Technology Guardian of 27 November 2008 has a story about a church which used a couple of pictures on its website which were sourced from the Getty picture agency but without paying for them. Getty sent the church a demand for £6,000. I’ll talk about the rights and wrongs of this a bit later but it reminds me of one of my own experiences.
Some time ago I was involved in arranging a weekend meeting in a certain town (I am being coy about the name to avoid raising any legal hares). We had to produce a booklet with the programme of the meeting and we wanted a cover picture which would attract people to the location. We gathered all sorts of images from websites, publicity brochures and so on and the one we all liked appeared on the town’s publicity brochure and, I think, their website. It was of a statue seen through droplets of water from a fountain, all glistening in the sun.
We could not have simply copied the picture even if we had wanted to, as we needed an original to get the required quality. We were going to ask the town publicity department – after all, we were going to publicise them. But then we had second thoughts: we were very short of time, the town might not have an original and they might not even own the copyright themselves. So a friend went out and took the very same picture and we used that. I think he even took the publicity brochure with him to make sure he got the angles right. I think we were legal there. I understood that it was the actual physical image, not the idea, which was copyright.
To come back to the church. I don’t know the details but they must have been very careless. They may have been in the wrong but the actions of Getty seem not less than rapacious – the article claims that the cost of actually licencing the pictures properly would have been just a couple of hundred pounds. And presumably the images were of their own church, so why did they not take their own pictures? My own company website has a picture of a well known local landmark. I took it myself but there must be very similar images in various picture agencies. I am sure I can prove I took it but perhaps I had better look for the original…
Tags: copyright, images, picture agencies
