Is Unauthorised Use on the increase?

[Bill Allsopp]

My sales report showed three sales of image M50XN1 today so I did an image search to find;

It was used by the Guardian - no doubt one of the paid sales.

The FT - ditto

The Iranian Financial Tribune (heavily cropped and with no credit)

CSR Egypt (heavily cropped and with no credit)

County Sustainability Group (no credit)

E-MC2 (cropped and no credit)

Newsbreak (Overwritten with a denial of responsibility!)

On and on it went; news gathering websites and others. 

 

Alamy do not hold the image exclusively and website sales are worth next to nothing anyway so I see no point in chasing anyone.

 

What are your thoughts and experiences?

[losdemas]

1. Ascertain who has legally licensed the image.

2. Ignore the infringements which are obviously v difficult to chase.

3. Chase the others: "website sales are worth next to nothing anyway" are v clearly worth something to many people - that's why they use them. They just happen (surprise, surprise) to prefer to pay either nothing or v little.

[IanDavidson]

I don’t think infringement is any different than it ever has been.  I had an image in New Scientist and it was “reused” by a lot of different news scrapper sites.  There is seldom any value chasing 

[Niels Quist]

I hate newspaper sales. Any article and photo in a British newspaper will be copied by lots of foreign papers and blogs. Sometimes this sort of extension is applied in the sale description:

 

"One use in a single editorial or advertorial article used within print and /or web versions, with re-use of the article in other titles or web versions within the same newspaper group. Digital use includes archive rights for the lifetime of the article. Any placement in paper and online".

 

Newspaper uses is like selling your image on microsites - the images will be diluted in the same way.

 

I have more or less given up persuing.

 

PS - was looking for the expression Ian uses, "news scrapper sites"

 

 

Edited May 28, 2020 by Niels Quist

[sooth]

9 minutes ago, IanDavidson said:

I don’t think infringement is any different than it ever has been.  I had an image in New Scientist and it was “reused” by a lot of different news scrapper sites.  There is seldom any value chasing 

worse thing is that a lot of times those images on the scrapper sites get higher placement in a google search than the original article with the legitimate license.

[digi2ap]

Are these scrappers copying the image and re-posting it or linking back to the original story?   I guess if cropped it is the former.  Bill, if your first post had the links I'd be interested to see how this all works - but appreciate you may not have time/inclination.   

Edited May 28, 2020 by digi2ap

[Phil Crean]

20 minutes ago, Niels Quist said:

 

 

 "news scrapper sites"

 

 

AKA "News scraper PARASITES" 😬

 

Phil

[Steve F]

I haven't been in the business long enough to say, but to answer the original question, yes, it stands to reason for me that there's more unauthorised usage. The proportion of digital sales to print media sales is steadily increasing. You can't really rip off an image published in a book easily; once an image is legitimately purchased and then published online it's very easy to rip off.

Steve

Edited May 28, 2020 by Steve F

[Bryan]

I was disappointed when The Times used one of my images as part of a montage of two photos and the sale failed to materialise. They are normally very good, it has only happened to me on this one occasion, and I had long since stopped keeping records of all usages, so can't pursue the case.  However, in the unlikely event of another montage usage appearing, I may store the page as evidence.  Not worth the effort financially, but it is a matter of principle .

[Bill Allsopp]

23 hours ago, digi2ap said:

Are these scrappers copying the image and re-posting it or linking back to the original story?   I guess if cropped it is the former.  Bill, if your first post had the links I'd be interested to see how this all works - but appreciate you may not have time/inclination.   

Adding the links would be time consuming but feel free to do a Google image search and you should see the result I did.

 

 

[Jools Devon]

On 28/05/2020 at 09:21, digi2ap said:

Are these scrappers copying the image and re-posting it or linking back to the original story?   I guess if cropped it is the former.  Bill, if your first post had the links I'd be interested to see how this all works - but appreciate you may not have time/inclination.   

 

I've had an image used in the Guardian reused on several sites - with the same text.....

 

All have copied the image and re-hosted it.

 

Will check with Alamy once lockdown is over - and then will ask CopyTrack to see see if they can pursue. (They are all outside UK/US which I think are the main countries Alamy chase)