Juice The Blog » Blog Archive » Copyright Gone Mad

Posted by BLin on March 14th, 2010

Some of you may have noticed some photos of our wedding on Juice, The Dropbox. I put them up there because I figured you guys may want to snag them, which I have full rights to do under my contract with the photographer. Part of our deal was that we would receive a DVD with all of our pictures, in high resolution, and we could do with them as we please as long as we weren’t selling them.

So today, Jackie and I decided we were finally going to fill some frames we got as wedding gifts with said photos. We had them quickly printed at Walgreens, and when we arrived to pick them up we were greeted by a smiling Walgreens employee who promptly asked if we had a waiver from the photographer to print these photos.

Huh?

After asking a couple questions, it became clear that we had to drive all the way home, dig up our photographer’s contract and drive back to Walgreens. When we got back, we were helped by the Assistant Manager. I asked him a few questions:

When did this policy start?

We’ve always had it.

How do you know they are professional photos?

We can tell by looking at them.

What happens when my friends and family try to print these photos?

You’ll have to give them a copy of the release.

This seems kind of ridiculous.

Well, it’s the law. We just want to sell photos, but we have to protect the photographers who make them because that’s their livelihood.

I just had to nod.

It is fairly obvious that this is pure legal bullshit on the part of Walgreens. I mean, had I actually been printing something without permission, how easy would it be for me to get around it? First of all, I could have just said that I took those photos. They would have no way to prove otherwise.

Secondly, what’s stopping me from typing the following release letter?

To Whom It May Concern:

I hereby authorize Brian Lindenau to print any of my photos.

Sincerely,

Theodore Roosevelt

I mean, they don’t even know who took the photograph.

This seems like this is an issue that could be easily handled by a simple checkbox, similar to what Facebook asks you: “I certify that I have the right to distribute this picture and that it does not violate the Terms of Use.”

It might save everyone some time and headache, and would be equally toothless.

For now, I guess I’ll just print my photos at a place that doesn’t place arbitrary legal barriers in front of me.

Tags: Copyright, Walgreens

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 14th, 2010 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Some Pulp. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

5 Responses to “Copyright Gone Mad”

March 14th, 2010 at 7:49 pm
brad says:

When I worked at the Wal*Mart photo department, we had to follow the same procedure. It was total bullshit. One time an amateur photographer came in to get his own photos developed, and it was a huge mess. The worst is if you have professional photos that were taken of, say, your grandparents in the 20s and you’re trying to make a couple of copies of the prints. It’s actually impossible.

Unless my supervisor was eyeing me up while I was making the sale or expressly forbid the sale of certain orders, I would assume that most people had the rights to their photos.
March 15th, 2010 at 7:48 pm
Shalini says:

First, you’re going to be hard pressed to find a place that will allow you to print professional photos for you. No one wants to be liable for the illegal reproduction of images. Once professionals do find out they’re allowing this sort of service, they’ll be hit with infringement lawsuits left and right. Even Photoshop is somewhat protected. Try scanning in a dollar bill and see the message that pops up.

Second, why would any professional photographer want their images printed off of a shitty Walgreen’s printer? Their reputation is built on their personal service, production, and output of their product. It’s also the most unstable medium in terms of protecting copyright from the likes of Photobucket and Pilfered.

You are both wrong in thinking that just because the photos are in your hand, you own full rights to them. Brian was lucky enough to have a photographer that allowed full use of the images. However, most contracts are specifically outlined with agreements on usage and distribution. They are selling their service to you, but that doesn’t mean you have complete ownership of the images. Creative property still belongs to the photographer for promotion and resale.

So you have some options here:

1. Do a little research and find a quality printer to make these prints yourself.
2. Get a photo student to edit and print them in the nice shiny RIT ESP facilities, for cheap. You could even trade them for a service of your own.
3. Talk to your original photographer and have them make prints for you.

Also for extra credit:
If you think this system is flawed, then I suggest you find a way to digitally watermark images (as if this industry isn’t already spending millions on finding this solution), sell it, and make a killing.
March 16th, 2010 at 12:02 am
BLin says:

@Shalini

First of all, I was more commenting on the absurdity of the process through which Walgreens “verified” that I had rights to print the photos, and also the way they “detected” that they were professional photos.

I never thought that just because I had the images I owned full rights to them. That wasn’t the point. Perhaps my title for this post was a little off.

Furthermore, when you’re brother is 2 days from showing up at your house, and you need to fill some empty frames he gave you 5 months ago, Walgreens is probably my best bet. Not that I think their print quality is all that good, but they’ve got me on convenience.

If I were still in Rochester, I would love to have my photos printed at RIT. Sadly, I am not.
March 16th, 2010 at 8:48 pm
adam says:

How does facebook fit into all this? Can you throw some of those bad boys up and tag our asses?

I ask more out of the narcissistic need to have those amazing pictures (you know the ones!) visible to our friends more than with an interest in intellectual property.
March 17th, 2010 at 3:16 pm
choof says:

Betsy and I got all the negatives and master digital files for all of our photographs from the wedding. We paid him a flat fee for taking the photos all day, and purchased some larger prints from him later. The photographer was a pretty chill dude, and I like how he gave everything away free of charge. The way he looks at it, he just wanted to get paid for taking the photographs, and then let us do what we wanted with them.

We ended up printing a lot of them from http://www.shutterfly.com. The print quality is indistinguishable to almost everyone (Shalini excluded), and they were dirt cheap. We never had any issues with written consent or copyright bologna, it was painless.

I’m pretty sure Shutterfly won the best online photo printing service when it was voted upon by the readers of Life Hacker recently, and I would recommend it to anyone.