The Artful Jurist

A couple of enterprising Ohio women have tapped into a money-making artistic venture by selling digitally retouched photos of actual police mug shots from the 1950s.

One of the owners of Larken Design in Cincinnati, bought a handful of old photos in an antique store.  Those photos included some long-ago discarded mug shots of people who had been arrested in Alameda County, California, back in the '50s.  Larken Design has touched up those photos just a bit and turned them into posters, note cards, and the like, and it's selling these items to an apparently eager market of consumers.

Arrest records are usually public information, and no one claims the entrepreneurs don't have a right to own them.  But there's still some legal questions raised about the use of such photos in a commercial enterprise.  After all, aren't these products commercially exploiting the likenesses of private individuals (who may or may not still be around -- something I don't know).  It's possible that could raise a right of publicity issue.

The other thing I can't quite figure out is why the company isn't selling reproductions of the mug shots on mugs.  I mean, c'mon!  Nobody thought of that?