Not that this is the greatest photo ever shot (of course I don’t mean the two ladies on it, but in gen­eral), there still must be some­thing about this shot that people want to use it… Now there’s two kinds of people: those that want to use it and pay for it, and those that just use it, without pay­ing for it (or even ask­ing per­mis­sion, for that mat­ter).

Here’s the whole story. I was recently approached by an ad agency who wants to buy a hand­ful of pho­tos of me for use in a pro­spectus for the uni­ver­sity. When the deal was almost sealed, they sent me an email say­ing that they saw one of the pho­tos they were about to pur­chase (the one above) in a sim­ilar pro­spectus from another uni­ver­sity, and that they weren’t really happy about that (since they thought they are get­ting the pic­ture “exclus­ively”, which is the nor­mal thing to assume).

Turns out there are actu­ally two pro­specti (?) from Dundalk IT where some of my images are used in. The best bit: They never asked for my per­mis­sion to print the pic­tures! This is bad in a num­ber of ways. It’s bad form to start off with, it’s a viol­a­tion of the copy­right I own for the images, it does not hon­our the licence under which I pos­ted the images on flickr (which only allows for non-​commercial use with appro­pri­ate attri­bu­tion only, whereas the ad agency was obvi­ously paid for mak­ing the pro­spectus, and my name was nowhere in it), and last but not least: I don’t have a model-​release from the two Erasmus stu­dents on it — so if they were upset about their pic­ture being prin­ted in hun­dreds (or thou­sands) of leaf­lets, I’d be in trouble now!

Any­way, I sent an email to the agency about the issue, and they now for­war­ded me to someone in the uni­ver­sity that provided them with the pic­tures. That per­son is away until Septem­ber 1^st, so I’ll have to wait and see how they react. I’d be inter­est­ing to see what they have to say though…