The Daily Mail used my photo without my permission
Giles Turnbull
know, the stats that tell you how many people have been looking at
your stuff online. But today I was idling my way through my Flickr
stats and noticed something very odd.
One photo, of the Folkestone Academy building at night, is
continuously popular and gets a lot of hits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gilest/1716159383/
Curious as to why this should be, I searched Google images for
"folkestone academy", and got two surprises. First: my Flickr image
shows up on the top line of results, which might explain some of the
incoming traffic. But second: that the same photo - my photo - was
also appearing in Google's image search under the domain
"dailymail.co.uk".
A couple of clicks later and I was here:
And there it was. My photo. On the Daily Mail web site, illustrating a
story of theirs. The Daily Mail had *not* asked me if they could use
it. The image is *not* posted under a Creative Commons licence, which
the Mail might have interpreted as meaning that they could use it
legally. Under the "Additional information" heading in the right
column, the text clearly reads: "All rights reserved." They just
Googled the phrase like I did, and presumably grabbed the first
picture that took their liking. They even had the cheek to put "(C)
GILEST" on the image, as if that made everything OK.
I was absolutely *furious* when I saw this.
A few years ago - 1999, maybe even into the early 2000s - I'd have
forgiven them for not quite understanding the internet properly.
People used to think like that. They used to think that any image
online was an image they could swipe - no-one thought that there were
any rules, or that normal laws applied. It happened to me before, back
in 1999 or thereabouts, when a photo of mine of a boat in Cambridge
popped up in the boat owner's publicity literature. I phoned him to
ask what he was doing and he was genuinely astonished to discover that
he'd done something wrong.
But that was six or seven years ago, and this is today, and we're not
talking about the owner of a pleasure boat on the Cam, we're talking
about a huge media organisation with one of the fastest-growing web
sites around. *That's* why I'm so mad about this. These people should
know better. I think they *do* know better, but they just don't care.
My photo was as clearly marked as a photo could be. The Mail can have
*no excuse* for not asking me if they could use it. Nor could there be
any reasonable confusion as to the image's copyright status. I just
cannot believe that the Mail used this photo by mistake. Indeed, the
very fact that the image was stamped with "(C) GILEST" means that they
knew full well who owned the image and that it was under copyright.
I have sent the Mail's online picture desk an invoice. We'll see what happens.
(Addendum: apologies to those of you who have already endured my
ranting about this elsewhere. I've been twittering, IRC-raging,
Flickr-posting and generally sounding off to anyone and everyone
who'll listen. Sorry.)
http://flickr.com/photos/gilest/2649417969/
http://twitter.com/gilest/statuses/852900599