Photographers, Do Not Be Taken Advantage Of !

There are plenty of ways that unwitting photographers get taken advantage of.

I’d like to address two of those ways; bad photography contests and commercial interests who know the value of photography but don’t want to pay you for it.

Photography contests and commercial interests usually troll for photographers who either don’t realize the value of their work or photographers who do realize the value of their work but are happy simply getting recognition for their work.

In both of these circumstances the the photographer gets taken advantage of while the contests and commercial interests build their photography libraries on the back of the photography.

Below you’ll find a post I made to a web forum. My post was prompted by this tweet; “VW car enthusiasts fight rights grabs on a web forum: http://bit.ly/do5OXs “. The tweet was made by http://twitter.com/PhotoAttorney

I was not a member of the web forum but I registered so I could express my opinion and to hopefully inform fellow photographers about the value of their work.

Since the web forum is moderated my post may not see the light of day so I’m publishing it here for you to read. I’ve edited the post to protect the identities of  the innocent and not so innocent and also  to CMA. (cover my mule so to  speak).

I’ve edited the post for publication on this site.

“Let’s Build A Community And Then Take Advantage Of Them

—- is right this goes FAR BEYOND minimizing liability; this is a blatant rights grab.

Any one who submits photos for consideration is giving up the copyright to their work and any money they deserve for the use of it. In addition, I’m interpreting the language that reads, “Entrant irrevocably assigns to —- all right, title and interest in your entry”, as a copyright transfer. If my interpretation is correct this means that, since —-now owns the copyright to your entry, you need permission from —-to use the same photograph that you have created. If you don’t get that permission, you’ll be committing copyright infringement and you can now be sued in federal court.

I can understand that —-wants to build a “community” of —- owners around the —- brand and I applaud them for that, but building a community and then taking advantage of the members of the community seems disingenuous.

By —-stating, “We are launching our ——–webstore on 5/31/10, and part of the web design has space for owner photos. If you’d like your car to be considered, please post photos in here and I’ll select ones for the site.” —-gives the impression that your pictures will only be used on ——–webstore. However, if you read the terms of entry, you can see that any photos that you submit will no longer be your photos and the photos can be used in any manner beyond display on the ——–webstore. This seems duplicitous.

We could all use some money. If you knew that you could earn money with your photograph, would you let someone else earn money with your photograph while you received nothing? That’s exactly what you’re doing by submitting your entry. The terms of entry for this insures that —- can earn money with your pictures, but you cannot.

The problem is that while everyone who has a camera is a photographer, not many photographers, except for professionals, realize that the use of their work has a value and that value should be realized in the form of monetary compensation to the photographer (owner of the copyright).

—- is right, —-isn’t evil. As a business —-is trying to do what’s in their best interest. The truth of the matter is that what’s in THEIR best interest IS NOT IN OUR BEST INTEREST. No one could blame an entrant if they did not know better or are entering photographs in the hopes of getting famous, but shame on —- for appearing to try to take advantage of the members of their community.

I hope —-takes the high road and changes their terms of entry to only get permission for the rights that they say they need, the rights to use an entry on the ——–webstore.”

In the meantime, I’ll be contacting —- to let them know that based on the behavior of —-, —- has lost the respect and the patronage of a —- fan.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 3:34 pm. It is filed under Blog Posts And Articles, Business Of Photography and tagged with business of art, Business Of Photography, copyright, copyright infringemnt, copyright issues, intellectual property. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.