Earth shattering implications
I am sure all of us remember the one of the first and most impactful images to have come out of the devastated island of Haiti hours after the huge earthquake struck the nation on January 12, 2010.
A woman lies amongst the rubble of a broken building, looking up at the photographer, Haitian Daniel Morel.
The former Associated Press staffer realized the importance of distributing his pictures as quickly as possible. What happened next, and decisions yet to be made in a Manhattan courtroom, may come to redefine how photographers and big media interact with the freewheeling world of social media.
1: Daniel opened a Twitter account and uploaded 13 images to an associated account at Twitpic tweeting that he had exclusive images of the earth quake. ( http://twitter.com/photomorel )
2: Shortly afterwards Lisandro Suaero, located in the neighboring Dominican Republic and previously unknown as a professional photographer, stole the 13 images, uploaded them to his own TwitPic account, and tweeted that he too had exclusive earthquake pictures.
3: At about 9:45pm AFP copied the images from Suero’s account, and subsequently began offering them for licensing to their international clients.
Effectively what happened was that his images seem to have been stolen from the internet and used by AFP and Getty Images for sale with no permission or said agreement.
Both parties are now fighting it out in a Manhattan court room but the implications are possibly very damaging to photojournalism.
Some would say that Morel was not wise to have posted images on a social network site that can be seen by anyone with an internet connection and it thus left the door open for parties to ’steal’ the images.
However the fact that AFP distributed the images without his consent has far reaching implications.
For further reading follow these links:
A: http://www.jeremynicholl.com/blog/2010/05/03/afp-steal-photos-then-sue-photographer-2/
B: http://www.1854.eu/2010/04/agence_france_presses_slap_to.html
C: http://www.100eyes.org/2010/04/daniel-morel/
It’s always a good idea to watermark images you put on the net. There are a lot of tools out there that do it fast, a lot of free ones. If I had to list the number of artists that have had their work nicked off the web I’d soon run out of fingers and toes. Even some of my work has had the grubby mits of others on. Annoying! Gladly none of these resulted in the offender making profit as I got to them soon enough but then again I am not relying on my photography to make a living. A nice watermark right in the middle of an image doesn’t have to take away from the content, but saves a million headaches.
Great piece, Kim.
In my opinion the issue is not Morel having tweeted the images. On the contrary, photojournalists should use the internet and social networks as aggressively as possible to promote their work. This case proves that it works! The rest is common thievery.
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