Home > Commerce > Digital Resources > Metadata Resources, part 2

Metadata helps protect against accidental infringements

Learn how a little metadata made a big difference in helping an ASMP member recoup fees for images that were part of an accidental infringement.

Photographer Corey Weiner grants very liberal image usage rights to his clients. However, he would never make these rights transferable. And this is noted clearly in the boilerplate information he adds to the usage rights field in the metadata for all his image files. This embedded data paid off for Weiner when Hyatt Hotels sold one of their properties in Lake Las Vegas, Nevada, to Loews Hotels.

Weiner had photographed at the Hyatt location on two assignments — granting his typical, liberal usage rights — so the hotel had about 60 of Weiner’s images floating around on various hard drives. After Hyatt made the sale to Loews, Weiner received a courtesy call from someone at Hyatt telling him of the impending change. Not long after that, someone from Loews contacted Weiner to license four of his images for their new Web site. So far, so good.

However, a number of months later Weiner visited the Loews Web site and discovered that the hotel had used fourteen additional images without permission. Weiner says that he immediately went into “infringement mode,” frustrated, angry and anticipating a time-consuming battle.

To Weiner’s surprise, representatives at Loews responded immediately to his courteous letter about the infringement. “They said they were shocked and told me to send them a bill,” reports Weiner. In his letter — keeping his anger in check — Weiner had actually made a point to clearly explain to the Loews staff how they could access the metadata information in their files. “I explained that doing this would help them avoid this type of thing from happening in the future,” says Weiner.

Weiner admits that he is not really sure what happened between the licensing of the first four images to Loews and the infringement of the subsequent fourteen images. “Was it an honest mistake? Were they trying to get something for nothing? Were they just rushed in trying to get their new site up? I really don’t know,” says Weiner. “However, I do know that having basic metadata embedded in my files — including the fact that the rights were non-transferable — seemed to help clear the situation up much more quickly.”

 

Previous: (File names) <<    >> Next: (Web resources)