Family's Christmas Photos Hawk Groceries In Prague 263
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that Jeff and Danielle Smith sent a photo of themselves with their two young children to family and friends as a Christmas card, and posted the image on her blog and a few social networking websites. Then, last month, a friend of the family was vacationing in the Czech Republic when he spotted a full size poster of the Missouri family's smiling faces in the window of a local supermarket in Prague, advertising a grocery delivery service. The friend snapped a few pictures and sent them to the Smiths, who were flabbergasted. Mario Bertuccio, who owns the Grazie store in Prague, admitted that he had found the photo online but thought it was computer-generated and promised to remove it, and 'We'll be happy to write an e-mail with our apology,' he says. Meanwhile Mrs. Smith has received 180,000 visitors and over 500 comments on her blog since she posted the story. She says she is glad the photo wasn't used in an unseemly manner. 'Interesting. Bizarre. Flattering, I suppose,' writes Mrs. Smith. 'But quite creepy.'"
For chrissakes, you're American, right? (Score:5, Informative)
Do it right.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002168937_coffeemug03.html [nwsource.com]
Sue them.
Amazing what you can find online ... (Score:4, Informative)
... when you use common file names that typical cameras use for their stored photos. Most people never change them. I took the part of the file name of that family's photo (removing the appended reduced size that was used) which was "img_1053". Google images found this [google.com]. People should think about what they put online. Google is watching.
Total Hijack (Score:2, Informative)
Sorry to be totally offtopic, but I'm very bothered by the junk showing up on slashdot articles, specifically, short horizontal and vertical gray bars and grey, green, and red dots/pills which do nothing but obscure content. Here's an example: http://i646.photobucket.com/albums/uu187/weirdslashjunk/dots.png [photobucket.com]
Is there a way to fix this?
Re:Total Hijack (Score:1, Informative)
Photography Copyright (Score:4, Informative)
The vast majority of people don't understand copyright. If I take a picture of you, I own the copyright on the image, not you. Even if you pay me. For some reason the "work for hire" system never got applied to photographers. This is probably because photographers are typically hired on contract, not on retainer. This is clearly as a case of a photographer selling his portfolio to a stock image reseller. It's not unusual and the people in the picture are not entitled to anything.
Re:Really... (Score:1, Informative)
Czech Republic, don't think they care too much about copyright over there.
Well they care the same as in UK, France, Germany.... Czech Republic is a member of the EU...
Re:Not Stolen. Nope. Not At All. (Score:3, Informative)
What "culprit"? He's the photographer.. he owns the shot.
RTFB (Score:3, Informative)
If you would have read the linked blog entry you would have seen this, written by the wife:
"I take FULL responsibillity for posting this picture with the incorrect resolution (read: too high)."
So we can take this "their friend sold their photo out" theory to rest.
Re:Photography Copyright (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The way it looks (Score:3, Informative)
If you read her blog post she says she accidentally posted the original high resolution picture instead of posting a thumbnailish version
In East Europe, that's considered Fair Use (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Really... (Score:5, Informative)
His admission of guilt and means of acquiring the photo appeared to be a second hand quote. Hearsay, if you will.
More than likely, he hired someone to do his advertising campaign or at least make the graphics for it. I can't say that I've known many business owners who do their own graphics work, unless it's a graphics firm. They would be the ones that made the photo, and edited the background and text into it. Not an amazing feat, but it was done none the less.
Probably whoever did it was confident in that no one would ever find out. Heck, who would expect that someone who knew the family in America would happen to travel to the Czech Republic and happen to spot the sign? It's not to say that it was right by any means, it just was impractical to think that they would find out.
Hell, one of the edited photos that I made, which had absolutely no bearing on the original other than the human form (substantially edited even at that), showed up on a national news broadcast. It was the main image from my site, and showed up in a flash in a set of other photos showing anonymity on the Internet. No, we didn't catch it on the DVR, and I didn't care enough to try to find the clip online to verify it and complain about it, but it was still my original work used improperly by a major broadcast company. If I hadn't happened to have looked at the TV just then, I wouldn't have even known it ever happened. People are generally pretty confident in the idea of "what they don't know won't hurt them."
Hopefully they learned a little something from this. Don't post hi res pictures. There's no need to anyways, bring it down to a reasonable displayed resolution. If they had, that photo would have been skipped over and another would have been used. As it is, that photo is probably floating around in a few stock photo libraries now, tagged as "average family, man woman children". Maybe whoever stole it assumed that it was already a stock photo, so they were even less likely to get caught.
I've seen that quite a bit. Places use stock photos that they were provided, but don't know anything about the original licensing. Consider going to a template site. Do you *know* that every photo there is properly licensed for resale? Maybe they're only licensed for the first user, and you're way out of line reusing it on your project, and/or reselling to someone else. Maybe when the same webmaster reuses it on a dozen sites, they were breaking the license for all of them.
So, shoot your own damned photos, and then you're sure. :) You want to put an average family up on a billboard, put a Craigslist ad up for an average family photoshoot, and pay the $50 it would take to get them to come to you, and sign the model releases.
Re:Total Hijack (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Eh (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think there's anything about copyright laws in not wanting your photos used by everyone and their pervert uncle without permission. Duly noted, in this case no big harm was done, but I can easily imagine a few uses where you probably wouldn't go "eh, creative commons all the way" about your photos.
As a still mild example, a case on The Register a couple of years ago involved a family discovering their daughter's photos -- which apparently they did realease under some kind of cretive commons license which allowed that -- being plastered all over the town on some "ditch your girlfriend by SMS" ads. If you don't see how being the poster girl for a "ditch your girlfriend" campaign can be stressful, I dare say you don't remember high school too well.
Or what if I used your photo in some glowing testimonial about herbal viagra or penis enlargement pills? I'm sure that'll be some fun talks all around. Or in some drug rehab ad? Kleptomaniacs Anonymous? Disgruntled employee of the month? I'm sure that'll be fun when HR runs into that before your next job interview. You might not even know they did. Or an ad for a gay sex hotline? Now that will be fun in the bible belt.
If nothing else, at some point or another, your image or reputation might actually be important. Having some control over how it's used is just common sense. It has nothing to do with copyright culture, but just with the fact that libel -- even vaguely implied, like associating your image with something you don't want to be associated with -- can and does cause real harm.
Re:Not Stolen. Nope. Not At All. (Score:4, Informative)
... this is like the 3rd post where I've had to explain to someone that a photographer is not required to get model releases.. the publisher is required to get model releases.
Re:Amazing what you can find online ... (Score:4, Informative)
Could you at least give out a warning? This ain't goatse, for $deity's sake!
Re:Not Stolen. Nope. Not At All. (Score:4, Informative)
Not necessary the high res shot was available on her blog:
http://www.extraordinarymommy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/img_1053.jpg [extraordinarymommy.com]
Looking at the URL she is going to be to pleased about this whole brooha as she is running her own blog as a potential business. Links from Slashdot are going to make her happy.
Re:Really... (Score:4, Informative)
It was the main image from my site, and showed up in a flash in a set of other photos showing anonymity on the Internet [...] but it was still my original work used improperly by a major broadcast company.
I would imagine such use of that content was for citation purposes and clearly fair use.
Re:Not Stolen. Nope. Not At All. (Score:5, Informative)
Technically true.
It goes like this: photographer goes to publisher with a photo. Publisher sees the a face on the photo - asks "do you have a release with that photo? If not, please provide one, or we won't use your photo." Most of the time the publisher doesn't know the person on the photo and doesn't even care, so in the end it's still photographer's job to get the release.
Re:Eh (Score:3, Informative)
I don't usually reply to trolls, here it goes.
I did not want any scandal. I am not a full-time photographer but I do value my reputation. Like I said, parents are sometimes overprotective. It's not my job to try and change their minds - most of the time they don't want to and you can't really reason with an angry mother. I could have acted in a stiff manner, since the MR was legally binding, but really, it wouldn't have done me any good.
Re:Really... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm against the use of copyright law to snatch money, over the odds, from illicit downloaders - Damages of $9,250 per song in the case of Capitol vs Thomas
While I agree that the punitive damages tossed around in these cases are excessive, that action - just like all the others - makes no claim for downloading music. Thomas is being sued for uploading; that is, distribution.
Re:Really... (Score:3, Informative)
Don't forget that Americans don't have nearly as much time off each year to travel as citizens of nearly all other first world countries.
This happened to my barbershop quartet (Score:2, Informative)