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Model Release

You may get sued big time if you aren’t careful with what you upload to Unsplash

Unsplash has in a short time become a major player in the photo-sharing industry. 174,000 photographers have uploaded images to the site. The platform this month boasts 5,000 views and 27 downloads per second. (PER SECOND!) People download images for blogs, classes, and other purposes, but also for commercial use. There is a big debate in the industry asking if Unsplash is good or bad, but it is not what I want to talk about today. Today I want to talk about the legal risks you face when you upload work to Unsplash. Not as the end-user, but as the photographer.

Photographers use Unsplash for exposure because of the enormous traffic the site generates. A company may hire a photographer for commercial assignments or simply want to license a high-resolution version of an image it found on Unsplash.

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Model release in travel photography

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While most commercial photographers know about copyright laws and the use of a model for their images, it seems the answer isn’t so clear when it comes to Travel Photography. So if you’re travelling the world with your camera, what laws apply – for you and for your subject?

You might need to consider what it means… taking photos of people in a foreign country, photos that you may one day print, sell or publish.

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New York’s “Vessel” is under fire over rights-grab photo policy for tourists

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The Vessel, in New York City’s latest luxury neighbourhood, is Hudson Yards’ fancy tourist trap. But it’s also a rights grab when it comes to photography. Initially, spotted by Gothamist, two particular clauses in the Hudson Yard Terms & Conditions were extremely overbearing. Terms and conditions to which you agree as soon as you enter the place.

Those clauses have since been combined into a new “My social media posts” clause. The new clause is a little shorter and combines the two previous clauses together with a little more clarification. But it still looks like pretty rights grabby to me.

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How a model release turned an author into the poster child for…everything

While a university student, author Shubnum Khan signed a model release in exchange for professional portraits as a part of a project by photographer XX billed as “The 100 Faces Shoot.” Unbeknownst to her at the time, the photographer started licensing the images as stock photography, and Khan’s visage started to appear in advertisements around the world selling everything from McDonald’s hamburgers to hyper pigmentation cream to management course materials.

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Woman sues Chipotle for using her photo without a release, asking $2.2 billion

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Dear photographers, please always have people sign model releases if you plan to sell photos of them. Let this recent lawsuit against Chipotle Mexican Grill can be a reminder for you.

Leah Caldwell was enjoying her meal at a Chipotle restaurant in 2006 when a photographer Steve Adams took a photo of her. She didn’t know he was shooting. As she was leaving the restaurant, Steve asked her to sign a release, which she refused. What the photographer and Chipotle did later was unethical and illegal. And it eventually ended up pretty harmful for them.

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19 year old girl banned from social media for posting nude photos of another woman

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19 year old Courtney Marie Mulkentine from Gympie, Queensland, posted photos of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend to Facebook and removed them after Mulkentine received a phone call from the victim, but by then it was too late.

After pleading guilty to “using an electronic carriage service to harass or offend”, the Australian teenager has been banned from using social media for six months, after the act of “revenge porn”, an increasingly common and worrying practice.

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