We got an ad from one of our suppliers that featured a photo we’ve been using on our website for about 5 years. And we see TONS of images from the same catalog all around downtown. For example one of the national banks as an ad that features a guy who is on our website. The photo was taken during the same photoshoot, so it’s not the same photo but he’s dressed in the same clothes.
Another dude we’ve used in ads was for awhile plastered to the side of the building where the new Trump tower is going up in Toronto. Again same photoshoot, different photo. I also see this woman all over the place. We were going to use this image too (before we realized she’s everywhere) but in the end decided to go with a group shot that was more ethnically diverse.
Indeed. A friend of mine made a tasteful nude picture of me last year when I was 8 and a half months pregnant. You can’t see my face, but it is a beautiful generic “pregnant” picture. My friend could sell the picture to Getty’s images, but only if I filled out a couple forms that I had agreed to being photographed, relinquished all rights, yada yada. I even had to send them a copy of my passport. I obliged because this was a big opportunity for my friend, but I can see how it would be hard to get such an consent form from any other model or person accidentally in the photo.
Yes and no. Many contracts (like, for example, for wire services like the AP) contain work-for-hire clauses, meaning the hiring company (like the AP in my example) gets the copyright for the photo, and the photographer can’t do anything with it. Some places work out a deal where you get a day rate and a royalty fee for every time your agency resells your work. The typical wire model (as practiced by AP, Reuters, AFP, etc.) was you pay your photographer a day rate, and get the rights to any photos transmitted. Sometimes, the photographers are allowed to sell the outtakes. Back when I worked for AFP, they would take all the negatives for important events (like the NBA finals, for instance) and for less important stuff you would send them the frame transmitted as well as the images to each side of that frame, so you don’t resell something similar.
Needless to say, I haven’t done work-for-hire since my first two years as a professional photographer, but AFAIK most wire shooters still deal with this sort of working arrangement.
And when I was freelancing, almost every contract (except for really good ones like Business Week and Car and Driver) tried to sneak in work-for-hire clauses, and you had to be on your toes to strike that out and negotiate a usage contract.
Yes, for a photo. Only a few photographers are capable of delivering that kind of imagery and have the business acumen to negotiate that kind of exclusivity for that kind of price. It’s generally discouraged by professional photographers to sell all the rights to your photographs, and you’re strongly suggested to always work out a usage package. Selling all your rights generally means, unless specified, that the buyer of your work can turn around and sell that image to a stock agency, any other publication, etc., and earn income off it. I know photographers who have negotiated rights like this to the tune of $50K+ and even $100K+ is not unheard of. This generally happens in the advertising world with companies with big budgets who demand exclusivity.
Here is a blog posting that shows five or six sets of books that use the same image. I don’t think this link is a re-run of any links above. There are also some pretty interesting comments at the end about stock photo exclusivity.
This is another blog post with examples of models that show up over and over again. (I didn’t click on everyone’s links above, but I suspect these examples might be redundant with one or more of the above examples).
The show Mamma Mia uses this stock photo that my store used many years before for our wedding displays. We got several complaints from customers about that photo…either they felt she was showing too much skin, or was too flat-chested.
Many years ago I was on a long airplane ride and sat next to a woman who ran a stock photo company with her husband. She would use herself and husband and kids in a lot of the family pictures so she wouldn’t have to pay models. She told me that friends would call her all the time saying things like, “Hey, I saw your kids on a billboard in Las Vegas advertising insurance.”
