Asking a question to see if anyone else has run into a similar problem. In the beginning of this year I went out to California to do a shoot for a company and submitted the images and an invoice at the end of Feb. March I hear from them that they summated the invoice for payment and I will receive my check within 90 days. 90 days roll around and I send off a follow-up email in regard to another shoot I did for the company in CT and ask about the status of the 1st invoice. From that point on all I have been getting is a big run around in regards to the payment from the 1st photo shoot. (the 2nd shoot was paid for within a week of summiting the invoice in June, but I was working for another department of the company)
The contact person I have been emailing for the last three months started out with "oh there is a problem with the billing department can I give you a credit card as a form of payment" and of course next was "there are problems with my credit card". Then I get "we never used any of those images from that shoot" (which they did because I found them being used via google and a sales flyer that was sent to me) In the last month I got a response of "the other department paid for those pictures already". (I forward all emails and invoices to prove they purchased a separate photo in June of this year) The most recent email from the contact person was saying that they could not find the person that created the flyer and that she never gave the cd of photos to anyone and that there was nothing she could do and said "this is just water on the bridge" with no offer for payment.
I was able to find out who created the pdf file and I sent an email off to the person asking them to contact me tomorrow. (they work in a local office and I worked with them a year ago on another shoot before their company got purchased by a larger national company)
I am at this moment looking for a good copyright lawyer in my area but am coming up short. (Looks like I need to head into Boston for a lawyer) I thought about sending a cease and desist letter to the person in the morning asking them to destroy all sale flyers and pull the pictures off the company website since they do not hold any release or copyrights to those images. (which in their documents they are claiming that have the copyright to the images) Then going after them for payment for what they have used the images for. Sadly this is a large company that has a healthy budget but in the last year has been known to not pay some of their venders for work done for the company. From what I can gather it is only this one department that is not paying people. I have enjoyed working for the company over the years but ever since they got bought out it has been a nightmare.
Maybe this was a little bit of a venting season since I have been trying to be polite and open minded about all of this.
Summate is a word, it means "to sum", however as Shatterkiss pointed out it is not the same thing as submit.
I don't know about the ceast and desist letter, but instead of hiring a copyright attorney I would seek out the advice of a contracts attorney (assuming they signed a contract for services in exchange for payment).
Also, depending on the size of the company, you shouldn't have been surprised not to get any information about a job taking place in California from an office based in Connecticut. It is like two different worlds.
