Copyright Infringement - advice needed

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matttnt1

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Hi guys,

hoping for some advice;

I recently took photos at a boxing event in Manchester; the photos were put on my Facebook page for general display. Each was labelled as under copyright to myself.

It transpires that one of my photos has ended up in a French (national) boxing magazine, with no credit to myself, nor was any permission sought from myself. I believe they got the photo from Facebook.

To be honest, I am not really interested in any monetary gain and would have gladly given it them FOC, so as long as I was credited. Also, given the copyright infringement would be under the applicable french law (as thats where the breach occurred), I think it would be a fools errand to pursue anything legally.

How would you all suggest I play this? Has anyone had any experience of a similar circumstance to this?
 
Get in touch and tell them you're prepared to Sue through the small claims track of the Patents court.
They'll pay up.

If you're not interested in the money, donate it to a charity:clap:.

But I'm sorry I have to take issue with the 'happy to work for free' attitude :nono:. I know it'll rankle some but :bat:

It really P's me off (no I'm not a full time pro). Would you be happy to be made redundant because someone who could afford to fancied doing your job for free?

Just because you enjoy doing something as a hobby, doesn't mean you should feel OK about destroying it as an industry:).
 
We're you the only person taking photos on the night?
 
It sounds like you would like to build a relationship with this French National Boxing magazine. A long time in business has talk me to look for outcomes rather than immediately 'shooting from the hip' with a gut reaction. Get in touch with them and express your feelings in a gentle way. Say that, on this occasion, you are prepared to let them use the photo if they add a credit to it. Having expressed this, you could then suggest, as they obviously like your work, that they might like to 'hire' you or be offered freelance photos by you for future events in your area.
This will build you a channel of communication and also just might get you a regular 'gig'.
 
matttnt1 said:
To be honest, I am not really interested in any monetary gain and would have gladly given it them FOC,?
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exactly the reason i wasnt there for this one :(

I am there on the 20th on a commision but wont make anyhting extra because too many stick them on facebook and give them to magazines for credit making it impossible for me and others to sell to fighters or media
 
It does puzzle me when Photographers stick Imanges on Facebok and then complain that people steal them :shrug:

stay away from Facebook is my advice, get yourself a web site as opposed to sticking them on Social Networking site full of Jeremey Kyle candidate's


Les :cool:
 
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Lez325 said:
It does puzzle me when Photographers stick Imanges on Facebok and then complain that people steal them :shrug:
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So if someone posts an image on Facebook it somehow makes stealing it acceptable and it's suddenly the photographer's fault if it does get stolen? What's the difference between Facebook and a personal site? Images are just as easy to steal from a personal site as they are from facebook.
 
PMN said:
So if someone posts an image on Facebook it somehow makes stealing it acceptable a.
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its the same concept of leaving your car windows open and a laptop on front seat...does that make stealing acceptable or the owner daft..
 
Thing is, I've had the same lesson through Facebook. Read the small print, you upload - you face the consequences. Facebook has supposed rights over any photo uploaded, that means even if you delete your account the data will still be there as per their T&C's. Send the dreaded letter as you have nothing to lose if you just wanted some credit. In 10 years time if everyone's ethos is to give photos free of charge where will this leave the pro's?
 
Flightphoto said:
Facebook has supposed rights over any photo uploaded
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So all the images people like Steve McCurry and Magnum Photos upload to Facebook have all had their rights given up and Facebook can do what they want with them? Surely that isn't actually true?

Can you maybe give a link to where it says Facebook owns the rights to images you upload? I know there's been a lot of uncertainty about all this but as far as I understand it there's absolutely nothing Facebook or any other organisation can do to openly exploit images uploaded.
 
Wasn't there a big old hoo-haa not too long ago surrounding "anything you put on Facebook no longer belongs to you" etc. ?! As far as I'm concerned, if you put something in the public domain like that, you should be fully aware of the risks. It's fine to upload to Facebook and Flickr etc. as long as you take the correct precautions. Stick watermarks on everything, adjust your copyright settings accordingly (in Flickr)... If you're naive enough to think people won't knick your work, then you probably deserve to be ripped off!

Also, I agree with Phil on the whole 'monetary gain' issue. Of course you should ask for money! The less photographers that charge for a service the more people begin to take advantage of them. Photography is a technical profession, one that not every person has a knack for. Time and dedication is poured into something that we stand to make very little money from anyway. Do you think a watchmaker would make watches for free just to "get his name out there"? NO I don't think so!
 
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What the terms of service say

Facebook
With over a billion users, Facebook is the definitive homepage for many web users. Its terms of service, data use and cookie use policy span more than 14,000 words over eight separate pages and would take even the quickest reader more than two hours to dig through. But what rights have you handed over to Facebook?

Specifically for photos and video uploaded to the site, Facebook has a license to use your content in any way it sees fit, with a license that goes beyond merely covering the operation of the service in its current form. Facebook can transfer or sub-license its rights over a user’s content to another company or organisation if needed. Facebook’s license does not end upon the deactivation or deletion of a user’s account, content is only released from this license once all other users that have interacted with the content have also broken their ties with it (for example, a photo or video shared or tagged with a group of friends).

Sharing Your Content and Information

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
When you publish content or information using the Public setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture).


Basically there's little loop holes but it just goes on and on! The clear caution is Do not upload anything that you don't want others to pinch
 
Thanks for that info Dave, I wasn't aware of that! The second paragraph seems to imply you can change your privacy or other settings so they don't have a license to use your images elsewhere, does anyone know how to do that?
 
Basically you need to go into the privacy settings and lock everything down. I've set mine so that people can't even search for me, at the end of the day I have people on my friend list that I want, I'm not into having 1000's of supposed friends on there! When you upload a photo there's a cog that you click to show the settings of that image, you can set it so that only certain people can see that image - covering the copyright 'supposedly' as people still manage to share the image etc!
 
Basically the biggest trouble is, although you may upload an image and have it set to viewing only by friends on your list, it takes one friend to press the share button before it becomes viral. I've found that a lot of photos get shared then picked up by blogs who then share it, those photos are then seeded by other blogs / photo hosting sites!
 
very simple, start a dialogue with the magazine, it may lead to a business stream.

Negotiation is key, why should you give it away for free, what happens if they do it again, and again.

They are taking you for a bit of an amatuer if they think its ok to use your image without credit at the very min.

be polite, write to them, use it to your advantage. Then, if nothing comes your way and benefit to you doesnt materialise, thats when you start with the legals.

Lets not forget, this may have been some newly hired junior thinking he is doing the right thing.....

either way, see it as a positive way of potential future revenue
 
PMN said:
So if someone posts an image on Facebook it somehow makes stealing it acceptable and it's suddenly the photographer's fault if it does get stolen? What's the difference between Facebook and a personal site? Images are just as easy to steal from a personal site as they are from facebook.
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surely a personally web site has proceedure on site to prevent the illegal download of images + place only small low resolution images on that site and plaster a copyright watermarl across them also, just a thought

Facebook as said Jeremy Kyle's waiting room:razz:& where did I indicate in my Post it was the Photographer fault????? That said, it is anyones responsiblilty to prevent their property fom being stolen, is it not?

Les :thumbs:
 
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You're not even safe on Flickr, although you can disable right hand click, there's a plugin for Firefox and Chrome to over come that - aswell as doing a screen grab! :)
 
I think a lot of that legal agreement T&Cs covers them copying images and data across multiple servers, which they do to share data loads e.t.c. All large websites do this, need those rights or they wouldn't work as well.

"Although some erroneously believe that Facebook claims ownership over user-published content on the site, Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities states that users retain ownership of all content and information they post on Facebook. For content covered by intellectual property (IP) rights, Facebook's terms of use grant it a "non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license" to user content until it is deleted from the site"


The outcry recently was over Instagram changing their T&C to allow advertisers to use uploaded content, but they changed it back again after the publicity was mostly negative,

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-5...ays-it-now-has-the-right-to-sell-your-photos/

Instagram is now owned by Facebook.
 
Flightphoto said:
Basically the biggest trouble is, although you may upload an image and have it set to viewing only by friends on your list, it takes one friend to press the share button before it becomes viral. I've found that a lot of photos get shared then picked up by blogs who then share it, those photos are then seeded by other blogs / photo hosting sites!
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Iif you set it to Friends only, then a share only displays properly for those who are also your friends).
If setting things to 'Friends of Friends' that leads to things going out of your control.
 
Flightphoto said:
You're not even safe on Flickr, although you can disable right hand click, there's a plugin for Firefox and Chrome to over come that - aswell as doing a screen grab! :)
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That's always going to be the case though. To be honest the issue I have isn't so much with someone using a low res image from Facebook or even Flickr; personally I'm not about to remove the 10,000+ images I have in various places online because someone somewhere might nick one of them, if that happens I'll deal with it. The thing I'm more interested in is who has the right to do what with it once it's uploaded.
 
KIPAX said:
its the same concept of leaving your car windows open and a laptop on front seat...does that make stealing acceptable or the owner daft..
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It's worse than that. More like leaving a laptop on the seat with window open, then putting a sign on the roof saying come and have a look.

The other thing is the average Joe doesn't regard it as stealing as the photographer doesn't actually lose anything and 99.9% of the time they're not even aware.

This doesn't make it right, but it happens, and will continue to happen. So if a bit of self-righteous umbrage is so upsetting (and I accept that sometimes it is) then take appropriate precautions.

From the professionals point of view, in monetary terms, the best solution is to get paid, properly, for actually taking pictures. Once they exist and are in the public domain, then their value is dramatically reduced and it's very hard to control their use.
 
Facebook (and every other website) needs that non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to do exactly what you want them to do - show it to people. Without that licence, they would have no rights at all to transfer that image to people looking at your Facebook page. A licence is not at all the same thing as claiming copyright.

When you create an original work, you have automatic copyright on it. Unless you explicitly place the image into the public domain, that copyright is yours for the term currently specified in law. You may attach a licence to an image that gives people extra privileges to do various things with your image, but unless you do so, you retain all rights under copyright. In the example of Facebook, you give FB a licence to copy and transfer your image to a viewer - but that viewer has no licence to further copy it in any way. By uploading it to FB (or Flickr, or anywhere else, including here) you are not giving up any rights - you are extending privileges to the site only, and not to third parties.


Edit: to avoid confusion, "placing the image into the public domain" is a term of law. It means explicitly revoking your copyright. It doesn't mean "uploading it to a public website".
 
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PMN said:
That's always going to be the case though. To be honest the issue I have isn't so much with someone using a low res image from Facebook or even Flickr; personally I'm not about to remove the 10,000+ images I have in various places online because someone somewhere might nick one of them, if that happens I'll deal with it. The thing I'm more interested in is who has the right to do what with it once it's uploaded.
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And the answer is that Facebook T&C's mean they have enough rights to store, show and backup your images in order to maintain the service you signed up for, whether that's done internally or outsourced.

If you think about what rights Facebook needs over your copyrighted content and read the Ts&Cs from their perspective, what you see is them being allowed to continue in business. All this waffle about giving them permission to sell your images on to 3rd parties is a joke. Read further down about how seriously it takes your copyright etc.

If you've got half an hour search any photography forum for 'Facebook' and apart from this particular debate (to the point of tedium) what you'll also find is lots of photographers with issues like the OP's and that FB removes them as soon as asked. Because to not do so, would mean they could be sued for their part in copyright infringement (the infringer hosting images with FB makes FB guilty of infringement).

BTW you'll see very similar terms on any site where your photo's are stored (including this one) because, as I said, without those terms they can't do business.

Lot's of people may believe we're all stupid for posting things on the internet (asking for them to be stolen, but frankly it's a case of managed risk.

Do I want people to see my photo's? Yes
What's the best way of doing that? The internet
Isn't there a chance they'll get stolen? Yes
So it's a bad idea then? It all depends on:
the cost to you of stolen photo's. vs the potential benefits of making them available.

At the end of the day, the risk of having them stolen doesn't mean you have no rights, you still hold copyright and it's still enforceable.
 
And lets face it, how many supposed togs have we caught using other's wedding imagery :)
 
matttnt1 said:
H

To be honest, I am not really interested in any monetary gain and would have gladly given it them FOC, so as long as I was credited.
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Whilst it is of course up to you how you treat your property, statements like this are very disappointing, and are largely responsible for the situation photographers (whose living depends upon their imagery) face in today's marketplace. I had to terminate my dealings with a book publisher just this week because he was shocked that I would not give him a front cover image for free, because apparently he had been able to get free images in the past. Clearly his view is that photography has no value, and that photographers are grossly unreasonable for expecting to be paid for their time, overhead, and skills.

I presume that the magazine in question has to be bought and paid for by its readers? And I would also suppose that the other personnel involved with its production are also paid in some way. There's nothing wrong with donating the odd image at times but only if the manner in which it is used will tangibly raise your profile. I'm not suggesting you should be paid a lot for the image (particularly if it's less than a quarter page in size) but you deserve to receive something in return. I don't know anything about French laws but if it were a British magazine then the infringement is also a flagrant. I would write to the magazine explaining what they have done, that they have knowingly and flagrantly infringed your Copyright, and enclose an invoice. Writing to them and moaning because they didn't credit you when they nicked your shot won't get you very far, the horse has already bolted.

I'm sorry for the lecture but this kind of thing has become a real issue - I've had a couple of instances in the last week alone which has left me grinding my teeth.

As for Facebook, I would recommend that any images posted there have a prominent watermark placed right through the photograph, you can reduce the opacity of the watermark to make it more subtle but it's vital in my opinion that you place it in such a way that potential infringers are deterred. Edit: creator's credit is your right, it's not something somebody else bestows upon you.
 
Thanks all, I'll make the necessary contact with the magazine and hopefully get some opportunities from the discussions.
 
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