The agencies and the publishing questions :
How to be sure that the picture we buy via standard online picture bank is really right-free ? Aren’t they unpaid image or author rights ? Is there something to prevent average blokes from taking pictures on the web and selling them in quality of author ? These questions make sense : Can I sue my agency for its lack of liability, if I broadcast a copy of an artwork ? Can I go into appeal against an international online picture bank ? Many questions to try to put things back where they should be. But other characteristics need to be taking in count :
French Intellectual Property Code
The French Intellectual Property Code excludes the concept ’right-free’ by imposing a frame scrupulously defined for the use of any artwork. Broadcasting your photographs ’right free’, is like loosing all your rights and authorizing the broadcasting of your pictures on all supports, limitless, by everybody and in all contexts. These characteristics are against the principle of the Intellectual Property Code. If no frame is drawn up, the contract is null and void.
Exclusive and limitless rights without signed contract.
No serious professional photographer would sell to any right-free picture bank. Well, maybe foreigners, non-professionals, picture thieves, but rarely professional, they do not declare these little sums and aren’t engaged in a contract : they only agree thoughtlessly on some general conditions. There are no written prooves, no signature. Author’s rights are virtual.
Besides these shady author’s rights without written signature, other problems occur : a non-professional photographer without scruples will have more chance to sell if she/he is linked to different picture banks. How can we be sure to have all rights on a picture when it is broadcast everywhere ? A firm that associates its product to the brand thanks to a right free picture broadcast everywhere incurs the risk to have its product associated to another company, in another context and even more : a rival.
For several years, a Swedish company used the picture of a Turk without authorization.
The 77-year-old man on yoghurt pots sold by a dairy obtained between 1,5 million and 2 million kronas as compensation (that is to say between 160,000 and 212,000 euros). The diary explained that it paid the picture to a right-free picture bank.
The revival of agencies and the publishing to professional photographers
Nowadays, clients I had before and I thought gone forever come back to me. The reliability of some online picture banks is by and by crumbling.
