Last year Neil Berrett came up with an unusual way of handing in his notice: he baked a cake with his resignation iced on the top and sent it to his employer. Later he posted a photo of the cake at Flickr, where it subsequently caught the eye of a People researcher preparing a story on unusual job resignations.
When Berrett asked for money for use of the picture – the cheek of the man! – People, one of the largest and most successful US celebrity magazines, did what any reasonable multi-million dollar publisher would do: they simply stole the image.
So Berrett has handed People their just desserts: a $500 invoice baked as a cake.
Berrett tells the story on his Flickr page:
On August 10 this year I received an e-mail from an employee of People Magazine requesting permission to use my cake resignation photo in an article. This is shortly after the Jet Blue Steward event, prompting many ‘Weird ways people have quit their jobs’ news stories.
I replied to People and said they needed a license to use my photo – meaning they have to pay me to use it. I did not receive a reply.
On August 11 my image was used without authorization and without payment on People.com, in an article titled “Take This Job and Shove It! 8 Memorable Quitters”.
I sent a cease-and-desist letter demanding my image be removed from their website. Six days later I receive an e-mail stating my image had been removed from their website. I received an offer at that time of $75 for the use of my image. That may have been reasonable if my photo’s copyright had not been willfully infringed and used for six days.
So, today I sent the photo director an invoice for a usage license of my cake resignation photo. This cake was delivered today, September 3rd.
It’s Labor Day Weekend in America, so no word if People Director of Photography Helen Lung is sitting on the invoice, or whether it has been swallowed by the accounts department, or simply scoffed by a starving unpaid Time Warner intern.
If Berrett does get paid that will put him ahead of the Corbis accounts dept. For apparently the world’s second largest photo agency, owned by Bill Gates, doesn’t employ anyone capable of filling out a copyright registration form correctly. On the same day that Berrett delivered his cake invoice, Corbis got egg on their faces after losing yet another copyright infringement case for failing to do their paperwork properly.
Photographer Tom Bean had sued publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in an Arizona court for allegedly using 150 of his images beyond the scope of the licenses sold by his agent Corbis. The images had supposedly been registered with the US Copyright Office on Bean’s behalf by Corbis as part of the agency’s bulk registration scheme. But in a damning judgement that rejected the infringement claim, Judge David G. Campbell ruled that Corbis had botched the registration. In his summary the judge wrote that the agency had failed to fulfill the copyright registration requirements for the individual photographs “almost completely. It failed to provide the titles of any of the individual photographs, largely failed to identify the authors of the photographs, and failed to connect any author with any individual photograph.”
The defeat is especially embarrassing for Corbis. Not only is it the second case they have lost this year against the same publisher in almost identical circumstances, but the agency have a page on their website advising photographers on copyright that stresses the benefits of the Corbis Copyright Registration Program.
Perhaps Corbis should give up on issuing advice and writs, and hone their cookery skills instead.
