immediately asked the Army to stop it,” Yon recently wrote Kennedy, the senior Massachusetts senator and a member of the U.S. Senate’s Armed Services Committee.

In a written reply to Yon last fall, a U.S. Army attorney countered that Yon had signed a “hold harmless” waiver that absolved the government of responsibility for any “injury’ Yon might suffer as an embedded blogger.

The army also said that Yon uploaded his photo onto government computer servers, creating an “implied license” agreement for the Army to distribute the photo.

Yon, who’s become something of an online celebrity because of his vivid battle dispatches from Iraq, said the Army’s arguments are “preposterous.” The injury waiver applies to physical wounds, not copyright infringements, he said.

[libertylover]

It's hard to know for sure without seeing a copy of the waiver but my guess is that it basically gave the photo to the Army. Any waiver about injuries probably would have been signed before he arrived in a combat zone.

[DustyMoment]

The army also said that Yon uploaded his photo onto government computer servers, creating an “implied license” agreement for the Army to distribute the photo.

If this is true, the Army has a valid point.

[No Longer Free State]

I like Yon. I think he's got a point - to a point. I think he could have made better choices on how to resolve the matter than to bring anti-military Chappaquidick Ted into the matter.