In a town of visual creatives, image rights can be a big deal – so when the GOP launched a new attack ad against VA candidate Tim Kaine featuring an image taken by a Style Weekly photographer without permission or attribution, the publication was noticeably upset.
In a town of visual creatives, image rights can be a big deal – so when the GOP launched a new attack ad against VA candidate Tim Kaine featuring an image taken by a Style Weekly photographer without permission or attribution, the publication was noticeably upset.
Without getting into the merits of the ad, Style noticed the image last night and sent out a tweet asking for them to be contacted:
Dear @GOP, you are using a Style Weekly portrait in this @timkaine attack ad (about the legal system) without permission. Please contact. pic.twitter.com/LzaEFoz9XF
— Style Weekly (@StyleWeekly) October 5, 2016
The ad in question appears to have been paid for by the Republican National Committee and is an official GOP ad:
In a follow up tweet style clarified the image, which can also be seen in here in a July 2017 story about Kaine, was shot by their photographer (Scott Elmquist) and is owned by the publication itself.
Paul Kunberger, a Richmond-based attorney, thinks Style might be on to something with their complaint.
“If you use copyrighted material, you can’t incorporate that into your own [work] without permission,” he said.
Questions about Fair Use, a law which allows the use of images in cases of journalism or otherwise, were raised, but Kunberger doesn’t think the GOP was in the right at any point with this one.
“They’re a political organization, they don’t have any special rights that i’m aware of to rip of peoples images,” he said. “If it was the other way around, if they had taken the picture and Style Weekly used the image, that would constitute fair use. But if is the other way around, they use copyrighted images from anybody, a news source or whatever, and they incorporate it into their ad as a featured piece of it… that wouldn’t be fair use.”
And Kunberger has another question for Style. He said the usual line of recourse for these kind of complaints is one involving lawyers, not a tweet – “Why didn’t they send a cease and desist letter?”
