OddThinking

As I have mentioned previously, I’m an amateur photographer.

I take lots of photos of friends, and I publish the results for free on web-sites. It’s a lot of work, but I am a nice guy.

A lot of my friends are performers, and I occasionally get asked for permission to use some of the photos for their promotional material. I am always honoured to be asked, and I always generously allow them that to use the photos in any way they would like. Let’s face it, I’m a really nice guy.

I occasionally visit the web-sites or read the promotional flyers of friends (and I use that term “friends” in the rather loose, MySpace sense of people who would stop to say “hi!” if they saw me at a party.) I’ve lost count of the times and thought “Hmmm…. That photograph looks familiar! Yep, I took that photo two years ago. They didn’t ask me for permission.”

I have chased down professional photographers, via their agents, to seek permission to use their images on web-sites. I’ll admit, in my younger, greener, days, I pilfered one or two images for innocuous purposes where seeking permission was going to be overly onerous. However, in my case, I put a copyright notice and my contact email address under each photograph. It is trivial to find me, and trivial to get my permission.

I feel a little ambivalent here. I mean I am a really nice guy, and it would seem churlish to make a big deal about it. If they had asked me, I would have immediately have said yes, so what’s the big deal? It’s irked me a little, but I’ve never said anything about it.

This week, two discoveries changed that.

The first was the web-site of one young performer that had a dozen photographs of her performing in a wide range of stage acts. Each photograph had an attribution below it. One of the photographs was taken by me, and it was attribute to me (but still published without permission). Nearby, another photograph was also taken by me. It was attributed to an organisation to which I don’t belong! It was merely sloppiness, but it rankled.

The second was the web-site of a senior staff-member of a circus. The portrait shot of her looked kind of familiar, but kind of different. I compared it to my files, and found that someone had cut-and-paste her head from one of my photos onto a pleasant garden background. I don’t deny it improved the photograph, and I don’t claim the touch-up went too far, but if you were going to go to that much effort on preparing a photograph, the extra effort of seeking permission would be trivial.

I am annoyed enough to take some action. I hereby announce a change of policy which I think is fairer to me, but still in keeping with my nice guy image.

If you ask my permission, I will almost certainly grant you the freedom to use the photograph in any way you like, without payment.

However, if I catch you using my photographs without my permission, I will not hesitate to demand a payment of one drink of my choice per infraction. In particularly heinous cases, including misattribution, you will also be required to buy crisps.

I strongly recommend you settle out of court.