Today, all the dissemination of information is very much a visual thing. At the same time, professional photographers now have extensive competition from ‘amateur’ content creators with great equipment. This makes that profession more fragile, and a few professional photographers have reacted very defensively.
We currently have a number of cases with the former users of our photo database calling or mailing us about claims from one of our former photographer partners, Karsten Bidstrup. He is very actively investigating possible violations of his intellectual property rights, via intellectual property rights violation agencies (not-allowed.dk and fechner.legal/en), and he has contacted many of our former users with compensation claims for violating the Attribution right.
Attribution
You can read about Attribution in the context of Copyright laws. When a photo is in the ‘public domain’, attribution is not required, but for photos published under specific licences, attribution is very important. Visit Greenland has bought the images of Karsten Bidstrup under a copyright licence that requires attribution. Therefore, whenever he finds his photos without attribution on the image itself, he actually has the right to claim copyright infringement and demand compensation.
We have not experienced any of our other many photographer partners making the same kind of claims, so we just want to direct your attention to the possibility of claims coming from Karsten Bidstrup if you happen to use any of his images in your material. If you do, we advise you to either replace them with other photographers’ images or place his name on the photo itself.
We regret that we cannot provide a complete list of all Karsten Bidstrup’s images that we have offered via our database. After all, we started our collaboration over 20 years ago. However, here is a link to a thumbnail list of the images that we do know about as it has been available in former versions of our photo database.
Normally, the photographer’s name in the title or alt-text, for online use, is enough, but NOT in the case of Karsten Bidstrup. As a general rule of thumb, for printed materials, please always have the photographer’s name present on the image itself or in a description on the same page.
Thank you very much!
Kind regards, Visit Greenland
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