Wow, what a response! Over 10,000 hits on our blog and 55 comments, so first and foremost, thank-you denizens of the web, for all your support. And it appears that this isn’t the first time the Daily “fail/wail/heil/rail…” has s**t on the little guy, your comments and twitter responses positively bristle with angry accounts of similarly disrespectful conduct.
Please get in touch if you’ve had any similar experiences and DO! DO! DO! follow our lead. If you’ve had pictures stolen with no compensation then send and invoice and tell people about it!
Our story has certainly struck a chord with the online media community and the case has been picked up by a number of online journalists.
We were the top story on MediaUK for 24 hours.
The Borderline Film-Festival talked about it here
Jane Fae Ozimek at The Register talked about it here
The British Journal of Photography talked about it here
Matt Brian at The Next Web talked about here
So what’s the latest?
Well, Mr Alex Bannister, managing editor of the Daily Mail, responded to a call from Olivier Laurent and asked him to pass on a message that they are willing to negotiate, though he has rejected paying the invoice in full. While we await the advice of the legal brains before contacting Alex, we can tell you that we shall not be bought off. We want our invoice paid in full, as it’s actually a rather small cost in the circumstances, but more importantly we want an apology and we want the Mail to publicly state that it will discontinue what is clearly an institutional practice of ripping people off if they think they can get away with it.
Once again, let us state, that this is for us, first and foremost, an issue of manners. As a group who regularly release work under Creative Commons license, we are generally pleased when we see our work reproduced. However, Emily did not take photos of people being turned away at the voting polls in order for a corporate site like the Mail to use them to sell advertising space, without permission nor payment. And then to try to bully us into taking their meagre offer by claiming that we’d wavered our rights by posting to Twitter, well, that’s just mean. All of us here at Just Do It don’t like the way they have behaved; it’s rude and it’s unacceptable.
So we’ll hold out for our £1170 and an apology. And a heartfelt one at that.
On another note, we’ve been overwhelmed by the support that we’ve gotten from the Twitterverse. So much so that Leo, our assistant producer and “life-long twitter sceptic”, would like to let everyone know that this episode has really impressed upon him the capacity of twitter for, what he terms, “diss-meme-ination” (oh my what a clever pun) and is even considering getting an account. Welcome to the dark-side Leo… (leo wrote that last line -ed)
This is great and I’m glad to read that you’re sticking to your guns. I suspect in the case of the Mail stealing my image the amounts were sufficiently small not to cause the level of resistance you’re finding. They really need to understand that they can’t go around ripping images that belong to others.