Infringement costs

[Michael Halberstadt]

I've found finding and dealing with copyright violations challenging. Part of the reason is that my images on Alamy often get used without proper credits to me or Alamy, post late, and the end customer is never named in an Alamy sale. 

 

I had a recent episode where I found a couple of images of mine used to illustrate an article for a big British news outlet. I found them with a reverse image search. As is often the case, there was no credit to me, any of my pseudonyms or Alamy. This particular article was dated about three years ago and I had to cross reference the images and find them on Alamy, then check to see if they had ever been licensed. Those images in question hadn't ever been licensed. This type of searching takes me a long time to find copyright violations and make sure that they weren't legit.

 

I contacted member services at Alamy and I now see the images in question in the "sold" list this month. Each license was for about US$7. So the couple hours I invested in chasing this violation will net me about US$2-3/hr after Alamy's split.

 

What I'd really like to see is that there be a disincentive to "forgetting" to pay Alamy. And I think to help in catching copyright violations, there ought to also be a further cost to not crediting either Alamy or the photographer. 

 

Think about it..... you know when you go on the subway in areas with an "honour system". Every so often the transit police come by and make sure that you bought a ticket. If the punishment for being caught was exactly the cost of the ticket you were required to buy- why would anybody buy a ticket?! Similarly, if the punishment for a major UK news outlet was if ever caught to simply pay the minimal amount they would have had to anyway- they are going to "forget" regularly.

 

Just an idea...

[Arletta]

Early this year I asked Alamy about the problem with no credit info to the author/ agency, where the image is taken from and here's what I got back:

 

"We ask all customers to credit us and the photographer as it’s in just as much our interest as yours. We apologize for the error and we’ve notified our Sales team regarding this so that such errors can be avoided in the future."

 

I want to believe this will work better in future, so we don't have to waste our time and good name when searching for infringements and maybe asking clients when/ if they had paid... That would be in a bad taste.

[Matt]

For some reason photo credits have fallen out of fashion.  I see this type of thing with many of my images being used in an editorial fashion.  Back when I worked as a photo editor, it was a great concern to make sure the photographer got credit.  We respected the hard work of the photographer and wanted  him to get recognition, but you also bring up a good point when policing your images.  If it doesn't have a credit, then we can only assume it was stolen.

[Michael Halberstadt]

For some reason photo credits have fallen out of fashion.  I see this type of thing with many of my images being used in an editorial fashion.  Back when I worked as a photo editor, it was a great concern to make sure the photographer got credit.  We respected the hard work of the photographer and wanted  him to get recognition, but you also bring up a good point when policing your images.  If it doesn't have a credit, then we can only assume it was stolen.

A friend of mine who used to do sports photography in Germany told me that he went to court against an infringer. He said that since the magazine didn't credit him (in addition to not paying him) and the court (I think he said) doubled the judgement against the infringer for that reason. That was in the print days.