Pictures Online: A New Headache
The publication of photos online is growing and starts to present a new headache for the photo agencies and photographers. Licenses for a month extend to years. The first complaints are coming but a solution does not seem easy in a world, the web, where everybody thinks that everything is free.
The web is always changing and a new trend now appears, revealed by professional photographers who find their images allegedly licensed for a limited time (under a Rights Managed distribution) present on Web sites, long after the license expired.
The situation has led some photographers to contact the respective agencies, but even those prove to be powerless to resolve the situation. In some cases photographers find that there are agreements with customers that allow them to keep the image in a file online for a longer or indefinite period. The discussion goes on at places like Alamy forum.
This is happening with magazines that use the photos in the printed edition and then transfer the material to the Web without the photographers seeing a cent more, because the use of this material is often not even mentioned in the license. And in most cases it seems that even if licensed, it is done in a way beyond what was defined in the photographer’s initial contract. The "web archive" of old features keeps readers flowing to the sites.
According to some photographers, the photos for online use should be more expensive than for print, because if the estimated audience is taken into account, the real market on the web can be 100x higher than in print. An interesting proposition that just goes against the current idea: that everything is free on the Internet.
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