2 July, 2007 | No comments

Remember, Keep Your Promises

A masterclass in how not to deal with your unofficial content providers.

Commission You

Tragedy, Water Under The Bridge

We won’t use your images again

Unfortunately, after this conversation, Ben’s magazine, Zoo, did publish two more of the free-content-giver’s images.

We should all avoid this type of faux pas as the ‘giver’ then had to block EMAP’s IP address. He questioned what use was allowing them access to a point of reference to prevent use of his images when it was, in fact, becoming a library for them to use when they saw fit.

14 March, 2007 | No comments

Dreadful News

The complainant in the Zoo (EMAP owned) magazine incident had an image appear last week in Zoo’s main competitor, IPC’s Nuts Magazine.

Unfortunately for all champions of free and low-cost editorial, the staff at Nuts were courteous and helpful, quickly confirmed that Beau Bo D’Or (stupid name!) created the image and agreed to a generous donation to charity.

Not only were they helpful but they give to a bloody CHARITY !

12 March, 2007 | No comments

Evasion

Just to ensure costs are minimised when we use an image, it’s important that any identifiers are removed from the images.

Some of the little viral monkeys use silly little noms de mouse to tell the world how clever they are and they, inconveniently, put them on their images.
These can usually be easily removed by cropping the image or cloning out the tag.
“Cloning?” - Ask your graphics people, they will do it for you. You may have to do this more often than cropping as the pesky little buggers put their tags on key parts of the image but it can be done.

Now, some magazines are starting to leave the credits as complaints mount but we don’t want to do that, do we?
Why? - Because it practically assigns ownership and that means we have to pay out. So NO TO TAGS !

However, as we all have clever lawyers, we can still muddy the waters if tags do become an issue. So do not concern yourself too much about this. We can always send them a £20 DVD player (that our sponsors provide) to buy the little monkeys’ silence.

What you must not do is acknowledge that the creator is the creator before your editor or legal dept. decide to deny the creators rights.

This is what seems to have been happening with Zoo magazine recently.
They have been holding out for months and have been having fun with one of those persistent viral jockeys.

Incredibly, before they decided to take him on the swings and roundabouts, they told him they loved his work and then asked him to come and do some of the same for zoo magazine!
The assistant editor was recorded when he had his conversation with Beau Bo D’or !

He apologised and made the offer in this file :

and Zoo magazine gave him an ego massage in this file :

So, while Ben Wilson had acknowledged Beau Bo D’Or had created his images in August 2006, his editor, Anthony Noguera still denies it.

This kind of cock-up can become very expensive in man-hours for your staff and lawyer fees as they put up a valiant defence.

We must support Zoo in their case as it could cause problems for the free and low-cost content movement from which we all profit.