What do you do when people keep stealing your SH!T
Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. Now this happens to me and
lots of photographers all the time let's take a look. A beer company in Brazil
blatantly using my work without my permission. A website template company
using my whiskey image and here another photographer had my work and many other
photographers work all over his website. Although he did take it down when I
asked him. And here's another photography company with one of my images an actual
different photographer with my work.
What the FU!*K!!! And what's this? International Addiction Services using my Hawk image
and here's my paint explosion image being used by several
different companies none of which have my permission!
An art store selling my ballerina image as an oil painting and here's my
ballerina image again this time it's even being used by an app on the App
Store. And it's not just my photos it seems even other photography vloggers
have reworked my scripts - "I wish I'd out this information when I was starting out
in photography because this will save you years" {wish I had a guide like this
18 years ago when I started as a photographer it would have given me the
ability to save months if not years of time.} "It's fundamental things to recording a
photographic image" {We're gonna hit the fundamentals of photography} "Because it's
as if you're there with me whilst I'm taking the shot" {It's the closest you can
get to being at one of my boot camps} "We'll show you some fantastic
photographs that you watch us take and I think that that way of learning is like
having you with me as an assistant on a training course" {So I'm not just gonna
sit there and tell you how to do things I'm actually gonna demonstrate it - you
get to be there as my assistant pretty much} and take an inspiration from one of
our shoots
coincidence or inspiration??? I guess we'll never know.
They say though, plagiarism is the highest form of flattery. Although I must admit,
I've certainly taken inspiration before without even realizing it. In fact it
dawned on me some years later that I probably got my inspiration for these
sci-fi shoots from this early Gary Numan photo from the 1980s and maybe
subconsciously I've used this lighting style a lot because I'd seen it years
ago on one of my favorite albums from the early 90s and on two occasions I've
actually deliberately tried to replicate an image but in fairness on both of
those occasions I credited the original photographer. On this historical project
for the BBC I replicated the famous Dali Atomicus us picture by Philippe
Hausman and for this tutorial... Now I saw a really nice shot of this product by a
great product photographer called Darrin Haddad I wanted to see if I could
produce a better version of Darrin Haddad's Chanel shot... I think I did but at
least I said it was his original shot. So as photographers what can we do about
all this plagiarism? Well the first step is to make sure that your image file has
the metadata embedded into it with your own copyright information you can do
this in Lightroom or in Photoshop in the File Info section that way your details
are embedded into the image file and someone would have to purposefully
remove it you can also search for your images using the Google reverse image
search feature and that will often lead you to the culprits that have stolen
your work. You can then invoice them, which is exactly what I'm going to do
when I finished making this video. There are also organizations like the
Association of Photographers in the UK or the Professional Photographers
Association in the USA these people can assist you with copyright infringements
if you're a member of their organization. There are now even new services like
pixsy.com or copytrack.com who for a fee will track your work and chase down those who
breach your copyright. There is another service called
exif.co which is a watermarking service which makes it clearly apparent that
this is your work and of course you can simply take legal action yourself
against those that have used your work commercially without your permission.
You can learn about your rights as photographers through your local
government laws and regulations which are usually available online. Right, I'm
off to dig out some old album covers to get some new inspiration :-)