friscoron Offline Upload & Sell: On
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p.1 #12 · p.1 #12 · Getting credit -- or not! -- for pics on TV news programs | |
It seems that everyone is on the same page here, so no need for me to respond to anyone individually.
To clarify for Guy, in my OP I said that I believe Jordan pulled this image from a Facebook post of mine. He never purchased an image from me. I get plenty of sales from dancers and their parents, so when I post images on FB or IG, I expect the dancers to pull those images and post them on their own social media outlets. Whether others agree with how I do things or not, it doesn't really matter. Once you put your images on the web, they're going to be taken and used. I've made it clear to the dancers that they can do that. They're just web-sized images, they can't really do anything with them beyond using them on social media.
Here's the way that I look at this. TV station is doing a story on Jordan, and Jordan obviously wants them to do it. They ask him if he has any pictures of him performing that they can use in the report, and he provides them with this little social media image. It clearly has my watermark on it and they can google me and easily find me to request or purchase the rights or use this on the story being aired, and on their website. But they didn't.
I get that some people feel that I owe it to the industry to speak up. I get it that some people think that I should be paid for usage rights. I think the first question I ask in a situation like this is what would they have paid for the rights to use this image. I'm pretty confident the answer is nothing. I think if they had to pay to use the image, they wouldn't have used it. The story really helps Jordan more than the station, or anything else. So if they had asked, I probably would have let them use it for free. I had nothing to gain.
But again, they didn't ask. And now, many of you are encouraging me to pursue some sort of compensation. Honestly, if they were sued every time they used a picture that they didn't get the rights to use, they'd probably stop using pictures altogether. And for me, it's not about the money, it's not about the rights unless they used my image in a way to truly bring profit (derived from my specific image's usage), it's about the story. I guess I should say that I worked in journalism for a lot of years. I wrote a lot of stories, and took a lot of pictures to support the story, or used pictures from photographers (our own, and the public).
I would have liked for them to request permission to use the pic. But even if they didn't, I'm not going to pursue compensation. I just don't see the value of it in a little story like this. Even if I was awarded $25k, I would not feel right about accepting it. Not even $1 of it. That's just the way I feel. By the way, this is not even close to the first time my pictures have been used by TV news. Like it or not, I'm okay with that.
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