AboutJohn Wilson Expertise Over 27 years specializing exclusively in professional wedding photography. I can answer most questions relating directly to wedding photography concerning the business, film, digital, traditional & digital labs, marketing, effects, pricing & packaging, shooting outdoors and in-studio with multiple flash, color management and creating magazine style wedding albums. I can't answer questions regarding other fields of photography.
Experience Over 27 years experience photographing weddings professionally. Past 4 years shooting digital exclusively.
Organizations Better Business Bureau.
Education/Credentials Going to photography seminars and reading all the wedding photography books I can find then applying the techniques and new styles I've learned with each wedding. You always need to grow and learn to keep up in this field. With each new wedding you photograph, you must challenge yourself to do better work than your previous wedding. You must always have the goal of making the wedding photographs for a bride & groom be the best photographs they have seen of any wedding.
Question I am a professional headshot photographer. A well known self published
author in the entertainment industry recently published a book that is now in
books stores and available on the Internet. She used one of my actor's
headshot, taken by me, in her book. She did not get a signed release from
me or even ask my permission. She did give me a credit but it is in the index
and not on the photograph itself or even on the same page. What recourse
do I have with the author or the publishing company? She and I had a run in
before and I cannot believe she would use one of my images without
permission which I would not have given her anyway.
Answer Hi Debi,
Thanks for your question about copyright ownership. Since you mentioned you would not have given permission for the use of the image anyway, and since it is acknowledged that you are the creator of the image in the form of the credit in the index, in my opinion there are basically two options:
One option is to send a bill for the use of the image to the publisher. It is easy to see and or prove the publisher violated your copyright since there is no written permission from you for use of the image. You can't be so sure at this point whether the author gave false information to the publisher for use of it. So I say go after the publisher . . . at least first. Even if you could prove the author falsely told the publisher there was written permission, that is the publisher's problem, not yours.
The publisher also has the legal obligation to be certain there is written permission from the creator of the work and the publisher obviously doesn't have it.
Also some photographers and studios include in their copyright notice to portrait customers and others what the penalty is when unauthorized use of an image has been discovered. It seems $500+ per image and any legal fees is common. But there can easily be exceptions based on the potential value of any particular image.
The second option is to simply take them to court if they don't pay the bill you sent in option one. This would look better to the judge since you made an effort to collect compensation outside the courtroom first. But you could just take them to court without billing them.
When weighing these two options, you might consider whether just having an image you created published in the book of a well-known self-published author in the entertainment industry has value to you. You could use this to your promotional advantage. Maintaining a friendly relationship with the author could bring you more work? If you think so, you could include the fact the author used your headshot services and included your great work in a book. Post this on your website and resume. Even include info about the book, what it costs and how honored you feel your image was selected, etc. Maybe it's worth turning lemons into lemonade. But this is probably something else that should be thoughtfully considered.
