another photo used without permission or credit

Get a grip, its just a youtube video

@juanlanteri: you got me, im a realist. i do see youve updated your profile to include an avatar, though.

so you can call me a "friend" but not add me to your "only friends" list? :) only joking

thats not a very good argument dxallen. you can read online where and what a photographer can take pictures of, including what they need permission to shoot - model releases, etc.

copyright issues seems to be a hot topic at the moment - another perspective (on copyright not this particular case) here..

photobusinessforum.blogspot.com/2007/12/its-not-your-copy...

two items of note....

"Until the laws change, however, while more and more people are going to be infringing on your work ... there will be more and more opportunities for you to reap the punitive benefits from these thieves. Yes, that means registering your work, and yes, that means pursing them with an attorney."

and

"...people will, in order for creatives to continue to survive, cost so much more on the front end to commission the work, because of the shortened life-span of copyright"

I find it interesting that you are upset about them using -part- of a picture you took without them asking permission, yet in this picture that you've posted on your own account in flckr, it has -part- of the lyrics for their song, as well as the -entire- modified picture that was used in the video.
Did you ask their permission to post that?

I was looking at the New York Times as I normally do and found this timely article on Fair Use and Copyright. It is well worth a read....

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www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/arts/design/06prin.html

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December 6, 2007
If the Copy Is an Artwork, Then What’s the Original?
By RANDY KENNEDY

Correction Appended

Since the late 1970s, when Richard Prince became known as a pioneer of appropriation art — photographing other photographs, usually from magazine ads, then enlarging and exhibiting them in galleries — the question has always hovered just outside the frames: What do the photographers who took the original pictures think of these pictures of their pictures, apotheosized into art but without their names anywhere in sight?

Recently a successful commercial photographer from Chicago named Jim Krantz was in New York and paid a quick visit to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, where Mr. Prince is having a well-regarded 30-year retrospective that continues through Jan. 9. But even before Mr. Krantz entered the museum’s spiral, he was stopped short by an image on a poster outside advertising the show, a rough-hewn close-up of a cowboy’s hat and outstretched arm.

Mr. Krantz knew it quite well. He had shot it in the late 1990s on a ranch in the small town of Albany, Tex., for a Marlboro advertisement. “Like anyone who knows his work,” Mr. Krantz said of his picture in a telephone interview, “it’s like seeing yourself in a mirror.” He did not investigate much further to see if any other photos hanging in the museum might be his own, but said of his visit that day, “When I left, I didn’t know if I should be proud, or if I looked like an idiot.”

When Mr. Prince started reshooting ads, first prosaic ones of fountain pens and furniture sets and then more traditionally striking ones like those for Marlboro, he said he was trying to get at something he could not get at by creating his own images. He once compared the effect to the funny way that “certain records sound better when someone on the radio station plays them, than when we’re home alone and play the same records ourselves.”

But he was not circumspect about what it meant or how it would be viewed. In a 1992 discussion at the Whitney Museum of American Art he said of rustling the Marlboro aesthetic: “No one was looking. This was a famous campaign. If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.”

People might not have been looking at the time, when his art was not highly sought. But as his reputation and prices for his work rose steeply — one of the Marlboro pictures set an auction record for a photograph in 2005, selling for $1.2 million — they began to look, and Mr. Prince has spoken of receiving threats, some legal and some more physical in nature, from his unsuspecting lenders. He is said to have made a small payment in an out-of-court settlement with one photographer, Garry Gross, who took the original shot for one of Mr. Prince’s most notorious early borrowings, an image of a young unclothed Brooke Shields. (Mr. Prince declined to comment for this article, saying in an e-mail message only, “I never associated advertisements with having an author.”)

Mr. Krantz, who has shot ads for the United States Marine Corps and a long list of Fortune 500 companies including McDonald’s, Boeing and Federal Express, said he had no intention of seeking money from or suing Mr. Prince, whose borrowings seem to be protected by fair use exceptions to copyright law.

But with the exhibition now up at the Guggenheim — and the posters using his image on sale for $9.95 — he said he simply wanted viewers to know that “there are actually people behind these images, and I’m one of them.”

“I’m not a mean person, and I’m not a vindictive person,” he said. “I just want some recognition, and I want some understanding.”

Mr. Krantz, who retains the copyrights to most of his work, said he had been aware for several years that his work had been lifted by Mr. Prince, along with that of several other photographers who have shot Marlboro ads. But he said he did not think much about it, and said he had never talked with other Marlboro photographers about the issue.

“If imitation is a form of flattery, then I will accept the compliment,” he said.

But on one occasion a woman active in the art world visited his studio in Chicago, and, seeing a print of one of his pictures, Mr. Krantz recalled, “she said, ‘Oh, Richard Prince has a photograph just like that!’” And in 2003 Mr. Prince’s version of an image that Mr. Krantz shot for Marlboro — showing a mounted cowboy approaching a calf stranded in the snow — sold for $332,300 at Christie’s. Although the shot was blown up to heroic proportions, “there’s not a pixel, there’s not a grain that’s different,” he said. And so Mr. Krantz, whose Marlboro ads now appear mostly in Europe and Asia, began to grow angry.

He said that while he is primarily an advertising photographer, when he was growing up in Omaha, he did attend workshops with Ansel Adams. He studied graphic design and got into commercial photography, starting out in Omaha taking shots of toasters and pens and heating pads because that was where the work was. But he has long exhibited his own art photographs, recent examples of which show stark images of an empty prison as if seen through defaced or broken glass.

Mr. Krantz said he considered his ad work distinctive, not simply the kind of anonymous commercial imagery that he feels Mr. Prince considers it to be. “People hire me to do big American brands to help elevate their images to these kinds of iconic images,” he said.

He has considered trying to correspond with Mr. Prince to complain more directly but said he felt it would probably do no good.

“At this point it’s been done, and it’s out there,” he said. “My whole issue with this, truly, is attribution and recognition. It’s an unusual thing to see an artist who doesn’t create his own work, and I don’t understand the frenzy around it.”

He added: “If I italicized ‘Moby-Dick,’ then would it be my book? I don’t know. But I don’t think so.”

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Correction: December 7, 2007

An article in The Arts yesterday about the photographer Jim Krantz and his views on the use of some of his pictures made for Marlboro advertisements by the artist Richard Prince referred incorrectly to the copyrights for his pictures. While the copyrights for his Marlboro photographs are owned by Philip Morris, Mr. Krantz retains the copyrights to most of his work; his clients do not generally own the rights.

Out of curiosity, did you get permission to use the screen shot on your site, did you license it? Because, like it or not they created a work of which they are the copyright holder. Their usage and possible infringement of your work does not allow you to infringe their work, though both uses quite possibly fall under fair usage but then I am not a lawyer and the cost of determining if the usage is fair or not may not be worth the cost.

@ralatalo - "the cost of determining if the usage is fair or not may not be worth the cost." whatever the issues involved, you cannot ignore the value of determining this case on principle. The assumption that "because its on the internet, its free" is damaging to creatives everywhere who risk using the internet as a promotional tool.

Value cannot always be quantified in dollars.

I really love your work Lane...

You are most definitely greedy and I am wondering why they didn’t just claim fair use if your photo is such a big deal.

Artistically and most definitely aesthetically they should have used something else as the photo is of poor quality by all measure.

On the bright side, you and Lars can hang out and bash “those thieving losers.”

Well… that is if you don’t have any stolen music on your iPod.

All the Best!

Estebe

wow estebeverde, dont bother reading any of the other posts before throwing your opinion in or anything. That wouldnt make any sense at all!

Lane,

I want to respost my comment from your blog here because I just had the same slap in a face yesterday from a band.

Go Girl! As someone who in the past year turned professional, today I just had my first slap in the face. A band used some of my photos on their MySpace without permission and credit. I called the band member responsible and she was unapologetic and told me they “weren´t the high quality photos we will buy when we have money”.

She saw one of my photos on Flickr a few months ago and invited me to come to her show. I photographed them freelance as I do many bands in Berlin and after the show we would “make an appointment” as she told me.

After two days of showing them my photos on MySpace via my flickr link, the drummer calls me (who I had not spoken to or been introduced to) asking me when he could stop by and pick up the photos. “Uh, yeah burn a CD and I´ll pass by”.

I told him, “I am a photographer, this is my job. Why hasn´t ______ called me? We were supposed to have an appointment to review the photos.” He apologized. Later, he emailed me and told me, “Sorry ____ is a bit ambitious and sometimes oversteps ____ bounds.

Later the band member who wanted to contract my services emailed me and apologized for the misunderstanding. She told me to call her and we would work out a deal and asked my price.

I told her 200 euros.

Later on the week, she called me to argue that she thought the photos were free, blah blah. I politely told her I didn´t want to argue with her and said goodbye.

She later emailed me, offering 50 euros now and 150 euros NEXT YEAR IN THE SUMMER (this was December 2007) when they would pay. I didn´t even respond because it was an insult to any photographer or any professional.

This week I grew suspicious because of her behaviour and attitude. I checked out their MySpace to see if my photos were there! And BAAM! She put three of my photos MIXED IN with other photos on an IMAGELOOP slideshow on their page.

I called her and told her to take the photos down. I went the same diplomatic route you took and politely asked for her to take them down.

She emails me back saying I was making a big deal over nothing, she would not take them down, and how if her work was used somewhere else it would be OK.

I will contact Myspace if they don´t take them down and a lawyer if necessary.

Thank you for blogging about this, making it public. I just googled photo copyright band and came across the CNET article about you, Q&A: Going to the mat for photo copyrights.

I knew of the case before through Flickr and Thomas Hawk´s blog and know I really understand it first hand.

Thanks for having the courage, transparence, and dignity to fight this and give other photographers courage as well to confront people who don´t respect copyright or our profession!

Shit - hope you got this sorted!

shit .. reading on, looks like its not a situation that can get sorted - crazy ... I cant believe people have such little respect

Filhos da mãe....

Congratulation for this shot. I enjoy this shot a lot. Again congratulation to you. Sir jeux en ligne