Photography

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A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.

This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.

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Publisher Used My Photo Without Permission (alien.top)

submitted 11 months ago by BeingBalanced@alien.top to c/photography@viewfinder.pro

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I see that Getty sells high resolution royalty-free stock images for $500. I assume that's a license in perpetuity to use the image however and wherever you want but just not be able to resell it yourself. I also assume that means they can keep selling the same license to others for the same photo.

I took some photos that I provided to a major publisher along with an article I wrote that then syndicates my article in the relevant local travel magazine website. They told me they were going to use my article (and paid me for it) and not use the photos I took. I've discovered the company has published one of my photos in four articles (not written by me) in two major City local travel websites, crediting me on the photo but I received no compensation nor was asked permission to uses it.
Normally they get non-exclusive rights to any of my photos they use with my article for an additional $50/photo charge.

I'm trying to figure out a ballpark reasonable fee they should pay per photo. Seems to me at minimum they should pay $50 X 4 articles. = $200? And a lot more if they want exclusive rights to use the image.

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[–] cookie_kindness@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not to let the publisher off the hook, but there’s a good chance your photos were uploaded to some sort of content management system along with other photos that they actually licensed, and someone in the organization found yours and assumed they were licensed.

If you hope to work with this publisher again, $200 is on the very low side but won’t burn a bridge. If you don’t expect to work with them again, I’d invoice more like $1000 – search for some legalese to include in your communications with them.

I’m assuming your info was in the metadata and that’s how they knew to credit you? It’s a good lesson for artists to populate those metadata fields before sharing work with clients.

[–] 0000GKP@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not to let the publisher off the hook, but there’s a good chance your photos were uploaded to some sort of content management system along with other photos that they actually licensed, and someone in the organization found yours and assumed they were licensed.

Well then that system is not managing the content very well. It's still their responsibility.

I’m assuming your info was in the metadata and that’s how they knew to credit you? It’s a good lesson for artists to populate those metadata fields before sharing work with clients.

I'm curious how you think the client can lack the knowledge required to track author and licensing information in a content management system but somehow have the knowledge to inspect image metadata to extract the embedded contact information?

[–] cookie_kindness@alien.top 1 points 11 months ago

Because I’ve seen it happen first-hand. The metadata fields get automatically pulled over into the content management system, but there’s no field for “this has been properly licensed and here are the terms,” at least in the one I’ve seen. It’s a flaw, to be sure. Irresponsible but not nefarious.