Family's Christmas Photos Hawk Groceries In Prague

Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that Jeff and Danielle Smith sent a photo of themselves with their two young children to family and friends as a Christmas card, and posted the image on her blog and a few social networking websites. Then, last month, a friend of the family was vacationing in the Czech Republic when he spotted a full size poster of the Missouri family's smiling faces in the window of a local supermarket in Prague, advertising a grocery delivery service. The friend snapped a few pictures and sent them to the Smiths, who were flabbergasted. Mario Bertuccio, who owns the Grazie store in Prague, admitted that he had found the photo online but thought it was computer-generated and promised to remove it, and 'We'll be happy to write an e-mail with our apology,' he says. Meanwhile Mrs. Smith has received 180,000 visitors and over 500 comments on her blog since she posted the story. She says she is glad the photo wasn't used in an unseemly manner. 'Interesting. Bizarre. Flattering, I suppose,' writes Mrs. Smith. 'But quite creepy.'"

Comments

Really...

[NervousNerd]

Anything (well unless it's something I'm trying to find) you post on the internet can be found. It's common sense.

Re:Really...

[evalhalla]

That's true, but a supermarket owner should know that they're not supposed to use a random image from the internet for commercial use; the defense "it looked like computer generated" does not work: there wouldn't be model rights, but the image would still be under copyright, unless the image was posted under some permissive license like CC-BY.

Re:Really...

[MichaelSmith]

Czech Republic, don't think they care too much about copyright over there.

Do you want a bet?

Re:Really...

[JWSmythe]

    His admission of guilt and means of acquiring the photo appeared to be a second hand quote. Hearsay, if you will.

    More than likely, he hired someone to do his advertising campaign or at least make the graphics for it. I can't say that I've known many business owners who do their own graphics work, unless it's a graphics firm. They would be the ones that made the photo, and edited the background and text into it. Not an amazing feat, but it was done none the less.

    Probably whoever did it was confident in that no one would ever find out. Heck, who would expect that someone who knew the family in America would happen to travel to the Czech Republic and happen to spot the sign? It's not to say that it was right by any means, it just was impractical to think that they would find out.

    Hell, one of the edited photos that I made, which had absolutely no bearing on the original other than the human form (substantially edited even at that), showed up on a national news broadcast. It was the main image from my site, and showed up in a flash in a set of other photos showing anonymity on the Internet. No, we didn't catch it on the DVR, and I didn't care enough to try to find the clip online to verify it and complain about it, but it was still my original work used improperly by a major broadcast company. If I hadn't happened to have looked at the TV just then, I wouldn't have even known it ever happened. People are generally pretty confident in the idea of "what they don't know won't hurt them."

    Hopefully they learned a little something from this. Don't post hi res pictures. There's no need to anyways, bring it down to a reasonable displayed resolution. If they had, that photo would have been skipped over and another would have been used. As it is, that photo is probably floating around in a few stock photo libraries now, tagged as "average family, man woman children". Maybe whoever stole it assumed that it was already a stock photo, so they were even less likely to get caught.

    I've seen that quite a bit. Places use stock photos that they were provided, but don't know anything about the original licensing. Consider going to a template site. Do you *know* that every photo there is properly licensed for resale? Maybe they're only licensed for the first user, and you're way out of line reusing it on your project, and/or reselling to someone else. Maybe when the same webmaster reuses it on a dozen sites, they were breaking the license for all of them.

    So, shoot your own damned photos, and then you're sure. :) You want to put an average family up on a billboard, put a Craigslist ad up for an average family photoshoot, and pay the $50 it would take to get them to come to you, and sign the model releases.

Re:Really...

[Aereus]

I think the obvious assumption is that he chose the photo specifically because they were from the US and unlikely to ever see the advertisement in his window. He just had the bad luck of the 1 in a million coincidence that someone else who knew the family also happened to be in Prague and notice the picture.

Re:Really...

[c0p0n]

It was the main image from my site, and showed up in a flash in a set of other photos showing anonymity on the Internet [...] but it was still my original work used improperly by a major broadcast company.

I would imagine such use of that content was for citation purposes and clearly fair use.

Re:Really...

[YourExperiment]

Read my sig and guess where I am from :-)

Hmm, somewhere that has only a loose grasp of English grammar and apostrophe use... the USA? :)

Re:Really...

[Jeff DeMaagd]

That might not be an unfair expectation. Depending on where you get your figures, only 10-30% of Americans leave the country. It doesn't help that it's a little expensive to go overseas, and the US is a large country, driving or riding coast to coast still means you're in the same country, covering the same distance many other places means you've crossed dozens of borders.

For chrissakes, you're American, right?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Do it right.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002168937_coffeemug03.html

Sue them.

Re:For chrissakes, you're American, right?

[anagama]

Some follow up. It appears the verdict was reversed on appeal to the CA Court of Appeals, and from there went to the CA Supreme Court which recently heard the case. According to this article from June 4, 2009, a decision is due in 90 days.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/la-fi-coffee4-2009jun04,0,7389392.story

Re:For chrissakes, you're American, right?

[TheLink]

Trying to use the Wheels of Justice to grind Nescafe...

I wonder what will be the grounds for their decision.

Anyone going to spill the beans?

Re:For chrissakes, you're American, right?

[TheLink]

What next? You want mug shots?

p.s. I rarely drink coffee- though it tastes good, it disagrees with my stomach.

Actually as far as costs go

[deft]

It would be amazingly hard to sue them, so finding pics of someone in another country that will more than likely never see it, is a fairly safe way to go, and zero costs, with little risks.

its a new kind of internet weirdness

[circletimessquare]

other (funnier) examples of global clashing with local:

http://boingboing.net/2008/07/15/chinese-restaurant-c.html

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/bert.asp

Amazing what you can find online ...

[Skapare]

... when you use common file names that typical cameras use for their stored photos. Most people never change them. I took the part of the file name of that family's photo (removing the appended reduced size that was used) which was "img_1053". Google images found this. People should think about what they put online. Google is watching.

Re:Amazing what you can find online ...

[Opportunist]

Could you at least give out a warning? This ain't goatse, for $deity's sake!

Re:Eh

[TheLink]

But why creepy? So many people keep sending pics of their children to everyone anyway. That pic was posted on a blog and sent to lots of people.

If they're the sort who'd find it creepy they shouldn't do that then.

There are now thousands of strangers downloading the pics of their children. Oh noes!

Not Stolen. Nope. Not At All.

[Karganeth]

From http://digg.com/odd_stuff/Stolen_picture_used_on_a_huge_billboard_in_another_country "Her blog post and most of the comments here are retarded. That image was not stolen. There's no way that large format print was produced from a 500 pixel wide Facebook rip. If you read her post she says a professional photographer "friend" took the image. The friend most likely sold it to a microstock agency which is where the design agency for the Czech supermarket chain bought it and is now denying it. With tens of thousands of decent quality high resolution images taken on pro/semi-pro equipment available for a few dollars each on microstock sites, there's no way any designer would troll blogs to find a usable random photo of a family among point&shoot and low rez photos."

Re:Not Stolen. Nope. Not At All.

[QuantumG]

... this is like the 3rd post where I've had to explain to someone that a photographer is not required to get model releases.. the publisher is required to get model releases.

Re:Not Stolen. Nope. Not At All.

[martijnd]

Not necessary the high res shot was available on her blog:

http://www.extraordinarymommy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/img_1053.jpg

Looking at the URL she is going to be to pleased about this whole brooha as she is running her own blog as a potential business. Links from Slashdot are going to make her happy.

Re:Not Stolen. Nope. Not At All.

[gaspyy]

Technically true.

It goes like this: photographer goes to publisher with a photo. Publisher sees the a face on the photo - asks "do you have a release with that photo? If not, please provide one, or we won't use your photo." Most of the time the publisher doesn't know the person on the photo and doesn't even care, so in the end it's still photographer's job to get the release.

The moral is

[SpaghettiPattern]

The moral is: "DO NOT POST YOUR PERSONAL LIFE ON THE INTERNET!"

Really, besides your loved ones, nobody gives a fsck about your personal life unless they can make a bob or two out of it.

Also, be unmistakeably clear to provide licensing conditions to your content.

Last, don't whine if you're an idiot. Then again, you're probably still in the long lasting denial phase anyway.

Do it better

[SuperKendall]

Don't sue them. Give them permission.

How cool is it to have your family shown in Prague? As noted it's not for unseemly use, and it's some small grocer just trying to get by.

Don't make him go to the expense (and waste) of having to print a new poster.

Instead, do the adult thing - accept the apology and let him keep using the image officially until he moves on. Everyone wins.

Photography Copyright

[QuantumG]

The vast majority of people don't understand copyright. If I take a picture of you, I own the copyright on the image, not you. Even if you pay me. For some reason the "work for hire" system never got applied to photographers. This is probably because photographers are typically hired on contract, not on retainer. This is clearly as a case of a photographer selling his portfolio to a stock image reseller. It's not unusual and the people in the picture are not entitled to anything.

Re:Photography Copyright

[m_ilya]

It is not completely true. If you take picture of me the copyright might be yours but you are often limited in what you can do with the picture. Unless I sign a model release form. As I understand according to USA law there are some cases when non-private use is allowed without the signed form but you definitely are not allowed to sell to stock image agencies without this.

I wouldn't be so sure

[Chuck Chunder]

Perhaps the supermarket has access to the same sort of computers as they use on CSI, NCIS etc. They probably have 3d models of the family, reconstructed based on DNA obtained by enhancing the Facespace photo and zooming in to the atomic level.

The way it looks

[gaspyy]

I've read about this over a week ago and it's very strange: There's no way anyone can take a 600px wide pic and blow it up to 1-2 m. 2m is about 80 inches; so that picture would have to be printed at 7.62 dpi (ppi would be more accurate). No way.

The only way that pic could have been used is if the ad people had access to the original file, which is assumed to be a hi-res picture from a dSLR. How could that happen? I see a few possibilities:

• The lady printed the high-res pic somewhere and a clerk took the pic, forged the model releases and submitted it to a microstock agency;
• She uploaded the full size pic to Facebook and they used her pic. I am not familiar with Facebook's TOS (don't use it) so I don't know if you grant them the use of the stuff you upload;
• The photographer sold the pic - again, model releases should have been required; 'extraordinarymommy' says she did not sign any model release. I don't want to accuse the photographer of anything, I'm just stating the options.

To keep things in perspective, copyright is mostly respected in all Central and East Europe - it's not like it's a jungle. Stock images from sites like iStock are very cheap and of good quality. A 12-15 Mp file costs $20 at iStock, that's nothing when you have a paying customer. There's no NEED for anyone to steal the pic.

Course of action: contact the grocery store, find out who made their ad. Contact the ad agency. If they got the file legitimately, they will have no issue cooperating. If the file was from a stock agency, contact them and they will resolve the issue. If the ad agency cannot provide and proof, get a lawyer, threaten to sue but look for a settlement; a trial would be long a costly.

Disclosure: I am an exclusive contributor to iStock myself and I live in another Central European country.

Re:Eh

[gaspyy]

The problem is commercial usage.

As I mentioned in another post, I am an exclusive contributor to iStock. I once made a session with a girl (over 18), very simple and decent stuff - business-like clothing and setting. She did sign a model release and was perfectly happy with it. But when her mother found out, I got a phone call -- she did not agree to her daughter's actions and that she was concerned about how some might use her pictures. I tried to explain to her that iStock's TOS disallow any pornographic or sensitive usage (including 'edorsement' and such) but she was still upset. I did not want to cause any problems, so I deleted all pictures and tore up the model release. Since I'm a parent myself, I can understand how other parents tend to be (over)protective.

BTW, if you think about doing pro/semi-pro shoots with a model, have a read.

It's not giving up. It's solving for the answer.

[SuperKendall]

In this day and age of feel-good, everyone's a winner anti-competitiveness, it should be no surprise that someone would come along and claim that giving up is the same as winning.

Incorrect. It's not giving up at all. In fact it's rather the opposite - it's obtaining the best possible result from the situation.

Sue the owner? We all know they would get nothing. A store owner would be out of business, and the family would be out legal expenses. A great ending if you're a law firm.

Tell him to take it down? Again, how have you really "won" anything. You have caused more waste through reprinting. You have done some harm to a small business, and done nothing at all to help your family. Your family looks like cads.

So you explain to me how saying "you know what, just keep using the photo and retire it when you are ready" is not the most sensible and best result possible. The family gets a kick out of knowing they will be seen in another country, again in a positive fashion. The grocer gets to keep using a nice photo, and again everyone wins - not because of anti weird anti-competitvness (which I abhor) but because in the best human fashion you have solved for the most optimal result.

There are plenty of other conditions in which I would say fighting would be the best option. You make the mistake of not realizing conditions can determine the best solution, and this is not one of the conditions in which a solution you seem to be advocating (fighting) is best.

Of course we all know at this point the true story is that it was obtained as a stock photo, which means he's not using the photo improperly at all and if anything the family needs to have a word with the friend who sold them to microstock without asking. Is she making money off them? Well then, that's a whole different story...

Re:Eh

[bloobloo]

I don't know. He can probably get by fine. It's not like he's known for his face.

Re:Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, what?

You took pictures of an adult (over 18) and her mother complained about this so you deleted the pictures?

I'm sorry but this doesn't quite make sense to me.

Re:Total Hijack

[c0p0n]

If you need scripts to "show things properly" then the implementation is broken in the first place. The site's functionality should degrade nicely when javascript ain't available.

Big deal

[DNS-and-BIND]

First, I'd like to say that I'm astounded that a non-story like this has made major front-page news all over the world. It's probably due to the horridly decayed state of journalism, combined with the fact that the kids are blonde. Seriously, this is the sort of thing you'd see to fill space on page D5 of the local city shopper.

Similar thing happened here a while back, the kids at one of the international schools had class photos taken. A few months later, one of the dads is browsing factory catalogs, and lo and behold it's a picture of his kid and a lot of her friends decorating the pages. Evidently, the Chinese administrators had given the pictures to the factory due to a guanxi relationship. None of them could understand why the parents were upset - they just used the pictures, no harm no foul. Why, did you want some money for it? Intellecutal property is a cultural concept, and people in China just don't understand why they shouldn't be able to copy something as long as nobody has been physically deprived.

I also "borrow" material from the internet for printing. Guess what, it's not front-page news. Everyone does it, and I'm sure I've published someone's vacation photo before. I try to use public domain images, but if they're not forthcoming then I've got a deadline to meet. Online repositories are a crapshoot, and my 300+ CDs of stock photos lack in entire categories - I've got three CDs of pictures of trucks and roads, and one photo of an airliner which I used a long time ago.

Re:It's not giving up. It's solving for the answer

[Ogive17]

All I would ask is to have the grocer send me one of the posters. I would think it would make a great wall hanging for a rec room. A picture of your family advertising the weekly sale in a foreign language.... great conversational piece!