Hi all,
I work as an in-house Architectural Visualiser, and just wanted to share this story with you. Last year I was working on a Design Approval submission for a project in New Zealand and prepared the image attached. Much of my work involves design development rather than producing market material.
During the design of this particular building, I was instructed to stick some kind of lifestyle graphic in the section which is dotted in red. The suggestion was to put something in to do with Queenstown where the project is located. So after a quick Google image search I found numerous photos of a person doing a bungy jump, and stuck it on. The image could have been anything, simply to indicate that a graphic of some kind would eventually go in that space.
As you can see the image attached is not particularly great, and was only intended to be used in-house, and shown to the Client. At this point I had not even bothered to stick in a background image given its WIP nature. It was also done essentially for free (but I won't go into that).
Months later I found out that the Client had published this picture in a small Queenstown newspaper without our knowledge. The Photographer who took the picture of the bungy jumper saw this and sent my company in Australia a bill for $7000 for use of his image.
I and several others in our office regarded this as extortion, however the management staff decided to pay this guy.
The photographer in question has been boasting on his Facebook page that he was on the case with this image and that he had found it on 125 other web sites, and these people were going to receive an email. I'm guessing that like myself, most of these people did't see any copyright info on this particular image, or see any Meta data indicating who the author was.
I should have known better, but I write this as a cautionary tale in case someone else finds themselves in a similar situation.
