Asian Egg Noodle at Urban Belly
This Spring I was contacted by the City of Chicago’s tourism site, Explore Chicago to be a contributing photographer for their Summer 2009 promotion – Life by the Lake. Along with four other photographers, I’m submitting photos about what I think makes this city wonderful. In my case, I’m covering the food/restaurant scene in Chicago. Natch.
I’m excited to have another photography project and to work with city. I’ll try to cross-post on Chicago Bites, but you can always follow my adventures here! Thanks!
Today I had the singular experience of seeing one of my cupcake photos used in an email blast from a local PR firm. What’s remarkable about it is I was never consulted on the use of my photograph. It was stolen.
They found it through a Google search and probably never thought that they would run into the owner of the photograph or get called on their shit. I understand that bloggers are on a learning curve and don’t understand Google, copyright and licensing photos. They don’t appreciate that people work at photography and earn a living from it. I expect more from a PR firm.
“We found it on Google and there’s no way to know where the photo came from.” That’s an exact quote from a PR firm manager. What bothers me most is that they think finding an image on Google absolves them from the responsibility for finding out who that image belongs to. If a PR firms plans to use an image to represent a client they have two real options — pay a photographer to take the photo or find a photo from a photographer and pay to license it. Anything else, and they’re opening themselves up to litigation and risk exposing the client to negative publicity.
They other thing that bothered me was her assertion that they didn’t misuse the photo and use it negatively. Like that matters. Still, since she brought it up, this is what the photo is supposed to look like:
Cupcakes, before they were stolen
Basically, it comes down to this — if you’re sending cupcake photos to cupcake enthusiasts; people who are active online and have a vested interest in the topic, then you’d better make damned sure you’re not serving their own content back to them.
PBS just ran an entry on Mixing it Up: How to Make New Content From Old Media. The question about how to reuse elements of our cultural heritage while balancing against the rights of individual artists is one of the core questions of RIP – A Remix Manifesto, a documentary I saw at this year’s SXSW. How people reuse and credit my photography is something that I personally struggle with, so this movie helped me back down from the “how dare they use my photos” mentality towards something more equitable and reasonable.
Another part of the challenge is managing requests for use of my photos that have a clear license attached to them. PBS contacted me to use this photo even though I have the license information watermarked into the image. It was nice of them to ask, but completely unnecessary.
Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig, who is interviewed for the film, happened to be on hand that evening to answers questions from the audience. I, of course, happened to have my camera with me.
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