Your weak apology to blame your wife went down like a house on fire. Take responsibility!

Read update here:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B0GlxWPnzhB/

Does anyone know the photographer I heard it was "David Crausby"?

Only way to resolve this is to pay the requested charity promptly. You might not be aware but Nadav Kander is extremely wealthy and powerful and could sue you for a lot of money.

Your weak apology to blame your wife went down like a house on fire. Take responsibility!
Read update here:
https://www.instagram.com/p/B0GlxWPnzhB/

For clarity, this second insta post refers to an incidence of (apparently) the same photo being used in Rolling Stone Italy.
You can see it by googling 'rolling stone italia David Lynch' and checking the pic. It's the third photo and the window shadow can clearly be seen. The pic may have been cropped in, it looks that way on the Google search pic.

I'm not making any comment on the degree of responsibility of the photographer. That would depend a lot on e.g. whether his image was a Live News photo of e.g. the opening of the exhibition, and how the image was originally captionned. IIRC, there was a label on the wall in the Alamy pic which presumably indicated the origin of the pic. and clearly showed that the tog was not trying to pass it off as his own work.

However, I've learned something via this as I'd never heard of Nandar, and possibly not of David Lynch, before. GIMF.

I'd think the main responsibility was those who cropped in on the image. Especially because, as journalists, they'd be expected to know the rules.

That rule of Alamy's isn't at all easy to find. For example, there aren't links from editorial file pages to the terms of use. Nor from the main buyers page.

However, I am not a lawyer, and sometimes the Law does not decide as we might expect.

(I have seen the original image as it was on Alamy, as it was on Google for a few days after it was removed from Alamy.)

Another thing perhaps (IANAL) pointing to more responsibility falling on the publishers is that there are lots of  'direct' images of David Lynch available from Alamy, yet they chose to buy that one and crop it in.

No need to read the thread if you're not interested.
I'm certainly interested in how this pans out, but there are many threads here which hold no interest for me, but have plenty of  interest for others. Just follow the threads you have an interest in and ignore the rest.

Lots of failures here. Failure of the "photographer" to take responsibility, to act honestly as an artist, to control their Alamy account (his wife was uploading to it), failure of Alamy to recognize an image that shouldn't have been available for commercial use without questioning its origin (it looked like a gallery image with wall placard), failure of the publication (what art director approved this without questioning the uncropped image), etc. What a mess.

Quote

...failure of Alamy to recognize an image that shouldn't have been available for commercial use

1. Alamy does not check for IP. It also does not control editorial/commercial use. These are the responsibility of the contributor.*
2. What makes you think it was available for commercial use?

*iS / Getty does check, but even correct annotation doesn't stop images sold from there being used commercially, either by buyers or by image thieves.

I like Alamy so I don't want to be too critical but perhaps they should check IP and commercial vs editorial designation.  Contributors are likely to make mistakes.

Perhaps all agencies should try harder.  Perhaps agencies should require the photographers name.  When the photographer is not the contributor perhaps agencies should require an upload of a work for hire or transfer of copyright document.  Buyers deserve to know they are receiving a legitimate product. 

Quote from: trek on July 20, 2019, 14:21

Quote from: ShadySue on July 20, 2019, 13:31

Quote

...failure of Alamy to recognize an image that shouldn't have been available for commercial use

1. Alamy does not check for IP. It also does not control editorial/commercial use. These are the responsibility of the contributor.*
2. What makes you think it was available for commercial use?

*iS / Getty does check, but even correct annotation doesn't stop images sold from there being used commercially, either by buyers or by image thieves.

I like Alamy so I don't want to be too critical but perhaps they should check IP and commercial vs editorial designation.  Contributors are likely to make mistakes.

Perhaps all agencies should try harder.  Perhaps agencies should require the photographers name.  When the photographer is not the contributor perhaps agencies should require an upload of a work for hire or transfer of copyright document.  Buyers deserve to know they are receiving a legitimate product.

I saw the original picture, it was online for a few days after Alamy deleted it. The original picture was on a frame, on a wall in an exhibition with a wall sign and showed distinct shadows from a window. I didn't see it on iS, so I don't know how it was captioned, but it seems unlikely the photographer was trying to pass it off as his own work. The BI bought it and cropped it right in to the photo only and did at least some work to mitigate the window shadow across the photo. Rolling Stone seems to have left the shadow in as it was on the original, and I'm not sure via google if they cropped the image in too, but it looks like they did.

I also don't know whether these two end users credited the image to Nadav Kandar, only to the Alamy tog or not at all.

So the buyer bought a legitimate product, but the end users went against Alamy's terms of use (quoted and linked to above) which say editorial images should not be cropped to alter context.
Looking at it logically, and not necessarily legally (they're not necessarily always the same thing), the only defence the end user/s could have is that that particular piece of information isn't easy to find*. UNLESS buyers are required to have signed their agreement to it when they sign up as buyers (I'm not a buyer, I have no idea).

*However, you'd think professional photo editors/art directors should know not to crop an image to alter its meaning. Unlike, for example, Joe or Jane amateur blogger. In Scottish Law (I don't know much about English Law) that sort of thing (expecation of professional knowledge of a section of the Law) hold quite a bit of weight.

Interesting.  I agree that end users have a huge responsibility in regards to proper use.

Perhaps all agencies should try harder.  Perhaps agencies should require the photographers name.  When the photographer is not the contributor perhaps agencies should require an upload of a work for hire or transfer of copyright document.  Buyers deserve to know they are receiving a legitimate product.

Which agencies don't requite the photographer's name, and some sort of proof of identity? These are legally required to prevent money scams in the EU, in any case.

I don't know the ins and outs of every agency, but the ones I know of either require a transfer of copyright or don't allow them. There must be some way that image factories can work with agencies.

Obviously, from msg and elsewhere, we know image thieves put up portfolios of stolen work, but that's not relevant in this case. It seems the Alamy tog didn't put up a pic of Nadar's photo pretending it was his. He put up a photo of a framed photo in 'some' context in an exhibition. That's not the same thing at all.

Quote from: ShadySue on July 20, 2019, 13:31

Quote

...failure of Alamy to recognize an image that shouldn't have been available for commercial use

1. Alamy does not check for IP. It also does not control editorial/commercial use. These are the responsibility of the contributor

This is not completely true, I received in the past a couple of (very fair) mails to inform me that a bunch of my images was changed from commercial to editorial, due to contents.
So they check, maybe random, but they see

That is usually after a specific issue, for example murals are now being deleted in hundreds, maybe thousands because of some complaints; National Trust images are regularly trawled, I had to remove 'Folies Bergere-type dancers' from a description, as they weren't actually in the FB. The image itself was OK to stay.

Once I (and many others) had files of a particular editorial subject removed because of an objection, but when Alamy checked it was found that the objection was unfounded so they were all reinstated.

But I was really meaning that they're not checked on upload. The photographer only indicated release information after the file has been inspected and that section isn't mandatory.

Quote from: ShadySue on July 20, 2019, 15:03

Quote from: trek on July 20, 2019, 14:21

Perhaps all agencies should try harder.  Perhaps agencies should require the photographers name.  When the photographer is not the contributor perhaps agencies should require an upload of a work for hire or transfer of copyright document.  Buyers deserve to know they are receiving a legitimate product.

Which agencies don't requite the photographer's name, and some sort of proof of identity? These are legally required to prevent money scams in the EU, in any case.

I don't know the ins and outs of every agency, but the ones I know of either require a transfer of copyright or don't allow them. There must be some way that image factories can work with agencies.

Obviously, from msg and elsewhere, we know image thieves put up portfolios of stolen work, but that's not relevant in this case. It seems the Alamy tog didn't put up a pic of Nadar's photo pretending it was his. He put up a photo of a framed photo in 'some' context in an exhibition. That's not the same thing at all.

It seems many agencies ask "do you own the copyright" which different than "did you take this picture".  Additional clarity might help. 

How? If someone is honest and they own the copyright, it doesn't make any difference whether they took the picture. AIUI if you set an image up completely and ask someone else to take the image (e.g. if you're in the picture) you own copyright to the image, but possibly it might be well to get a sign-off on that.

Alamy recently added a button asking if the image is public domain.  A button confirming the contributor and photographer are the same seems reasonable.

There are lots of image factories, or husband and wife teams, or family / friend teams.

But let's face it, if someone wants to be dishonest, they will be dishonest, whether it's faking releases or saying they have copyright to an image when they don't.

(All of these points are irrelevant to this particular case.)

- was the image marked as Editorial or was being licensed as Commercial? If it was Editorial I don't see a problem for the photographer unless any of the previous conditions existed. If it was licensing as Commercial then the photographer may have a problem, even if he forgot to mark he Editorial box.

A lot of people have made comments here who don't seem to know how Alamy works.

Alamy doesn't license as editorial or commercial. It indicates whether or not releases are available and the end buyer then makes a decision. As I said above, a blade of grass isolated on white will show up as unreleased.

Alamy is far stricter than e.g. is/Getty and probably SS about what constitutes 'property'. So much so that I indicate anything other than wildlife/nature shots as 'needs release/no release', even if I know that iS would accept it. Also it's far stricter about what constitutes a person, even tiny totally out of focus pixel clusters that might be a person count as a person, or tiny parts of a person.
Nowadays you can also choose to tick an editorial only box: for RM it's not compulsory, I'm not sure about RF. That option was only recently introduced for RM.

Why wouldn't you choose always to tick 'editorial only'? Well, say you had a photo of a well known tourist site with a range of touristic 'property'. You indicate no releases. A tour operator might consider whether the property owners  would object if they used your image in promotional materials and decide they would be pretty stupid to do so, and go ahead (at their own risk). They couldn't legitimately do that if the editorial only box was ticked, though they could apply to Alamy to ask you to lift the restriction for their use and it would be up to you to weigh the risk, or require the end user to accept full risk.

Note that Kadar himself has said, "added to this your site says clearly that permission should be sought before using your work". I'm not 100% sure of how to interpret that, and can totally identify with 'red mist' getting in the way of clear communication, but my first interpretation of that is that no releases were indicated, which triggers the 'check if you need releases' link.
But now I see it could also mean the the tog has his own site with that comment on it.

It does seem, though, that Kadar doesn't see the difference between someone making an image of a framed print of his image and making a straight copy and claiming it as his own.

As the two indicated uses are editorial, the commercial use question is irrelevant to this case.

There has been no indication that the photographer claimed he had releases, that is not at issue here. That would outright lying and a totally different issue.