Christy Turner will do a lot for a good picture of the night sky. The Calgary-based photographer feeds her passion for the Northern Lights by monitoring weather conditions at home and, whenever she flies over the Arctic Circle, by making sure to sit on the right side of the plane. Her diligence has paid off: Turner’s work has been featured by CNN, HuffPost, and the Canadian edition of Reader’s Digest. Like many photographers, however, she’s also discovered her work elsewhere, even in print, in publications that never contacted or paid her. Recently it was a shot she got on St. Helena, a remote, volcanic island in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
“I climbed up 900 stairs on an island to take a photo of the whole island, and it was used on the cover of a local magazine out there,” she says.
Turner might not have known about the photo theft if not for a pair of services called Copypants and Pixsy, which use algorithms to scour the internet for copies of photographers’ work and help them enforce their rights. They send stern letters to suspected infringers, demanding that their clients be compensated or that licensing fees be paid; in some cases, law firms that work with the companies will even initiate a lawsuit on their behalf. In Turner’s case, justice came in the form of $500 in damages.
For many photographers, especially those who can spend thousands of dollars on equipment, travel, and more, it’s unauthorized commercial uses—think someone appropriating a photo to promote a business or include in an ad-supported article—that are particularly galling.
“Some of them, they use it as clickbait if it’s a celebrity, and some of them they just use it for commercial purposes,” says Joseph Chen, a New York fashion photographer and Copypants customer. “One of the [infringing] companies was actually a very exclusive nightclub in New York.”
Copypants says it has represented more than 11,000 copyright holders, and has identified about 2.7 million image matches, with about 50 resulting in cases referred to Higbee & Associates, a law firm it works with.
