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Ask Slashdot: Should This Photographer Sue A Hotel For $2M? (google.com)
Unhappy Windows User writes: An Austrian photographer was contracted by the luxury [hotel] Sofitel in Vienna to photograph the bar with an amazing view over the skyline. He was paid for his time (4200 euros) and arranged a three-year internal usage contract for the photos. After the contract expired, he still found his photos being used -- on external sites too. He is now suing for 2 million euros, based on each individual usage.
My question is: Is this the real market value of his work...? It seems like the largest economic contribution to the work was from Sofitel, who allowed access to the property and closed it to customers. I don't have any issue in a photographer wanting to be paid fairly for his work, and asking for perhaps double or treble the original price for the breach of contract to match what an unlimited license would have cost. [But] with this money they could have employed a professional for a month and automatically obtained full rights to the work...it seems like this guy is trying to take advantage of an oversight by a large corporation, never to have to work again.
Here's the original article in German and an English translation, and it's one of those rare cases where the copyright belongs to an individual instead of a massive entertainment conglomeration. But do you think the photographer should be suing for 2 million euros over this copyright beach?
My question is: Is this the real market value of his work...? It seems like the largest economic contribution to the work was from Sofitel, who allowed access to the property and closed it to customers. I don't have any issue in a photographer wanting to be paid fairly for his work, and asking for perhaps double or treble the original price for the breach of contract to match what an unlimited license would have cost. [But] with this money they could have employed a professional for a month and automatically obtained full rights to the work...it seems like this guy is trying to take advantage of an oversight by a large corporation, never to have to work again.
Here's the original article in German and an English translation, and it's one of those rare cases where the copyright belongs to an individual instead of a massive entertainment conglomeration. But do you think the photographer should be suing for 2 million euros over this copyright beach?
Dont know. Ask a lawyer. Which he appears to have done.
Sounds like they are in breach of contract. But a German judge will have to work that out.
If an an individual making a single copy of a work by a large company is $200k or so, why is a large company giving copies of a work by an individual to all comers (publishing it on the web) supposed to get a pass? Is it right? Obviously not. But this is the way the deep pockets want it, so that's the way it is.
Why not? Is there some stipulation that says only megacorps are allowed to sue for absurd amounts of money? If Sony can sue an individual for millions of dollars over a stupid song, then a photographer can sue a company for millions over a stupid photo.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
This is a standard commercial license, and you haven't heard of it because you are not a professional photographer or need their services. Most commercial photography does not include the copyright, rather a license to use that copyright for a period of time and specific uses. People violate it all the time, and usually this is simple enough (and inexpensive enough) to deal with.
But TFA implied the hotel didn't care they pirated his work and offered a trivial sum for the excessive violation. The moment they exceeded the usage limits, they were violating copyright.
Consider lending someone your car to drive 100 miles. They return the car with 10,000 miles on it. You complain, and they offer to pay you for another 100 miles. That's not what the agreement was, and they made an insulting offer to compensate for it.
Except that fair pricing of loss or damages is the fundamental basis for many justice systems. If this case was being heard in Australia, for example, the settlement would not exceed probable losses.
For a specific close to home example, DBC, the owners of Dallas Buyers Club, won a case to get the details of ISP subscribers who they believed had pirated the movie. But before they could go on their merry way demanding $1000s of dollars, the judge wanted to see their demand letters and advised the demands could not be more than actual losses. He estimated those losses to be no more than the full price of a DVD + legal costs. It worked out at around AU$60.
Without a monopoly, art will dry up.
No, it won't.
The purpose of copyright is to protect the artist from exactly what just happened. If that protection is lost, or blatant violations are not prosecutable, artists will stop releasing their work.
No, they won't.
What will happen is that art that actually requires skill or craft or long-term investment or training will become harder to find.
You can always find people to post their latest recording of their friends in a basement on Youtube, perhaps singing an original song (frequently awful). You can always depend on people to post random landscape photos of their vacation on social media. Just like you can always make reality TV shows and other cheap entertainment.
So no, art will NOT "dry up." What does happen without copyright protection is that fewer people would want to invest in QUALITY artworks. This was the original justification for copyright protection back when it started in Italy in the late 1400s. Basically, this was a pivotal moment of the Renaissance when ancient Greek texts were rediscovered and people started translating them into modern languages (first Latin, and then vernacular languages like Italian). The problem was the printing press -- you'd have an expert translator (few people knew Greek in Western Europe at that time) who'd spend a few months doing a superior translation, and a printer would invest in having typesetters do all the text arrangement by hand... and after they sold one copy, the print shop down the street could buy it and re-typeset it, and there'd be a bastardized edition on the streets within a week. And the new shop didn't have to pay the translator and figure out the original layout, etc., so they could sell it cheaper.
At this point, the local government was faced with a problem. If cheap knock-offs became standard, why would any translator invest months of his life producing a quality translation? Learned leaders in places like Florence and Venice thus decided that the best solution was to grant a copying privilege for a short time (usually 5-10 years), so the printers and the translators could get paid for producing a QUALITY work. This was to assist in the creation of quality knowledge and its transmission for the general public. Obviously copyright has been abused by Disney and others since then, as copyright terms have ballooned to ridiculous proportions.
On Slashdot, there's often an assertion that artists just have this "drive" to make art and will keep doing it no matter what. But some things require skill -- like producing a good translation. Why should someone invest years in acquiring that skill if they can't make money off of it due to piracy? Why should someone spend a few years of his/her life researching an investigative book or a quality research book if there's no possibility of getting paid back? Or, to bring this back to the present discussion, why bother learning how to take great photos (learning about lighting, angles for shots, staging and presentation for commercial photos, etc.) if there's no reward for it?
The answer heard on Slashdot is often two things -- (1) "Artists can find other ways to make money -- musicians can play live rather than make money off of recordings, etc." or (2) "Well, the good artists can just be paid as a work-for-hire, like anyone else." The first only works for some types of art, and even then we're essentially saying, "We want artists to make product X for free, but they have to subsidize it by doing Y too." In that case, less people will try to produce quality X.
And for (2), that's great for established people with reputations. But for new artists without established reputations, they often need to put out significant investment first. No publisher, for example, is going to pay an advance to write a book for someone who has never written a book before... and even if a draft looks great, they likely wo
Wrong.
The lawsuit isn't for continued access to work; the entity that initially hired him and agreed to the terms had an opportunity to negotiate continued/expanded access either before the contract was executed or in the intervening three years. The lawsuit is because the entity elected to ignore the previously negotiated contract. Intentional or accidental is for a court to decide.
If the award for breach of contract was simply the fee that would have been due, then there would be no incentive to bother honoring contracts -- you could simply pretend it didn't exist, not pay until someone noticed, and then get off with the same cost as you would have paid had both parties been diligent. No, lawsuits relating to breaches of contract are for additional damages (and courts subsequently award said damages) to punish the offending party as a deterrent to those who would shirk the responsibilities of a contract in the first place.