Archive for the ‘Copyright’ Category

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When Germans get greedy: Nivea XOXO photo contest blatantly grabs for copyrights

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008


Photo by Derrick Tyson/Flickr

Just when I thought it can’t get any worse with regards to the copyright situation for photographers, I came across the Nivea USA photo contest, named Nivea XOXO, looking for photos of “the most kissable person”.

Let’s have a look at the official contest rules (as of 08/10/08):

The photo cannot have been submitted previously in a promotion of any kind or exhibited or displayed publicly through any means.

Aha. So they want fresh, unique, previously unpublished material.

You must be the sole owner of the copyright of any image submitted. Your submission of a photo is your guarantee that you are the copyright holder of the photo.

Nivea seems to be concerned very much about copyrights. Too bad that many of the participants will be teenagers who have just a very vague understanding of the copyright concept at best. But Nivea’s legal team probably knows what they are doing.

If your photo contains an image of another individual, you must obtain express written permission to use that individual’s name, image and likeness and provide it to Sponsor upon request and you and the individual depicted may be required to sign a publicity waiver and release form provided by Sponsor.

Uh-oh. This is disaster waiting to happen. Beiersdorf wants a model release for persons appearing in the photo. Again, with mainly young folks participating in this contest, I doubt that many participants do even know what this passage is all about. It will be interesting whether this may provoke an incident similar to the Virgin case, where Virgin Australia was using a photo without proper model release.

But now for the rights grab! Drumroll, please…

All Entries will become the exclusive property of Sponsor, and none will be acknowledged or returned. Sponsor shall have the right to edit, adapt and publish any or all of the photos, and may use them in any media without attribution or compensation to the entrant, his/her successors or assigns, or any other entity. SUBMITTING AN ENTRY IN THIS CONTEST CONSTITUTES ENTRANT’S IRREVOCABLE ASSIGNMENT, CONVEYANCE AND TRANSFERENCE TO SPONSOR OF ANY AND ALL RIGHT, TITLE AND INTEREST IN THE PHOTO INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, ALL COPYRIGHTS.

Isn’t it beautiful? “Exclusive property” means that even the photographer can not use, licence, or otherwise monetize this photo any longer! No attribution. No compensation. In other words: this is an obvious and blatant grab for photo rights! I expect this competition to turn up on The Rights Off List soon.

Such rules make me sick, really. I would not have expected a respected German company, Beiersdorf AG, to grab so blatantly for photo rights. Is the economy that bad by now that they can not even afford any royalties at all for the use of images, however small such royalties may be? I can already envision teenagers who submit their photos and while they did not win anything, they may find their photos appear in major NIVEA print campaigns. With no dime paid and no credit given, these kids will be disappointed.

I can understand the underlying math done by the Beiersdorf folks, though. They spend about $7,800 on two grand prizes, plus a nifty web site. In return they get ownership of 1,000s of images. Even if just a small percentage of the images qualify for their commercial purposes they still can save a lot of money. No need to pay the photographer, no need to pay an agency. Another proof point that commercial photography is doomed.

For those who claim that anybody is free to enter the contest at the given rules (or refrain from doing so). I agree. Nobody is forced to submit images. But that’s not the point here. The point is to make photographers, especially young amateur photographers, aware of the fact that by entering photo competitions they often give away precious rights to their photos in return for – nothing. Such copyright grabs devalue photography even further and thus harm the entire photo industry.

Again, this makes me sick.

I am convinced that there is absolutely no point in supporting such photo contests. I just hope that you think twice before submitting your photos to any photo contest. And please read the fine print. It’s well worth it!

P.S.: Having said that, I think it’s easy to avoid Nivea products – just don’t buy them! I certainly won’t. :-)

Posted in Copyright, Opinion, Photography | Comments Off

Polyvore and the copyright

Sunday, October 5th, 2008

Again and again I am amazed at the degree photographers are being treated like dirt when it comes to copyright infringement. While the industry of moving images (Hollywood studios and TV broadcasters) and the music industry have strong legal support when it comes to defending their copyrighted works, photographers are really screwed.

Latest example: polyvore.com

Polyvore, founded by ex-Yahoo! Pasha Sadri, is a nifty little site that lets users pull together image objects from around the web and then do “collages” from these images. Cool, eh? Yep, some of the resulting images are certainly interesting and of good artistic quality. Yet, it would be even more cool, if the users who create the collages would actually ask for permission to use the photos.

And they better should do that, because most of them create and publish derivative works without permission. Often they remove existing watermarks from the images, which can be fined at US$ 2,000 per case. And they display the works across the web. Now, if they were found to sell the resulting images, U.S. courts can assign damages up to US$ 150,000 per infringement. (Have a look at Netcopyrightlaw.com to see how things might turn out for infringers.)

Here is an example how my work has been taken and modified:

My image has been cropped by the user, and the copyright information in the image has been removed.

Exploring this user a bit further, I found that she has collected more than 6,000 photos from around the web. Looking at the photos, I’d say most of the images infringe some photographers copyright.

All that is well known to the creators of polyvore, but they do hide behind the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that allows services to accept “user created content” and re-publish this content without risking to be sued. So I sent a notice of infringement to polyvore to get my material removed, along with all the derivative works created from it.

As a side note, isn’t it interesting that there is no easy way for copyright holders to figure out which sites have been hotlinked by Polyvore? It would be easy to introduce a search that let’s you enter the domain name of your site, returning all collages that use your photos. But no, it’s more convenient to let the users just steal and to hide behind the DMCA, while making it as difficult as possible for owners to find potential copyright infringements.

So I used Google to find out where my work might have been used elsewhere on Polyvore. To my utter astonishment I came across a page cached by Google. It shows that the service apparently had had a feature to find other works of the same site:


A Polyvore page cached by Google reveals that Polyvore used to show “More from” a given site.

The cache copy was made by Google on 17th September 2008. Now, about two weeks later, this feature is gone. At least, I can’t see it anywhere on any page. Was it taken down? Why?

Polyvore.com – another nice service that supports copyright infringment.

P.S.: Some may argue that “it’s just teenagers having some fun on the web”. Sure, that may be right. Someone should supervise these teenagers and tell them about copyright. But Polyvore is a service that tries to earn money from their service. The foundation for this are in fact the copyright protected works of countless photographers that make the service a useful, attractive, and monetizable service in the first place. Without this, there wouldn’t be a service.

P.P.S.: An old, but nonetheless interesting thread on Polyvore at The Flickr Help Forum. Plus a petition to stop the nonsense, signed by hundreds of members of photo sharing community RedBubble. And the standard “it’s-not-us-it’s-our-users” excuse from polyvore can be found here.

Update 07-OCT-2008 – Apparently, Polyvore has changed the page linked above and has now removed the former entry that mentioned that one item in the collage has been taken from my site. However, the service did NOT remove the part of the image that has been used. It’s still in the collage. Plus, an Adsense ad is now visible. Fools!

Update 12-JAN-2009 – The link above now returns “The set you were looking for was not found!”, i.e. the infringing image has been removed.

Posted in Copyright, Photo Business, Web Publishing | 18 Comments »

15 Minutes of Fame, Internet Style

Thursday, September 4th, 2008

Just a quick follow-up to my recent post about the new and surprisingly uncool search engine cuil.com – now that a couple of weeks have passed, I revisited their site to see whether they have at least fixed the problem with images assigned randomly to search results.

The good news is: yes, they fixed the problem, at least for my site. Right after their horrible launch I had found about 50 of my travel images that were listed next to results leading to other (often competing) sites. This seems to be fixed by now. Good.

But how well is cuil accepted by the masses? It appears not so much, despite the media blitz they managed to create. Their Alexa chart tells a clear story of “15 Minutes of Fame, Internet Style”:

Alexa chart for cuil.com after 5 weeks of operation
Alexa chart for cuil.com after five weeks of operation.
Source: Alexa.com

I do not think that we have to remember that service for a long time to come. And that is somewhat satisfying. *grin*

Update 11-SEP-08 : TechCrunch reports that Louis Monier, Cuil’s VP of Product, has quietly resigned from his job, just a month after launch. I just wonder why? Wasn’t he working for the cuilest search company around? Wasn’t he part of the 120 billion pages indexed success story? Wasn’t he aiming at Google when he greenlighted the launch? ;-)

Posted in Copyright, Web Publishing | 1 Comment »

New Search Engine Cuil – surprisingly uncuil

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

So, on Monday, a bunch of Ex-Google employees launched a search engine called Cuil (pronounced “Cool”), and it can only be described as the worst launch ever. Why?

Here are a couple of problems I discovered upon just a quick glance:

  1. The name is difficult, too difficult. You can’t explain to people that you found a cool new search engine named Cuil without spelling the name to them. Unless they want to get to a parked domain full of ads (cool.com). Also, you better have no typo in there, otherwise you might end up in places you don’t want to.
  2. The results are not good. I received 15 hits for relevant queries yesterday (yeah, that’s not too much), but trying other searches gives a hopeless pile of junk, sometimes leading even to malicious sites. While searching for “4 days in Rome” Cuil offered me zillions of opera tickets on eBay. Huh?
  3. The service was unavailable for the better part of Monday. Their PR blitz had worked well, probably too well. They could not satisfy all the requests. Several pages were not properly linked (e.g. the about page). That’s lame for a Google-wannabe powered by ex-Googlers.
  4. They claim to have indexed 121,617,892,992 web pages. Yet, many pages are not even listed. And Cuil can’t even cont: often, when you try a search beyond page 3 or 4, Cuil does not have any results to display, despite claiming several thousands of results for that query. Their index size is either 100% Marketing/PR, or their index is so full of spammers that there is barely any useful content left. In any case, their claim to be the biggest is bull.
  5. They desparately want to show pictures next to the results. Fine. But it is completely beyond me, why they are using random pictures for this. In one case, I found my -admittedly not very beautiful- image of Kos old town next to an entry leading to ciao.co.uk. Please…! This is not only dumb, but also copyright infringement. If they don’t stop that soon, they’ll drown in DMCA notices.

So, is Cuil worth it? Well, the world is certainly waiting for a genuine Google competitor. But Cuil.com is not it. To me, it almost looks like a hoax, a fun project to see “what happens if…”, or maybe even a research project on Marketing and PR. But it’s safe to say that it’s quite uncool. Maybe I’ll re-visit them next summer.

Update: Found this story on Ireland-based Sunday Times columnist Sarah Carey, who is an old college friend of Cuil CEO Tom Costello. Apparently she became Cuil’s “Strategist to the CEO”. :-)

Update 2: Jim Goldstein also has an article on Cuil’s shady photo tactics.

Uncuil
Screenshot of cuil.com showing random images placed next to search results. Here one of my Kos photos is shown next to a result on travel reviews located at travel.ciao.co.uk

Kos Historical Old Town
Kos Historical Town (original picture here)
Mark Zanzig/www.zanzig.com

Copyright Violations by Cuil
Screenshot showing images next to search results, five of them taken from Zanzig.com without permission. Note that the results are not associated in any way with our site.

Posted in Copyright, Web Publishing | 2 Comments »

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