The story of the image to the left from the Flickr user Lorenzo D. Dominguez (here you can watch his photos on Flickr) starts with:
"I work for a big company, a Fortune 100 [financial services] company [in Manhattan], as a director of marketing and communications. In fact, I’ve worked in advertising and marketing for twenty years now.
Thus, I well know that the standard and most ethical business practice is that you get your photos from either internal sources for art, photos and design or your company purchases images from stock photo companies or independent photogs for both internal and external presentations, storyboards and mock advertisements."
Lorenzo´s user name on Flickr is lorenzodom, and he is apparently one of Flickr´s most succesful photographers with some 17,000 images online:
"As of June 21, 2006, over 140 blogs, websites and print publications have cited, posted or published over 300 lorenzodom photos over the last year. My photos are listed in the Top Ten Flickr All Time Most Popular list according to flickstr.com. My “cut-out” technique for many of my photos is currently featured as part of a story in the 2006 July issue of Germany’s premier photography magazine, foto magazin".
With all this success, Lorenzo recently opened his own lorenzoshop to sell his images through a dedicated website.
The image above first appeared in Lorenzo´s set Elegance en Blanche of over 100 photos (view the set as one-second slideshow). The image quickly appeared on the cover of the March issue of LOOK Magazine and was published in the inaugural issue of The Gnostic Magazine in April. Lorenzo noted that he "was never paid for the photos used in Look and Gnostic".
Lorenzo was then approached by the "advertising agency DDB Berlin (i.e. Gunn Report's Most Awarded Agency Network in the World, for the second year in a row Adweek's Global Agency Network of the Year, four-time winner of Clio Agency Network of the Year, winner of more awards than any other network in the history of the Cannes International Advertising Festival", as he writes in Do You Know This Woman? (Part I).
DDB Berlin wanted to use the photo for an advertisement campaign and "in the process they attached the mocked up magazine advertisement for Max Magazine that you see here".
As it turned out in the follow-up Do You Know This Woman? (Part II), Lorenzo now accuses the DDB agency of simply stealing the photo and not willing to pay a dime for the usage:
"Grand theft auto, information highway robbery, a heist on the autobahn of advertising.
All my images and photos are copyrighted. Yet, they still took a screenshot and lifted one of my photos right off of Flickr and used them for business purposes, as mocked up above. It’s one thing for an individual to blog someone else’s photo with a link directly back to the page or to publicize it in a magazine after you’ve asked permission, but it is really another to manipulate it and then to ask, after the fact.
I suppose I should be grateful that they liked it enough to use
commercially, albeit “internally,” and that they subsequently asked me
to use it for advertising purposes. Yet, at the same time I feel,
somewhat, taken advantage of.
Many photographers get paid lots of money for their photos, yet these guys weren’t willing to pay anything. [...]
And DDB is one of the world’s most successful, richest ... and highly
visible advertising agency networks, in the world. Thus, they can
readily afford to buy stock photos.
Yet, DDB pursued this precarious avenue of taking an image that is not
rightfully theirs, manipulating it for their own purposes, and then
audaciously sending it to the owner as bait. That’s risky business if
you ask me, that’s asking for a lawsuit or some international bad press
for possibly illegal and unethical business practices (i.e.
intellectual property theft and harassment for looming deadlines).
And albeit their client,
Max Magazine, loves Flickr
photographers and runs a feature on them every month— they’re not
willing to pay you for your photos, for your work. They figure that
since you’re an amateur (and thus a sucker) they can easily sell you a
little “instant fame” in exchange for using your photos for free, so
that they can sell more magazines and increase their profit margins at
the same time.
[...] If anyone knows of any intellectual property lawyers who would love to make a case out of it, have them give me a call. I just might be interested after all."
Some major european newspapers and magazines, like Bild and STERN, are paying their citizien journalists for their images. Others, like Max Magazine, do not.
The race to the bottom is always hotly contested. The next step seems to be that advertising agencies, famous for their campaigns, intend to extract the best images from Flickr and are not willing to pay the photographers for them.
Related:
- Do You Know This Woman? (Part II) (September 2006)
- Do You Know This Woman? (Part I) (Sept. 13, 2006)
- View: Turning A Photo Sharing Community Into An Editorial And Stock Image Outlet, Comments From Fotolia (Aug. 15, 2006)
- Picture Press Starts To Convert Images Of Photo Sharing Community Into Cash, Flickr Probably Follows (Aug. 10, 2006)
- MAX Magazine Feels Really Sorry: How To Use Flickr Photographers To Maximize Your Company´s Profit (July 24, 2006)
- Official press release: Flickr/MAX cooperation announced in March 2006
