Photography For Real Estate

Thanks to Scott for pointing out a great story of how you can stand up to unauthorized uses of your images without spending big money on legal support. Here is the story in the words of the photographer Christopher Boffoli. And here is Carolyn Wright’s legal analysis.

While cleaning up the blog I ran across the summary of a series of posts and discussions from two years ago on the subject of ethics. Two years ago this was a fairly heated discussion with opinions all over the map so what I did was attempt to summarize the general consensus of how readers [...]

Via: Thomas Bliss’s IAAP site and Carolyn Wright’s Photo Attorney blog:
“Liz Ordonez-Dawes, an accomplished architectural and interior design photographer, recently was awarded more than $12 million dollars for copyright infringement of seven photographs. In brief, the court found that the defendants distributed Ms. Ordonez-Dawes’ photos of high-end houses to various third parties for advertisements to [...]

About a month ago I did a post highlighting some background on the The Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008 legislation pending in the house and senate. Thanks to Carolyn Wright over at photoattorney.com I just noticed that there is a petition to sign registering sentiment against this legislation.

If you haven’t noticed Congress is on it’s way to passing some legislation that will radically change the way copyright law works. Photographers owning copyrighted material will be effected by these laws if passed. I suggest taking the time to understand what is about to happen with copyright and if you don’t like it, express [...]

After participating in a number of discussions about photo licensing with real estate photographers I’ve realized that there is a disconnect going on between real estate photographers licensing and MLS photo usage rules.

I hesitate to do another post on photo editing ethics again since we have pretty much beat this subject to death in the recent past. However, the Real Estate Trends + Technology Magazine of the California Association of Realtors have a pretty definitive article by John Edwards, titled Have you crossed the line?
I think this [...]

Do your clients think they own the photos that you shoot for them? Mike over at www.martinvirtualtours.com told me about an misunderstanding that he recently had in which he shot a tour for a new construction agent where he included some neighborhood photos in the tour. Later, he provided the same neighborhood photos to a [...]

Jason Soles commenting in the last post poses a great question: “Does anybody (photographers or agents) have/use some sort of written code-of-ethics for these situations?” Since as a RE photographer you are working for the REALTORS® I think  the NAR ethics should set the ethical guideline.
As a  REALTORS® I knew that the National [...]

Drew from NJ just pointed out an interesting recent article on yahoo.com/real estate by Vanessa Richardson of Bankrate.com titled- Altered Photos: Taking the Real From Real Estate.
The article bottom line is that according to John O’Brien Chairman of the Illinois state Real Estate Lawyer Association:
“Advertising is held to be boasting and bragging, not [...]

Back in May of last year I pointed out that there’s a blog ( photoattorney.com ) that covers legal issues associated with photography. A few weeks ago Carolyn started shipping a book on the subject called “Photographers Legal Guide”. I purchased the e-book ($9.95) version and allthough I haven’t had time to read it from [...]