Image rights – Clare Painter Associates

Photo rights: Flickr free accounts are changing

6 November 2018 / By Clare Painter / In Image rights, Rights

A quick post from me today, as some changes are taking place over at the photo service Flickr, which will be relevant to many.

Flickr has long offered generous data storage to all photographers (and other providers of images) who choose to use the service. In recent years this has been as much as 1 Terabyte of data, a huge amount of valuable space!

But now this is now changing following Yahoo’s sale of Flickr to SmugMug not long ago.

What’s changing, and why does it matter to you?

Photographers and other providers of images are the people who will see the really dramatic changes and need to take urgent action before 8th January 2019.

If you’re a user of Flickr photos, the burden of proof is with you to show that you’re not breaching copyright, so there are steps you need to take now, too.

Photographers and other rights holders

That Terabyte of data is no longer going to be available free of charge, but will instead be reduced down to just 1,000 images unless you sign up for Flickr’s Pro account, which involves paying a subscription.

But here’s the urgent part: if by 8th January 2019 you don’t upgrade or reduce your account to fewer than 1,000 photos, then beginning from February 2019 Flickr will start to DELETE your photos for you!

Yep, that’s right, your photos will actually begin to disappear from the Flickr site, unless you take action to reduce the numbers or upgrade.

Off the top of my head I can’t think of any other online service provider who has deleted someone else’s copyright materials, after promising such a huge amount of free storage. Will photographers comply before the deadline? Will any miss the news, and suddenly find Flickr has unilaterally deleted their work? What might the legal consequences be?

Certainly, if some of your own photos are currently on Flickr, I’d advise you take a close look at your account and check whether you’re going to be exceeding the 1,000 image limit, either now or in the near future.

Make sure you don’t leave it too long.

What about users?

Many use Flickr as a useful resource for ‘free to use’ images. If that’s you, I’d advise that from here onwards you keep really, really good records.

Whenever you use a Flickr image, make sure you keep copies of the rights information you find on the site, especially if the image is under one of the various Creative Commons licences such as the “CC BY” licence which only requires you to acknowledge the source.

Remember that someone can challenge your use of their copyright photographs at any point after you have used them. That means you could have problems if you’re relying on a link to the Flickr website to show that your use was justified. The link and the image itself might just be gone from the site. The onus will be on you to justify your use, so this could cause you trouble.

As always with rights issues, keeping fantastic records may not be glamorous, but it really matters!

Who owns the copyright?

18 May 2018 / By Clare Painter / In Copyright, Image rights, Rights

Who owns the copyright? A handful of good places to begin

If you’re using images, text extracts or pretty much anything else, you’ll need to know who controls the rights. Even if the name of the author (or artist, or photographer, etc, etc) is pretty clear, that doesn’t necessarily mean you know who to turn to. Can you reuse the material? Who will be able to tell you? And what terms or costs might they impose?

I’ve gathered together a few ideas of places you can look online, to help with this first stage of your research.

It’s very, very far from exhaustive. A recent academic study found that cultural institutions wanting to check whether a work is a considered an “orphan” (i.e. without a known copyright holder) across a range of EU countries, will have to answer as many as 569 separate rights research questions. This can be a complex field if you try to be really thorough!

In the spirit of starting with something a little less draining than that, here are a few starting points for various types of content:

Writers, Artists and Their Copyright Holders (WATCH) – The WATCH File from the Universities of Texas and Reading is a useful first stop. It’s often the first place I’d try.
DACS – The Design and Artists Copyright Society represents visual artists if you are starting from the UK (though the artists themselves are worldwide). Search here to see if the artist you’re looking for is listed. (Remember you might need 2 separate licences if you’re using a photo of a work of art: one for the work itself if it’s still within copyright (could be from DACS), and another for the photo.
Poetry – Clearing permissions for poetry can be tricky. A handy feature of Faber’s online permissions tool is that, as well as allowing you to request permission for the poems they publish themselves, you’ll sometimes also find information about who else holds rights, if it isn’t with Faber. Worth searching here to see what comes up.
PLS Clear can help with extracts from books or serials, as long as the relevant publisher has signed up with their service.
Writers and Artists Yearbook – A UK-focussed list of literary agencies, book and audio publishers, magazines, newspapers, and more. I used to tell people that every UK public library would have a copy of the latest print edition (published annually), but in these straitened times I’m not certain if that’s still true. Either way, you might prefer to subscribe online
Firms Out of Business (FOB) – Publishing companies, literary agencies etc from the past. Often in rights research you’ll find out who used to represent a particular author, and that’s frustrating if you’re not sure where to go next. FOB is associated with WATCH, and helps when you want to know who bought a particular list or imprint.
International Literary Marketplace – International lists of publishers and literary agencies . The enormous printed volume of ILMP is expensive, and so is the full online service, but fortunately it’s possible to subscribe for as little as a week at a time. Plan your research in bulk, if you can!

4 Questions Before You Digitise

23 March 2018 / By Clare Painter / In Archive Material, Copyright, Image rights, Rights

If you have older titles or archive materials which you’d like to digitise, but rights issues are getting in the way, here are 4 quick questions you might like to examine…

There’s hardly a publisher anywhere, I’m pretty confident in saying, who doesn’t have a few titles lurking in a corner, undigitised, because there are rights issues. Copyright in the main text of the books might be sorted out, with author contracts happily in place, but something along the way prevents those titles from being turned into digital form and enjoying an extended life online.

This might seem surprising to those of you who don’t work in publishing houses. (This newsletter goes out to a wide range of people: readers are just as likely to come from professional societies and academic institutions, as from the world of publishing – and welcome to you all!)

Often, the reason certain titles cannot be digitised is connected to the images. Pictures might come from a range of different sources, and clearing them again for digital use would mean additional time and cost.

Other types of material can have different kinds of obstacles, but the fundamental issues for corporates, societies and book or journal publishers are largely the same.

There are 4 key questions to start with, if you want to digitise archival material of any kind, and you know there might be trouble ahead.

Do you know where the paperwork is? – A basic question, perhaps, but it’s key to figuring out what the gaps are, and where to go next. If there’s nothing in the file (it happens), try looking for acknowledgements and captions in the printed work itself. What details can you see? You’ll still need to research who those copyright holders are and where to find them, but it gives you a starting point.

Can you figure out how many different copyright holders are involved? – Start with a list of all the items, but really the thing that will make a difference to your rights research is the number of sources, not the number of items. That’s because each rights holder represents a search, a conversation and potentially a negotiation, whether it’s for one small item, or a list of many.

Do most of the rights holders still exist? – More tricky than it sounds, this one, as content gets bought and sold on a fairly regular basis, folded into new companies and taken over again by someone else. But if your list includes a good proportion of recognisable, current names, your work will be much reduced.

What’s your approach to publishing risk? – Lovely as it would be to carry on searching for historical rights holders until we’ve exhausted every single possibility, that’s just not feasible in today’s world where time and resources are limited. So you need to prioritise.

Which content is going to be most important to the digitised work? Which items represent a high risk if you can’t locate the rights holder, and how do you go about creating a research log for those items you really can’t identify?

The answer lies in balancing a combination of factors against each other: the high or low publishing risk can depend on the copyright status (how old is it and where is it from?), the type of source (do they still exist? who else might hold rights nowadays?), and the way you plan to use the material (in an ebook? for a client? in e-learning?).

Nothing can be safer than a proper permission licence, but if that’s really not possible, you can go a long way to reducing your risks by having a clear process in place, and an audit trail to show the steps you have taken.