A while back I shot some photos for a neighbour's new barbershop website. He paid me in free haircuts (like there's much to cut!) which was a fair barter. But then the other week he called me saying that one of those images was being used on a rival’s website - had I given them permission?I checked the site and there it was, a shallow focus shot of a man receiving a traditional wet shave, used as a ‘Book an Appointment’ button which meant it appeared on all 30 of the website's pages.
I checked with Rex Features, my editorial stock agent, but I hadn't filed those images with them, so it must have been (gasp) stolen. I crafted a carefully worded letter to the websites’ owners, pointing out the misuse and that “images grabbed from the internet are not copyright free, and it is the users obligation to seek permission from the author before use. Recent legal decisions against the Daily Mail, Evening Standard and other publications for abuse of so-called 'orphan works' has backed this up. If the author cannot be identified, you do not have the right to publish the image.”
The web site owner passed the buck to the designer, who was mortified, explaining that he'd used images from the web to mock up the site for the client and thought he'd replaced all these 'orphan images' with licensed stock or commissioned images before going live. I have no reason to disbelieve him (and I like to give benefit of the doubt) but a breach of copyright had been committed, my image had been published without permission, and a payment was due.
Had it gone to court I could have sought punitive damages, but as it was we agreed a fee which amounted to roughly ten times more than if he'd licensed the image legitimately from me in the first place, but wasn't an unreasonable request for use over thirty pages.
I also did a quick Google image search using the keywords 'wet shave' and found yet another photo from my friend's site used in an article for Esquire, no less - to whom a quick phone call yielded over four times their standard reproduction fee.
(To add insult to injury, my friend's barbershop wasn't even among the Top 5 listed in the article)The lessons:
People will use images grabbed from the internet if they can.
A professional photographer's images are their product and livelihood, and while most photographers are unlikely to chase anyone for personal uses, if an image is published or used in a commercial context it's the same as if stealing a product from a shop. A licence for legitimate use would have cost a fraction of what the publishers had to pay in the end - and I’d have been just as happy. Orphan images do not equal free images.
For my part it's been a lesson in vigilance, and an eye opener as to how once you put your images on the internet, they can be stripped of all metadata (caption, copyright info, contact details etc.) and your hold on them is tenuous at best. I’ve always preferred not to watermark images on my website or blog, presuming that lo-res web versions of my images were of little commercial use to people, but I may have to reconsider this.
For now my friend and I are off for a slap up meal on the proceeds, as reward for his keen eye.
As Shaw Taylor used to say on Police 5 (taps side of nose) "Keep 'em peeled".
