Late pastor's name and photograph copyright?

[dkahlona]

What is the name of your state?What is the name of your state? New York

My pastor of 30+ years died two years ago. His eldest daughter, however, has declared that we (the church) cannot write his name on any church program and even threatened to remove his picture from the church wall declaring that these things are under copyright.

Q: One of the members photographed the picture in question and has the negative. Is the picture and the negative the member's? Can he reproduce it again should the daughter remove the picture? Can he be sued for "copyright" infringement?

We recently had a church event and wrote on the program/order of service, "Dedicated to our late pastor, The Rev. ABC". The daughter told me that we were not to write his name anymore because the name was under copyright.

Q: Can she copyright our pastor's/her father's name? We want to have a memorial service for him. We will have to use his name and write his name on the program. Can we be sued if we refer to his name in writing again?

I kind of thought our pastor's name "belonged" to the church, and therefore, we could write about him, memorialize him, etc. In other words he was and still is our business. His name will always be on our records and in our church history. We do not have a permanent pastor as of yet. His daughter has been extremely (bitterly) possessive about her father's name since he died. We members know the pastor would not approve of her behavior towards us. I know because my family and I were close to the pastor. He loved us; she hates us.

 

[divgradcurl]

Q: One of the members photographed the picture in question and has the negative. Is the picture and the negative the member's? Can he reproduce it again should the daughter remove the picture? Can he be sued for "copyright" infringement?

The copyright for the hoto, assuming no other written arrangements werre made, belongs to the photographer. Unless the photographer had given the copyright of the photo over to the pastor (in which case the daughter WOULD then own the copyright is she was his heir), he cannot be sued for infiringment.

Q: Can she copyright our pastor's/her father's name? We want to have a memorial service for him. We will have to use his name and write his name on the program. Can we be sued if we refer to his name in writing again?

No. Names, titles, short phrases, words, etc., cannot be copyrighted.

Can you be sued? Well, the answer to that is yes, because anyone can sue anyone else for anything. But there is no copyright issue here, so she wouldn't prevail on that theory.

I kind of thought our pastor's name "belonged" to the church,

No, the pastor's name belonged to the pastor, and only the pastor. Neither the church nor anyone else (including the family) has any right to tell anyone else when, where or how they can use the late pastor's name. So you are okay to use it, you just can't control anyone else's use.

 

[dkahlona]

Pastor's name--copyright?

Thank you.