Forum Moderators: not2easy
Surely with it being a personal photo that makes it obvious that it's my image???
Would having a negative be classed as proof?
Another point I should make is that the person in the photo is a minor.
If you are walking down your local main street and a photo is taken of the crowd, with your face clearly recognizable and without your permission, what is the status of copyright on that? If you don't want your picture on a paper/magazine/on TV?
Do the media have free reign to take photos of anyone and everyone and print them?
If they are freelancers they sell picts and exclusives copyrights to the publisher. If they are hired by the publisher, the contracts states that all material belongs to the publishers.
If bystanders could oppose to get theire picture taken, paparazzi would be a dead profession.
I think mack has a problem here. The publisher probably aquired the picture in good faith.
If it's a major publisher, which I assume it is if the book is that expensive, call an attorney to see if there can be a contingency fee arrangement set up and have the attorney make a demand for royalties for the use of the photograph.
That is cheaper ownership establishment because it does not rely on expert/scientific consultants to establish the original source.
In the UK "Small Claims Court", that is sufficient proof to get judgement.
the person in the photo is a minor
Be aware that the publisher might demand to see YOUR model release (signed by parent/guardian) before agreeing to pay any royalties. Of course, the royalties from one photo in a large book (that isn't a worldwide bestseller) will no doubt be a pittance. It would be nice to enforce your rights, though.
There are some other interesting issues here, too. If it had been posted on your own web site, you probably would have had a copyright notice covering the entire site's content. Since it was posted on another site, presumably with no copyright notice from you, could that constitute putting the photo into the public domain? Or would the copyright be owned/shared by the forum owner? (Note the little "(c) WebmasterWorld.com 1998-2002 all rights reserved" at the bottom of each forum page here. Does that forum owner do the same?) This kind of stuff is what keeps lawyers employed.
I had some moderately unique photos that I thought might be ripped off, so I actually put a little text copyright notice in each jpg image. Easily cropped out, but nobody could say that they didn't know it wasn't public domain when they stole it. Haven't found them in a book yet, though, so maybe I shouldn't have done that... ;)
While the law varies from country to country the general rule is that you do not need to put a copyright notice on it to own the copyright. Copyright is yours anyway. Also publishing it on the internet is not putting it in the public domain unless you explictly say so. So noone else has the right to publish that photo canywhere for any reason without your express permission. As the photo was taken by you you retain ownership of it, all the stuff about permission of teh model doesn't apply, it's your photo and that's what will get them in trouble.
As for proving it's yours, you not only have the negative but hopefully the original file from when it was first converted to an electonic form (by scanning or whatever). This file has a creation date as part of it and they would need to provide an electronic version of the file with an earlier date as proof of ownership. Obviously they can't.
So like anyone else I will say: get a lawyer. In my opinion it's worth it even if you don't make any money out of it (and surely they should end up at least paying your legal fees or something) because it will stop them doing it again.
For more inromation there are a lot of good websites out there. whatiscopyright.org is a good place to start and a google search should find more.
