When the media steals your photos
The story of a photographer whose photos went astray – and got re-published by one of the UK’s biggest newspapers without permission
There’s something really difficult about looking after your copyright on the internet. Every single word I’ve ever typed in this blog, for example, is duplicated at least a couple of times around the web. The problem is that words are easy to find. Pictures, on the other hand, are a different tumbler of guppies… As Maciej Dakowicz found out, when his photographs suddenly surfaced on the Telegraph’s online edition…
Photos going astray…
What had happened in this case is that someone found his rather awesome Flickr set called Cardiff at Night. Go look at it. Maciej is a brave, brave man for taking a Canon 5D out on the streets of Cardiff. It’s not the roughest city in the world, but, well, look at the photos; I did a photo project like this in Liverpool once, and people tried to mug me on several occasions. As for Maciej’s set, see Be Blessed, Night Calling, Cold Night and Police Car. In fact, look at the whole set, it’s a rather fine collection of night-time photography.
I’m digressing like a drunken prostitute in a snowstorm. Let me try to start that sentence again. What happened in this case is that someone found his rather awesome Flickr set, and posted it on an Hungarian site, probably with a title along the lines of ‘lol look at thz drnk english twats’, which would be largely incorrect, because the spelling hurts my eyes, and Cardiff is, in fact in Wales, so it’d be more fair to assume that the bulk of people in the photos are Welsh. I digress again.
Facsimile of Maciej’s Cardiff at Night Flickr set. (screenshot used under Fair Dealing)
After suffering the injustice of having his photos nicked once, someone at the Telegraph came across the photos, hashed them into a photo gallery, and published them. A lot of people – myself included - were impressed by the photo gallery, and ended up linking to it via blogs, Twitter, etc.
I shan’t speculate as to what sort of procedures the Telegraph have for checking copyright and reimbursing the photographers involved, but it’s pretty safe to say that whoever they got permission from didn’t have authority to give such permission. Someone subsequently recognised some of Maciej’s photos, and notified him. Understandably, he was pretty damn pissed off, grabbed a screen-shot, and e-mailed the Telegraph.
The Telegraph apologised and took the gallery down, offered their ‘usual fee they pay for online galleries’, says Maciej, which comes to £125. Nice of them, and I guess they’re making some sort of effort to solve the situation. My personal opinion is that offering up £125 for having stolen a gallery of photos is an insult, and that Maciej should get in touch with a solicitor to get suitable compensation, but that’s not the point of this article.
The point is, however, that this could have happened to just about anybody – .
So, what do you do when this happens to you?
First off, calm down.
No, really. Calm down. Flying off the handle is not going to do anyone any good – lot of people (yours truly very much included) get very indignant and angry about things like this, but naming and shaming (or ranting and raving, for that matter) is generally not the right thing to do – there are systems in place for dealing with copyright infringement, so use them…
If the people using your photos are a professional outfit (like a company, as opposed to, say, some random blog), your steps should be as follows: First off, immediately send a NTD – Notice and Take Down. This is a legal request in which you’re demanding the website in question removes your images immediately. In effect, they’ll have to remove them as quickly as possible, which normally means within 24 hours. For a publication (websites, newspapers etc), send the request to the photo editor – if the photo editor’s contact details aren’t on the website, give them a bell and ask for their details. CC the editor of the publication.
Now, hopefully, they’ve taken down your copyrighted material (if they haven’t, contact a solicitor, because they are now knowingly infringing on your copyright, which raises the stakes all around), and it’s up to you what you want to do. Personally, I’ve on occasion guilt-tripped the photo editor in buying other photography work from me in the future (with the idea that if my work is good enough to steal, it must be good enough to pay for), and in effect, I still supply photographs to one publication which stole my images by accident.
Alternatively, you can send them a bill (see how much shoudl I charge for a photo for an indication of how big that bill shoudl be) for unauthorised used. If they don’t pay, then file a small claims court judgement (this normally costs £25). What normally happens when you do that is that they’ll get in touch with you and settle well before it ends up in court. If you billed them £1,000 for a set of photos, and they offer you £600, I’d go for it, it’s more money than nothing, and it saves you the hassle of going through the legal system.
What if you can’t get in touch with them?
Some times, it’s nearly impossible to find out who is actually responsible for the copyright infringement – if someone posts your photos as their own on Flickr, you contact Flickr and they’ll deal with it for you. If it’s a hosted blog (like wordpress.com or blogger), you can report them to the host, and they’ll deal with it. If, however, it turns out that it’s someone running on a foreign domain, without any contact details (or, say, whenever you call the phone number on the domain registrar you get through to someone who only speaks Chinese – which happened to me once), you might find yourself in a spot of bother. This thread from 2004, for example, outlines what happened when someone nicked around 100 photos and placed them on a Russian site.
Lots more advice is available from the UK Copyright Service (like their Copyright Infringement Fact Sheet or the very useful 10 copyright myths). The Publishers Association Infringing Websites helps with some terminology which may come in useful.
Finally, it’s actually possible to go after the ISPs of the people hosting your content – which only helps if you can actually contact them, of course. If any part of the hosting business is based in the UK or USA, you have a case for going to them directly – they can then shut down the entire site if necessary – but only if they are co-operative, of course.
Finally, you can ensure that the enfringing site gets de-listed from Google by filing a Google Digital Millennium Copyright Act Infringement Notification, which takes a while, but might at least mean that the site hosting your copyrighted content gets less traffic than they normally would.
Further reading
I’ve done a lot of writing on this general topic recently – check, for example, Photo Licencing and the Law, Be careful what you sign, Can I use the photos I’ve taken? and how much should I charge for a photo?.
Finally, please note that I’m not a solicitor, and nothing posted in this blog may be construed as legal advice. Contact a solicitor for advice.
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Insights, suggestions and comments
Top stuff – a subject that I often see on forums.
Especially like “First off, calm down”. He he. yes I’ve been guilty of storming in once or twice.
Oh have a question relating to this + maybe sending a bill.
If a Magazine publishes images of yours without permission – but it transpires that they were supplied to them from a 3rd party – who should you send the bill too – Magazine or the 3rd party?
I guess Magazine but thought I’d ask.
Hey Daf – wicked photos on your website!
To your question; It’s the publisher’s responsibility to ‘clear the rights’ (as it’s known in the industry) to any images they use, so send the bill to the magazine. It’s then the magazine’s problem to sue / otherwise re-claim any money they pay you from whoever supplied the image to them.
If this happened to you, get some legal advice – In the UK the citizen’s advice bureau can offer some help and are free!
- Haje
Same thing happened to me with a local newspaper. They took a photo of mine off Flickr and used it on the FRONT PAGE of their Entertainment Section – almost full page! I called my lawyer, gave her the details (and a copy of the newspaper) and she is dealing with it. They haven’t offered anything yet, but we will follow through if only to let everyone know that you can’t just take pics off the Internet and use them!
The problem of newspapers printing photos without credit is unfortunately common in Ireland.
Offering their “usual fee” for photos after they are caught was standard and it seems to have created a culture of “take a chance, use the photo and if we are caught 50% of the time we will still have saved 50% of our photo budget with the ones we didnt get caught for”.
Often the photographer backs down and takes the standard fee in the belief that they dont want to burn their bridges with potential customers.
You won’t believe this, but I spent about an hour today trying to find out what the term was (NTD), so that I could send one to a former client. I wanted to revoke any rights to my images as they’d used them in a new format of website without referring to me as the original author as was our original agreement.
I basically saw red mist, and emailed them asking to remove all the images used on the site (they were all mine) within 24 hours or I would seek legal advice. Got an apologetic email back, saying that if they listed me on the images as the author would that be okay… I had to concede that this was better than nothing I suppose. But I’ve saved this post for future use… Thanks
Great blog by the way…!
Thanks for the article man! I have recently seen 2 news sites use my image for articles without my permission. They had just mentioned my name below the images. One in Australia, one in the US. Both prominent media conglomerates. Sent them mails, they took it down. They had already used my image for more than a month. The Aussie one offered a paltry $25 – AUD! And even asked that if I agreed, it gave them rights to use it on their site! I said that I thought my image was worth more than that and closed that topic then and there. The other came back with a lot of legal mumbo jumbo and said that since they are a news site, they can use images like mine! What can I do?
flickr.com/naveenroy
Wow, that was fast! You have already located what image was used without permission. Thanks for stopping by my photo stream. Let me know if I can do something…..
To Naveen Roy, what software were you using to track down your photos? Is it expensive?
No software, just some luck and some ego – hehe, name searching on Google to see how popular my images are!
Been reading up on this… The best way (and the free way) is to drop a phrase into your IPTC file info, that way when you do a trawl through the web you’ll be able to find it.
Very interesting article… I guess he was lucky in a way that it was the Telegraph that stole his photos and not a less scrupulous newspaper. At least they tried to make amends when they realised the mistake.
Interesting article. I think in this digital age copyright infringement is a fact of life to some degree. It’s good to know there are things you can do about it pretty easily that are effective.
I believe there’s a new search engine that can compare an image to millions it has trawled the internet and seen. It’s main objective is to find copies of your image on other websites. A nice idea but how practical this could be in tracking copyright infringment? Who knows.
my daughter had one of her images copied by an artist (paints) and used as an album cover.
we found out after friends saw it on amazon.
after advice and a flurry of emails we settled on £350 for this one off usage.
they could have had it for £50 if they’d thought to check ownership and ask permission.
and yes i kept calm outwardly but it was pretty blood boiling at the time.
The case has been resolved. The Telegraph apologized for this incident and offered me a fair compensation. The whole situation has been handled by them properly and professionally. I am glad it has been resolved quickly.
Very helpful indeed, thank you for this article.
http://tineye.com/ is the website MattPreston is thinking of. I’ve already discovered some of my own pics being used elsewhere.
People also steal my content from my website and claim as their own!! Such a bunch of losers!
Good post and thanks for the advice and tips.
thank you for this!
Add “Times Of India” and a bunch of other Indian newspapers who publish photos without any regards to the copyright. Stealing is so common in the newspaper industry here.
Been there, not done that. I had a similar incident happen to me thanks to a speciality photography equipment chain in India called Pixetra. There is an yearly event called Bird Race and during one such race I had photographed a Pipit in a field. Of course I had blogged about this and put it online in one of my photo albums.
However, I was browsing through Pixetra’s website one day and I happened to notice a photo that looked remarkably similar to one that I had taken. I did a lot of comparisions with my photo and it turned out to be exactly the same including a hardly visible streak of an OOF blade of grass in front of the bird.
I promptly wrote to them about this. I didnt want any compensation, but I would like to be credited for my photos that they publish on their site. Nothing happened. In another few months the site underwent a redesign and the image was taken off.
Such is the case in India. Nothing in the judicial system will protect the rights of individuals. Had I gone to court, I would have perhaps still been running around trying to get the case closed.
Regards.
A good post with some interesting tips.
Thanks
It’s amazing that all they are offering him is 125 pounds. That’s a slap in the face.
All said and done, the photos themselves seem like a gross violation of the rights of the people in the pictures. I wonder how any of them feels about having their pictures posted all over the net. I come from a research background and I am into photography myself. So I very well understand the issues with plagiarism in general. I think as photographers and human beings we should spare a thought towards the rights and dignity of others.
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