BEWARE OF COPYRIGHT ISSUES

July 15th, 2011 at 11:37 pm

With the increasing importance of the internet in our business, we have seen a corresponding increase in copyright issues and claims being made against our agents. The most common claim is made by the owner of a picture, such as Getty Images, against an agent website for using their photos without permission. Typically, our agent finds a community type picture (such as the Hollywood sign or Coronado Bay Bridge) and puts it on their website without paying for it or getting permission from the owner. Many companies are now protecting those assets aggressively, writing demand letters and seeking payment of a use fee, sometimes in the thousands of dollars. Frankly, those claims have merit, since under the law, the owner of a picture has the right to control its use. As a result, be very careful about the photos you use and make sure that (1) all pictures were taken by you or (2) your have permission to use them. Since the photographer of a picture is assumed to be its owner, using your own pictures solves this problem.

This issue also has implications for the photos you use for your property listings. As I said above, as a general rule, the photographer is the owner of the pictures she takes. As a result, if you want to protect the pictures of listings you upload to the internet, you need to make sure that the photographer you hire will assign its rights to you and the Company. By doing so, we can protect those pictures on the internet, and stop other agents from using them on sites like Craigslist or their own personal sites. Without those ownership rights, however, we would have no right to take any act to protect these pictures. To make this easier, we have reached agreements with our two preferred vendors, Visual Tours and Image Maker 360. If you use either of those vendors, our agreement will govern and all pictures taken for our listings will automatically be owned by us, thereby allowing us to protect them for you. However, if you use a third party photographer, you will not automatically have this protection. So, please either use one of the vendors above or make sure that your photographer will assign his/her rights to your listing pictures.

As always, please let us know if you have any questions.

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