Contacting the Photographer Directly?

[frazier123]

Hello,

I searched for this but did not see it.  Yes I received the letter that one image on the main page of my site was infringing on their copyright.  I took it down and completely removed it from the webserver.  The image came from a free mambo template from a website.  The template was copyrighted in 2004  by someone in Mexico (I have found the person's email address and website)  I have contact our attorney and forwarded this site to them. We are waiting to here back. I did the copywright search and it is not listed under the photographers name. He does have a Sailing book.

My questions are

1. Should I try to see if the person in Mexico has proper license for this image?
2. I have found the photographer's website who took the picture.  Should I try and contact the photographer directly and get a license for this picture?  Being a hobby photographer myself I would be open to people contacting me directly if I where on the other side of the coin.

Thanks,

Frazier

[goober]

It might help if the Photographer was contacted and asked if he sold or transferred his copyrights over to Getty and when. I couldn't find a copyright registration for the image that I was supposedly infringing on either, at least under the artists name.  There are lots of individual artists in other countries that might sell their "Copyrights" to various companies and copyright laws in other countries can be lax and rarely enforced.

So what happens if the photographer or artist sells their image to a few different companies, including Mambo? It would be interesting to see if the other big stock photo companies have identical images that they are claiming copyrights to. Maybe they should start going after each other.

[Oscar Michelen]

Normally, only a company that has been given exclusive rights to an image can bring an action otherwise the rights to enforce usually stay with the artist.  Now Getty may have exclusive rights to the image for electronic media and the artist may have reserved other rights. But we have found where the photographer has perhaps mistakenly given Getty exclusive rights even though he had previously given the same rights to another entity. The other issue is that the first licensee may have been limited by time (lets say they received a two-year exclusive license) and be inviolaiton of the time limitation. You can contact them directly and ask these quesitons or you can pose them to Getty.  Getty will likely send you back a form response that they don't reveal their license agreements, etc etc so the photog himself might be the way to start.