I'm a bit reticent about all this.
When I post pics on blonde, they either belong to me - I took them - or blonde, which is fine, or, & most frequently, I go to google Images & lift one from there. It never occurs to me to pay anyone for them.
The blondepedia photos - the ones used by the Mail & Telegraph - were presumably lifted from google images, rather than directly from blonde, or THM.
Are not photos on google Images - unless they specificaly say "you may not use without permission", or are "wartermarked" - free to all to use?If I "lift" a photo from google Images that came from the Daily Telegraph, for example, what is the difference?
Creation of an image is enough to make it copyright in most cases – for example a painter may create a painting and this then cannot be copied/reproduced without permission. The same can be said of a photo – just because it’s easier to create a picture of a poker player doesn’t make it any less copyright. Think about all those fantastic photos of nature that have taken hours/days of preparation to get just right Would it be ok to produce that on postcards and make money out of it if you had not taken the photo in the first place? No – which is why licensing exits – to allow that to happen.
So – on to online publishing. Slightly off topic but very interesting legal case with Norm Zada- owner of now defunct Perfect 10 – very very clever guy – we have facebooked because of our model connections – and he is a very clever geek (I love clever men) his Dad created fuzzy logic and his family are just clever x 10.
Norm created Perfect 10 glamour magazine and then tried to sue Google for using thumbnail images of his magazines photos to link to various sites. In fact it was the sites that had the pictures on their sites that were infringing on the copyright – not Google. It was ruled that as they were providing them in such a way (thumbnail) it was not of good enough quality to stop the public buying into third party sites to see the images in better quality. So there was no loss of revenue for Perfect 10. It was ruled as being 'Fair Use'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_useUsing images from Blonde? Well the copyright has been ascertained purely by the taking of the photo however Blonde is not a subscription site and is easily accessed by any member of the public. Does this change things? Not really imo – if I had a website and had created a picture of me and one of my clients and put it on there can it be used on the Daily Mail? Not without my permission despite the public nature of the subject. Just by me putting it up there I have asserted my right over the image I created.
If the image was on Facebook it’s different matter as you are giving permission for other facebook users to share your image just by putting it up there.
It’s interesting.
Very easy for the DM to approach Blonde and ask for permission so no excuses there. Their defence will be they saw it elsewhere and lifted it from there – and that it was very difficult to ascertain from the primary source they lifted it from who the owner was. No excuse but if they took reasonable steps to find out they may have a reasonable excuse and just promise not to use it from now on.
I think you have a good case for financial payment – more if you can confirm that the images were also used in the print version of the paper as there is provable profit from the sales of the printed paper. Depending on how DM on line make money – assuming its from clicks and ad’s - then the widespread distribution of your images online to a much wider audience here and abroad (copy the comments at the bottom of the article for evidence of this) should result in a bigger payment imo. I think you have a very strong case.
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