Mr Granata, I’m Shocked

November 20, 2007 by pmelcher.

The watchdogs of the Photo Industry are turning against themselves in an effort to cash in a few extra pennies. What happens, when someone who owns a photo agency claims it is okay to steal copyrighted material. Mr Pino Granata explains, in a long post, on a website thrives on photo business news, that it is unfair for big movie and TV network productions to charge for image usage.

Here is how it goes. A TV studio hires an expensive and highly talented photographer to shoot images of a show they wish to promote. They then decide to give away ( for free, yes) some of the images to a limited and carefully selected group of press outlets in order to publicize the show. A photo shoot can go from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousand of dollars, depending on the show.

Mr Granata believes that, because those TV network have given images for free to some media outlet, it is OK for anyone who can get their hands on it to either use it for free and even license it to others for a fee. Suddenly, copyright disappear. It’s a free for all, pun intended. Supposedly these TV Networks and Movie studios are extremely rich, so what do they care?

They care Mr Granata and others like him, because there is such a thing as copyright. They care because they paid for these photo shoot and they want to be able to control where they end up. They care because you literally steal images, charge for them and do not even offer to share licensing revenues ( or “research fee” as you call them). Funny part is you, and others like you, do not seem to do the same with Getty or Corbis. They too have a lot of money. If you license an image for them without there authorization, according to the same thinking, you do them a favor don’t you ?

This game has to stop. You want to license an image, you ask the copyright owner for a permission to do so. Movie studio, Annie Lebovitz, Joe googoo, Fickrl or not. As a photo agency owner, you should be on the front line of protecting copyrights, not claiming stealing from the rich is ok. Stealing is stealing.

Getty has been very active in finding and fining copyright infringement culprits. Using state of the art tracking software like the one offered by Idee Inc, they can scan almost any publications in the world and check for illegal usage. What makes you think the major studio are not going to do the same? Once they see they can recup their marketing expenses, they will certainly go after the infringer. And if they can get $250,00, they should.

There is nothing more lethal to our business than copyright infringement. Nothing worse than stealing images from someone in order to license it to another without authorization. Nothing worse than trying to justify it by claiming it hurts our business.

Mr Granata, and everyone else who supports this practice, should you want to change the business in order to help the “little” guys, please do not do it in advocating stealing images. You are not doing the studios a favor and you are certainly not helping the photo community.

PS: if you want to use images from the TV Networks, license them legally from places like NBCU Photobank 

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