And now we go full circle(back to original topic).
So If the PIAA owns the rights to those images, the athletes must agree to those terms if they want to compete. And if the PIAA contracts a photographer to shoot...
I was talking about this to another photographer on the sideline of todays JV football game, and he mentioned something to that effect about the Little League world series. Even if you have a press pass, by Little League allowing you access to shoot their games you give them the rights to use your shots for advertising(or other).
IMO if we look at this closely it is not such a terrible policy, I mean these high school athletes are amateurs and minors. I feel the PIAA and Little League controlling where and how(as copyright holders) the images are used and sold can protect our kids from the exact stuff that was mentioned as concerns in this thread. We are looking at this as photographers, but lets try to look at this as parents. Wouldnt you want someone monitoring how your kid/athletes images are used?
Personally, I don't think this is a good trend at all. Copyright ownership is literally the lifeblood of photo journalism. Without it, your ability to earn a living or extra cash is in jeopardy. Over the last ten years or so, copyright ownership has been under a constant assault that has had some very real negative effects in the PJ world. It's one of the reasons that more and more, being a PJ is akin to taking a vow of poverty.
The first big shot fired in this war was made by the Associated Press (AP). News services often hire freelancers to "string" for them at sporting events and other scheduled news events when extra help is needed. It used to be that if you were an AP stringer and they used one of your photos, they paid you a per image fee, they got the rights to use the image for news purposes, but the stringer retained ownership of the copyright and was free to sell the image as a reprint or for other non-competing uses. That all changed several years ago when the AP rolled out a new stringer contract that bumped up and per image fee a bit, but in return it added language that transfered ownership of the image to AP forever, and ever, amen. The Stringer had the choice of walking away from the work they got from the AP, or signing their rights away. Most chose the later.
From that point forward, the rush for "rights grabs" was on as other news venues took notice and started looking at things like secondary sales (See
this list of news organizations selling reprints). Well, it's harder and less profitable to sell reprints of photos you don't own, so away they went!
It wasn't long before the idea spread beyond news organizations and into the subjects of the photos too. They have to spend a lot of nuts to get good photos of their events for advertising and other promotional use. So they realized that if they could get the photographers to sign credential agreements with "rights grabs" inserted, their photo bills would drop to zero. Recently, even some entertainers have gotten into the act by trying to insert grabs into concert credential forms. Not surprisingly, the photographers and agencies that like actually being paid for use of their work take a lot of umbrage when such clauses are often times quietly slipped into the piece of paper you sign when you go to pick up your event credential.
As for the motive of the PIAA, I can assure you it isn't about protecting the kids from misuse of their images. Just like everything else in the "rights grab" game, it begins and ends with $$$. If you want to sell photos from their events, that's fine, but you gotta pay a licensing fee first to sell "their" photos. On top of that, the PIAA get to use any of "their" photos for free, even if you took them.
As for protecting the kids, the PIAA and any school for that matter, can ask any photographer to leave the grounds for any reason they wish. If they spot a guy at a basketball game only taking photos of the cheerleaders' rear ends (
It happens) ... they can bounce him. Likewise, if they don't like what a photographer or agency is doing with the photos they take, they can be barred from future events. There are other ways to deal with this other than a blanket "rights grab".
Fortunately there still are agencies out there that do things the "right way". For example, I'm represented by Icon Sports Media. I get to keep my rights, and they share any revenue from sales with me. Before you sign any forms or submit any pictures anywhere, read the text. There's a very good chance there's a rights grab in there! A common place to see them now are with so-called "Citizen Reporter" programs... the ones were if you get a good news photo (or video) on your cell phone camera your local newspaper or TV station (or even CNN) wants you to send it do them. Guess what, they get a good photo (or video), they don't have to pay a nickel for it (because they know you'll just be
thrilled to death to see your photo in the newspaper or video on TV!), and when you submitted to them they made you check a box whereby you agreed that the newspaper/TV station can use the photo/video, sell it, license it to others, and do what they want with it (and might even now "own" the work) forever!
