Industry News

Fall 2009, Industry News — By Richard on October 28, 2009 at 11:31 am

GETTY IMAGES SYNDICATES L.A. TIMES CELEBRITY IMAGES
Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Johnny Depp and Cameron Diaz are just a few of the faces picked up by Getty Images in August through a deal to subsidize celebrity images by Los Angeles Times photographers.
This new collection of images will be available on Contour, a division of Getty Images that focuses on professional licensing of celebrity portraiture.

Copyright © Photo courtesy of Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times / Contour by Getty Images

In addition to The Los Angeles Times, Contour manages images for other publishers, including British Vogue, Esquire, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Rolling Stone and Time. It also handles national and international photographers such as David LaChapelle, Max Vadukul and George Holz.
Prior to this deal, The Los Angeles Times, which is owned by the Tribune Company, filed for bankruptcy in December 2008 and laid off 300 employees in January.

GETTY REFOCUSES MICROSTOCK LICENSING PLAN
To entice frugal web designers to use Gettyimages.com, the Seattle-based stock photo company now offers licenses for very small images not previously offered on Getty, or even microstock sites such as iStockphoto, Fotolia and Shutterstock.

These micro-images, ideal for web and mobile products, come in two sizes: 170 or 280 pixels wide. Getty expects these types of photos to be used for e-mail, websites, web ads, banners, mobile apps and sites, intranets, web applications and other digital projects.

Getty’s low-resolution “web & mobile” files start at $5 for royalty-free use of a 170-pixel image and $15 for a 280-pixel image. In addition, Getty still offers rights to slightly larger 413-pixel-wide, rights-managed images starting at $49. The rights-managed licenses, however, come with some restrictions, including a three-month time limit and the use of the image on only one webpage.

In contrast, microstock sites such as iStockphoto – which is owned by Getty – typically charge as little as $1 for a 425-pixel photo and around $30 for an extra-large 3,000-pixel photo. Getty’s tiny-image category offers licenses for pictures that are smaller than what microstock sites currently offer, and it allows users to purchase high volumes of web images at very low prices.

When Getty first offered a $49 rights-managed license for 413-pixel, low-res images in 2007, it received objections from seven photo industry trade groups. Finding that customers were not always satisfied with the cost and quality of micro-stock images, Getty created these web and mobile licenses to offer its high-quality images to the web market as well.

One advantage of this new micro-pricing plan is that photographers can easily branch into small-scale photography without switching to a microstock site. These miniature images are currently available throughout the majority of Getty’s creative stills collection.

AP TO SET UP CONTENT MANAGEMENT REGISTRY
In ongoing efforts to deter online content infringement, the Associated Press will launch the first wave of its new content-registry website in November to manage, tag and track the use of AP and member stories, photos and videos.

The system, which will cover only AP text this year, will soon expand to include photos, videos and member text next year.

Although no specific technical details have been released yet about the portal, the AP has said that it is developing a digital permissions format that will be endorsed by London-based Media Standards Trust (MST), a nonprofit research and development organization. MST expects that this portal will help regulate standards for online news format and distribution.

After completing the development process, AP expects to implement and financially support the system through 2010, at which time it predicts that the site will generate its own revenue, most likely from content owner fees and licenses.

This intellectual property management web page, part of the content protection initiative fashioned by AP’s board of trustees in April 2009, is the first step in the news company’s larger plan to curb infringement and offer AP members a secure and profitable location in which they can share information.

In the past two years, AP has been involved with several major lawsuits, including AP v. Shepard Fairey, concerning an artist’s use of an AP image in a poster supporting Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy; AP v. AHN Media, involving the sourcing of AP content for AHN news stories; and AP v. Moreover Technologies Inc. and VeriSign Inc., for unspecified misappropriation and copyright infringement. The latter two cases were settled, and the Fairey case is still on trial.

GAMMA GIVEN JANUARY 2010 DEADLINE TO REORGANIZE
Gamma, the venerable news, celebrity and creative stock image agency, was told by a commercial court in Paris that it has until the end of this year to cut jobs and reorganize its business and finances.

This observation period will end in January 2010, at which time the court will decide if the photojournalism agency will be declared bankrupt. Gamma, which is now a subsidiary of French photo agency Eyedea Presse, appeared in court at the end of July to ask the courts for protection after losing $4.2 million in the first half of 2009.

Gamma’s CEO, Stephane Ledoux, stated in court that the company lost money by trying to “employ photographers while the entire photojournalism business was collapsing.”

In a New York Times article, Gamma said that the reorganization would ultimately include layoffs and that the company hopes to end daily news coverage and return to magazine photography.

Green Recovery, a private-equity firm based in Paris, took over Eyedea in 2007 and has reportedly said that it will continue to back the company financially.

Gamma, founded in 1966 by photographers Raymond Depardon and Gilles Caron, currently employs 55 staff members, 14 of whom are photographers, at its Paris headquarters.

KODACHROME TAKEN AWAY
The life of the world’s oldest commercially successful color film has come to an end. After 74 years on the market, the Eastman Kodak Co. is retiring Kodachrome from the shelves.

The film was widely used in the 1950s and ’60s to capture iconic images such as President Kennedy’s assassination, Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and photojournalist Steve McCurry’s portrait of an Afghan refugee girl.

Kodak, which suffered a net loss of $353 million in the first quarter of this year, has said that it is ending Kodachrome production because of waning film use. Kodak currently receives nearly 70 percent of its revenue from digital business, and Kodachrome accounted for less than 1 percent of the remaining film sales.

In homage to the film, Kodak has given McCurry several rolls of Kodachrome from the last production line. McCurry, who has himself switched to digital photography,
is planning to take his final Kodachrome pictures this fall during his shooting tour in Europe, Asia and the United States. The George Eastman House museum in Rochester, N.Y., has agreed to display McCurry’s images next year.

Kansas-based Dwayne’s Photo, the only lab that still processes Kodachrome, has agreed to process the film through 2010.

APPLE SUED OVER USE OF IMAGE IN I.TV APP
For the second time, Colorado-based photographer Louie Psihoyos has filed a copyright lawsuit against Apple Computer for using one of his photographs without permission.
Psihoyos alleges that in 2008, Apple illegally incorporated his image into its first version of the i.TV, a free software application that lets users access their TiVo and Netflix accounts. The photograph in question – a shot of a man sitting in front of a dramatically curved wall of screens, titled “500 TVs” – was registered by Psihoyos in 2005 and reportedly took him a month and $100,000 to create.

Copyright © louie psihoyos / Science Faction

This current lawsuit, seeking $2 million in damages, follows Psihoyos’ 2007 lawsuit claiming that Apple used images “identical or substantially similar” to his own to advertise iPhone and Apple TV products. Psihoyos also claimed that Apple, after negotiating but ultimately refusing to pay for the use of the “500 TVs” image, knowingly went ahead and used it anyway. The case was eventually dismissed, suggesting that a settlement was reached.
Additionally, this current lawsuit – which names Apple Inc. and Apple Computer as the defendants, but not the application’s creator, i.TV – will help determine whether Apple is responsible for iPhone applications developed by third-party companies.
i.TV, based in Palo Alto, Calif., developed the program in 2008 for the iPhone and iPod touch. The company recently launched i.TV 2.0 in August and does not currently feature Psihoyos’ image.
A former National Geographic photographer, Psihoyos has also brought eight other copyright lawsuits, including one against National Geographic for which the federal appeals court ruled twice in favor of the magazine.

LEIBOVITZ REACHES TENTATIVE LEGAL SETTLEMENT
For now, it seems, photographer Annie Leibovitz has won some reprieve from her financial woes.

Her most recent monetary debacle began in December 2008, when Leibovitz took out a $24 million loan from Art Capital Group (ACG) – putting up her photo archives, her studio and her two homes in New York as collateral – to help her pay for vendor lawsuits against her for more than $700,000 in unpaid bills. At the same time, Leibovitz signed ACG, which specializes in artist loans, as her exclusive agent through 2011.

Although Leibovitz did not repay the loan by its Sept. 8 deadline, she and ACG reached a settlement three days later. As part of the resolution, ACG has dropped a lawsuit against Leibovitz for allegedly refusing to cooperate with the art lender’s efforts to sell her properties.

Had an agreement not been reached, ACG would have been entitled to up to 10 percent commission on the sale of Leibovitz’s real estate and 15 percent commission on the sale of work from her portfolio.

An agreement has not been reached, however, in the lawsuit between ACG and Getty Images. In April, ACG filed a suit against Getty for making a $1.1 million deal with Leibovitz to hire her for eight assignments over the next two years. Prior to the lawsuit, Getty attempted to purchase the rights to Leibovitz’s archive from ACG, but talks ended after Getty offered only $15 million for a collection valued at $50 million.

At press time, however, Leibovitz still faced at least five other unresolved lawsuits against her – four from vendors who say she owes them a combined total of nearly $800,000 and one copyright infringement suit brought by Italian photographer Paolo Pizzetti, who claims she used two of his photos in an ad campaign without permission.

PHOTOGRAPHER GARCIA JOINS FAIREY AP LAWSUIT
In July, Associated Press photographer Mannie Garcia joined the copyright lawsuit brought by the Associated Press against California-based artist Shepard Fairey over Fairey’s now-infamous Barack Obama poster.

In 2006, Garcia shot a photograph of Barack Obama while freelancing for the AP. In 2008, Fairey used Garcia’s image as a reference for his Obama poster. The AP and Garcia are now suing Fairey for copyright infringement, and the courts must determine whether Fairey is protected under fair use laws.

Garcia is also suing AP for wrongfully claiming the copyright to the photograph that he shot. Garcia was not a full-time staff photographer when he shot the photo; AP claims that it owns the rights to images taken by freelancers.

Both the original photograph and the campaign poster have been registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.

The next conference for this trial has been scheduled for Nov. 20, at which time the court will try to determine which photograph was actually used as the muse for the poster.

BLACK STAR RISES INTO SOCIAL MEDIA REALM
Since creating the popular Black Star Rising blog (rising.blackstar.com), New York-based photo agency Black Star has redefined itself as a popular new source for photographic news and information. The site celebrated the publishing of its 600th post in August.

With 19 contributors from across the United States and the United Kingdom, Black Star Rising encompasses a variety of information from marketing and legal experts as well as many photographers and photojournalists.

The blog was launched in 2006 with an article by editor Scott Baradell, who is also CEO of PR firm Idea Grove, with a discussion about using the same stock photos as your competitor. Other popular photographic discussions on the blog include how to establish copyright protection for your online images and why photographers should use Twitter or Facebook to build business clientele.