Hi Dave,
What are the legalities involved with selling your prints (or publishing a book for that matter) that prominently feature people in the images you create - are release forms or something to that effect required? (B.G. Oregon)
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I get asked this a lot. My understanding - and it might be wrong is that if you take pictures of people for "editorial" use (i.e. not for an advertisement) and you are on public property, and you aren't defaming them -- you can display them on the web or print them and sell them without a release. If they aren't identifiable - then for editorial they are definitely not a problem. And I imagine the laws are different by country, possibly by state.
(Am I anywhere near correct?) Probably not. But for sure it is not practical to get model releases for street work.
2 comments:
Good resource. But what I took from it was that "free speech" mostly protects works sold as "art" but there are a bunch of ifs you've got to check.
That includes on the web and in a gallery.
Any nothing says you won't be sued even if you've done everything as correctly as you could - since there are so many gray areas.
For me - having a model release is not something I'm going to think about while shooting. Never have. Never will.
But I'm prepared not to have them sold as stock.
Hey dave- I pasted in a post below from
http://beingmonkey.blogspot.com/2005_06_26_beingmonkey_archive.html
I wonder if this case has been resolved?
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Philip-Lorca diCorcia is being sued by an Orthodox Jewish man that he photographed in 2001, as part of his Heads series:
"DiCorcia rigged strobe lights to scaffolding and trained his lens on an "X" he taped to the sidewalk. From 20 feet away, he took shots of Nussenzweig and thousands of other unsuspecting subjects. Later that year, diCorcia exhibited this image under the title "#13" at a Pace Wildenstein gallery show called "Heads" in Chelsea. The photographer said multiple prints of Nussenzweig's picture sold for about $20,000 each. The picture also was published in "Heads," a book that sold several thousand copies, diCorcia said.
Now Nussenzweig, a retired diamond merchant from New Jersey, is snapping back at diCorcia — and at the right of photographers to secretly grab pictures on the street and sell them — by suing him, Pace Wildenstein, publisher Pace/MacGill and unnamed distributors and sellers of the image and the book.
"We claim that to take someone's picture without their consent is bad enough," said Jay Goldberg, Nussenzweig's lawyer. "But to then hang the picture in galleries, put it in books and sell it around the city without telling the person or obtaining permission is unfair and outrageous."
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