Where are your photos going?

Have you seen this? It’s the story of a St. Louis family whose photo has ended up as an advertisement for a grocery store in Prague. The only problem? The family didn’t authorize it.

Uh oh.

In cases like this, the first place you might think to look would be the photographer. Certainly they licensed the photo for this use, right? Wrong. The photographer specializes in family photos, and would have needed a release to legally license the photo for an advertisement. No release was signed, and the photographer never sold the photo.

So how’d it end up in an ad? Probably a simple Google Image search; a search for “happy family” reveals this photo on the first page of photo results. The photographer, or someone in the family, likely uploaded the photo to some third-party site.

The fault here clearly lies with the shop owner in Prague. He claims to have thought the photo was computer-generated. That sounds a little weak to me. My guess is he thought he’d never get caught. But it could have been prevented with a little diligence on the part of the photographer and the family. The first lesson? If you put your photos online, other people can–and will–use them at will. Since when has legality stopped anyone from doing what they want?

Times have changed for photographers, and for our clients. This case just shows how hard it is to protect not only our individual photographs but also our businesses. Clients can always find free or cheap photos, whether they’re of quality or not. Sometimes good enough seems to be good enough–especially if the budget is zero.

It also shows how easy it is for a naive client to illegally use an unlicensed photo. Remember, just because it’s online doesn’t mean it’s free to use–whether that’s a photo or a song or a story.

Our clients can be reassured that their photos won’t end up illegally used in advertisements because at Barlow, we don’t upload our photos to web sites other than our own flash-based portfolio and our password-protected client access area.

Photographers, just like musicians, painters, graphic designers and poets, work hard to create our intellectual property. It’s all we have. It’s how we make a living, and so we tend to take this sort of thing seriously. In most cases images are licensed very affordably; there’s no reason to use them illegally. My guess is that the store owner in this case could have easily obtained this photograph–if only it had seemed worth the time and expense to do it the honest way.

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