Friday 7 December 2007

More control?

Photographs are an important part of any website. Some are good and some are bad but if you run a fansite for a popstar, filmstar or musician, the photographs form an important part of the website's indentity. That is no longer the case for fan websites of Prince who has legally demanded that ALL photographs of himself be removed from three of the main Prince fansites.

More and more celebrities seem to wanted to take full control of the way they are seen and represented online and in the media in general. Quite frankly it's laughable and one of the best ways to antagonise fans that i can think of. Yet the fans still remain loyal.

Control is what its all about. Control of an image.....but why try?
Any image released on the web is open to abuse, theft or mis-interpretation. They always have even before the internet was invented, the net just makes it a global problem. Away from the internet you can run into all sorts of 'offers'.

The worse case i've encountered as a photographer was a TV production company offering me £1 ($2) for a photograph they wanted to use in a national TV show. I lost any rights to that image meaning that they could have launched a best selling book with that image on the cover and i would get NOTHING!

They didn't get the picture.

1 comment:

JennyB said...

This is a good piece of advice for us amateurs, not that I have any photos of note - yet. It shows how good your photos are.

Jenny