Last Rites for Images
A couple of BBC news stories have caught my attention this week concerning image rights.
It’s a bit of a minefield – in the world of PR you naturally have to be careful about providing images to accompany stories – it’s important to know where they come from and who they belong to.
A great example of this concerns an article by the brilliant photographer and journalist Nick Smith for E&T recently – his fantastic image of Stratus Technologies Chief Exec Dave Laurello perfectly reflected the very human and insightful interview that accompanied it.
While we’d love to be able to share that image for other press coverage of Dave, it wouldn’t be right, since it is not owned by Stratus technologies or Cadence Innovation Marketing.
But as this story on the BBC explains, pictures taken in public, without permission, share similar legal protection. A fact that, in the world of Social Media, seems impossible to police, but, remarkably, is leading to photographers suing the subjects of their images when they repost them via Social Media.
Surely under such circumstances, the subject of the image should be protected?
Such are the grey areas.
As ever, it feels like the winners here are all in the legal profession…
The other news snippet that caught my attention on the beeb was the one about Jose Mourinho, the erstwhile Manchester United manager, “settling” for a one year prison sentence and a fine in Spain after accepting tax fraud charges concerning his image rights. This, perhaps, is the other side of the coin, where monies paid to Mourinho for image, voice, signature, likeness and mannerisms to be used commercially was allegedly whistled-through tax havens and offshore companies to avoid paying Spanish taxes. Remarkably, despite only being Real Madrid manager in 2011-2012, the tax figure he was accused of owing was 3.3m Euros.
Which shows just how much image rights can be worth to top celebrities.
It’s all a bit of an ethical and legal minefield.
On the one hand, who else but the subject (apart from the tax authorities) should be able to make money from someone’s image? On the other, the skills and efforts of the professional photographer must surely be recompensed and protected in the digital world.
I wonder, really, if there might be sensible law about permission and tacit permission. ‘Tacit permission’ being appearing in a public space (but getting the rights to the use of your own image if captured in that space) and ‘permission’ being more formal, taxable transactions, where image rights are keenly protected.
But then, what if you’re David Beckham and you just walked out of The Ivy with Tom Cruise and you post the pap-snap? Could Cruise then sue Becks?
Oh, and of course Mourinho is not actually going to serve his one-year prison sentence – anything under two years in Spain is rarely served, it seems.
Which leaves Jose free to find another coaching job. Or to pick up his punditry career, which is also lucrative – he reportedly earned £1 million for five TV appearances in Russia during the 2018 world cup.
