You want to know what a picture is worth? Ask Time, Inc. (People), Hello, and the other international publications who have now paid millions of pounds, dollars, euros, and who knows what else for the exclusive first publication rights to the Brangelina baby pics.
Now, I have absolutely no interest in the images from the celebrity standpoint–I’ve never cared for either parent as actors and really don’t care if they have one or a dozen babies. I will look at the images like I do most images, with a critical eye, and I won’t go out of my way to get my hands on the pubs with them, but that’s just me and I’m weird in that.
What does interest me about the pics is that incredibly high price. Some photographers are bitching and complaining about it–railing about the unfairness of Time, Inc. paying such sums when they make “regular�? photographers take low fees. But here’s the thing–numbers like that mean that they do understand the value of images and they are willing to negotiate.
What does that mean to the average photographer? It is yet ANOTHER reason to hold the line on prices and to negotiate better deals, or walk away from the table. Use the fact that they shelled out so much money for those images as one of your negotiating tactics.
Oh, and no one ever “makes�? a photographer take a crap deal; s/he chooses to do that him/herself. Always. You can always say “no.�?
The second part of the story is that Time, Inc. and Hello are going after gawker.com for infringing on copyright and their exclusive publication rights. Gawker, a blog-ish site that has repeatedly stolen images and other material to fill its pages, published a small version of one of the photos, in its original context on the cover the the publication. Ooops! That’s a double infringement–the image AND the cover as a whole. And the lawyers at Time, Inc. and Hello are serious about this.
Now why would they be bothering if they weren’t aware how important their intellectual property rights were? What value they held? They know, and every creative should know the value of his/her work as well.
As I posted on one of the photo forums earlier, infringement makes for strange bedfellows–go get ‘em Time. Inc.!