Reply To: Using other photographer's work to promote your business

[cameraclicker]

There are stock sites that charge for images and, apparently, stock sites that offer free images.  Stock sites offer their images to advertisers for use in advertising, that’s why they demand model releases.  On that basis it is probably perfectly legal to use a collection of stock images to advertise your photography company.  At the same time it may be fraudulent to use stock images to advertise your photography business.  It is certainly morally corrupt.  It strikes me as false advertising to show someone else’s photos as examples of what potential customers can expect.

That web page alleges the photos used by those they are exposing were taken from the actual photographer’s web pages, or from advertisements and generally were not even from a stock agency, and at least one photo had the copyright notice removed.

There is a photographer in California that writes books.  The introduction talks about his 20 years of photography experience and has a section saying the whole document is copyrighted.  The books are basic but mostly accurate and have photos to support the text.  In a couple of cases the text says he didn’t take the photo so he does not know for certain how lights were set up.  I started to become suspicious when he identified a photo of the Canadian House of Commons as a picture of a castle.   There was a wedding photo which had a watermark at the bottom.  I did a Google search and found the photographer, who had no idea her photo was in the book.  I don’t know what action she took, but she confirmed she had not provided permission to anyone to use her photo.  I did a search on a number of other images and found several were from stock sites that offer images for free.  Some images could not be located by search tools.  I am left wondering why a photographer would not simply shoot the images needed for a book the photographer was working on.