Getting Screwed

A friend of mine, Dan is almost a full time photographer. His photo income varies from 50% to 90% of his income. He wrote custom software a few years ago and he still gets paid for support and changes.

In Canada, Hockey is very big, and now it's the Stanley Cup. The For the first time in many years the Canucks, Vancouver's hockey team, won it's first round, and will go to the second round. Since the Canucks are doing so well, many people and corporations have jumped on the band-wagon. There are many Canucks parties and events sponsored by various companies. A local children's charity asked Dan to cover and make photos of an evening event, they couldn't afford to pay him, and it's a fund raiser... You know the whole song and dance. They have no money to pay the photographers for his photos, but they have plenty of money for the champagne, the food, and the entertainers... Blah, blah... They promised him to have his name on the sponsors list, and his copyright notice on the photos whether they were used for print or on the web.

Yesterday afternoon, I received a call from Dan, he was furious. It turns out that the charity gave away his photos to one of the sponsors of the evening, it's a very big retail chain. They used Dan's photos to show how good of a corporate citizen they are. Except:

  1. They didn't pay Dan for it.
  2. They didn't even mention Dan's name.
  3. They didn't even let him know.

It turns out that the retail chain had a standing contract with the charity, in which they can use all of their photos for whatever use they want, wherever and whenever.

I have on occasions done "work for free", but I do have a policy for free:

  1. Proper attribution directly under each photo.
  2. Attribution to me with copyright: ©Syv Ritch
  3. Attribution to my website: http://foto-biz.com
  4. Notice that the photo was donated by Syv Ritch.
  5. The font to be used must be the same as the body of the article that my photos illustrate.
  6. They agree that any breach of this policy will result in having to pay the full standard fee tripled.