advice needed

[TinoDeVoe]

Hi everyone,

I have a few questions regarding a situation I'm in with some photographs I have taken for a local business.

I've been slowly setting up my own small business doing photography and videos for local realtors. I approached a home audio/video store that I've been a customer of for years about doing work for their website. I ended up taking several photos of the various rooms and of their equipment in the store that the are now using in ads and within stores and will soon be on their site once finished.

An agreement was made on the payment for the photos/videos and that was settled no problem.

A few weeks ago I received an email from the store owner that was forwarded from the VP of one of the speaker companies that they had sent copies of my photos I had taken of the products in store. The email was basically letting me know how great it was that they had forwarded my work to the speaker company and they had authorized the photos to be used by the company without consulting me. The VP thanked the store and said they loved the work and would use one or more of the photos in their ads.

So now I'm trying to figure out what legal rights I have if any, what approach I should take at this point as I'm not getting paid a dime and my work will be used by a very big company that sells VERY expensive audio equipment using my photos for advertisement.

any advice will be appreciated.

[Dennis_Hammer]

Unless you assigned them the rights, you have ALL the legal rights, unless see below. I don't know if you want to burn your bridge with the store or not but you have a couple of options. One go to the store read them the law on copyrights and explain that if those photos are used they will be billed accordingly. Or email the speaker company and nicely state how happy you are they like YOUR photos and if they are interested in using them you would gladly negotiate an appropiate fee for the appropiate rights. Now stop and copyright those photos immediately it will help you in the long run.

Now two things could sit you down with no rights, first you assigned them to the store and/or second it was work for hire. So it all depends on what your contract looks like....what did you say you didn't have a contract? That could get messy.

[Krapo]

I would do as the second suggestion above. Contact the speakers company and try to negotiate something.
I don't know what is the by default law in terms of copyright in case there is no contract. But even if you're in your own rights, enforcing law will indeed burn some bridges (and the word may spread around). Consider carefully whether it is worth the bucks you may make by suing them.

That's tough learning but I think I would try to contact the speakers company first, and in case they ignore you, just swallow it. Consider this as (tough) learning experience for next time.

[CosmoKid]

what speaker company is it? maybe you could work out a barter? don't barter if it is Bose. Bose blows.

Since you are in Canada I am rooting for Paradigm, Mirage, Totem....

[TinoDeVoe]

Lol, its definitely not bose.

Its one of the world's best speaker companies if not the best one in my opinion. This is not something I want to burn any bridges with for sure, its been very frustrating to say the least.

The problem is that the store owner sent the VP photos saying, sure go ahead and use what you want and now i'm like hold on, we have a problem here.

I've been in discussion with the VP of the speaker company basically playing along keeping cool to make sure the store owner looks good out of all this. Now I'm basically trying to get the store to pay me back in one way or another for the work that they were handing over to the speaker company.

Now i'm trying to figure out how much each of these photos they'd like to put in their ads are worth and perhaps I can do some barter on equipment with the store and just hand over a release form to the manufacturer.

he's asked me what i want for one of the photos and sounds like we can come to a fair agreement here without this getting any uglier.

Any suggestions here?

[Park Street]

Use FotoQuote as it is a standard for the industry. http://www.cradocfotosoftware.com/

If you do not want to spend the money, research what Getty would charge for the same usage.