Commercial Photo Manipulation, Restoration & the Law

[Ritfe]

Hello all,

First of all, I am new to the forums so hello & thank you in advance for any advice.


Obviously my question relates to copyright law and my best route is to seek legal advice, but for my tiny business that would be very expensive, I just want to see if there is an obvious answer I'm missing first before doing this. Everywhere I look says photographer retains copyright until 70 years after their death and there is a period between 1 June 1957 and 1 August 1989, where copyright usually belongs to the commissioner rather than the creator of the work.My query is as follows:

I have started a digital photo editing business. I would like to offer restoration of old images and photo manipulation among my services.

I see many companies doing this, but on reading endless information online (UK) - I can't see how they are doing it without breaking copyright laws, or how they are covering themselves? It seems almost every enquirer I have, doesn't know who owns copyright, especially in the case of restoration for a gift. Most of my business comes through Facebook, so it's not a case of having a tick box on my website with a legal declaration, but I'm guessing I may need to go this route?

Is there anything I can do to make it more feasible to run this business? As it stands, when I ask people who owns copyright they don't know, or don't own it. If I launch a big copyright investigation for every customer, it will not be affordable to run.

Do I need to accept an enquiry on Facebook and direct them to a photo upload page with a legal statement/tick box to say they own the copyright? Or is there another solution?

Thank you so much in advance for any help!!

 

[sirch]

Obviously if this is a business then half an hour with a decent lawyer would be a good, tax deductible business expense and that would sort out whether it is worth having a clause about the client indemnifying you against any copyright issues. That said, pragmatically I'd also consider it from the point of view of how much risk you are taking and build that into your price. Even if you breach someone's copyright the damages you pay are based on lost revenue to the copyright holder. If it is previously unpublished family snapshot then there can’t really be any loss to the rights owner, you would presumably have wasted your time and have to delete any copies you have worked on, and have a bit of stress and hassle but that would seem to be the main extent of the risk. The bigger risk is that someone sends you a published photo from a famous photographer, you edit it and then your customer sells the prints on ebay; in this case it is conceivable that you could be caught up in the whole mess even though it is not you making the copies or selling the prints.

As I said, a few hundred quids worth of lawyer time will go a long way towards putting your mind at rest.

 

[riddell]

Sirch makes a lot of sense. I photographed some products for a client, which included a series of bags with photographic prints. The prints were images of London with selective colouring such as London scenes with only the buses and tube signs in colour, everything else in black and white.

So I shoot, edit and the client puts the images on their ecommerce site and also lists on Amazon. Shortly afterwards they had to pull everything.

It turned out that they'd brought and licenced the images off a stock photo site, but the original photographer was claiming that the images were only listed on another stock site in full colour and the licence details with the other stock site said that the images cannot be manipulated.

As photographer I was asked what my involvement was, but I didn't know anything, I just shot a clients products and assumed they had the rights to use the images on the bags.

Anyway as it later turned out this photographer had put his photos on a large stock site, listing his terms and conditions. Someone had stolen them and listed them on a different stock site. Last I heard from my client was that he suspected it was the stock site themselves. And of course they didn't list all the information.

The sad thing for my client was that he had gone to and taken the trouble to purchase and licence his images from what he thought was a legitimate stock site and he paid a lot extra for full commercial licences.

I don't know the full outcome of the result, I bowed out, it wasn't my issue, but I know the client was fighting with the stock site, which turned out to appear to be UK based, but was in, I think, Russia? .
To original photographer he told me he agreed on a settlement of something like a 70/30 split on profits on the bags in favour of the photographer.

Messy situation.

 

[Ritfe]

Thanks so much for your responses!

I think other businesses maybe do just weigh up the risk and go ahead anyway. That said... A certain huge printing company offer this service and being such a huge company.. They must have protected themselves legally (you'd think) so rightly or wrongly i have emailed to ask them What they do. seems like a conflict of interest to help me but realistically my business is so tiny im no threat to them, so i hope they'll tell me.

If this fails, hope i could work for someone and have them take the risk... I love editing for work but legalities are stressing me out as i don't want to do anything illegal no matter how unlikely I'll get caught.

 

[Mozthecat]

Is it likely that properly drafted t&c’s stating that your customers must own the rights to any images before contracting you and agree to pay any and all costs, fines and fees incurred if they fail to do so would be the way to go?

Per the advice above proper legal advice at the start of business is likely to be a sound investment to minimise the risks.