www.bjoern-steinz.com

It took 8 months time and the help from LaPixa and their lawyer to get finally compensated for my “stolen” image published by “Le Quotidien” in Luxembourg. The case did not go to the court and suddenly – after receiving post from a lawyer – “Le Quotidien” agreed to a higher compensation then the usual license fee. In the end they paid about 8 times more – including the lawyer fees and my compensation – then they would have if they licensed the image in the beginning.

The whole case is described in my older post here

The Lunik IX housing estate is home to the largest Roma community in Slovakia. It is located a few kilometers away from the historical city centre, on the outskirts of the eastern Slovakian city of Kosice. Since the beginning of the 1980s a large number of the Roma residents living in the city and in nearby settlements have been moved to Lunik IX. 

Project landing page: http://a-wall-runs-through-it.oka2.com

Online: http://projectm-online.com/demographics/a-title-no-country-wants/

After Google introduced the “reverse image search” I am sometimes looking where my work appears without a legal license and I decided to publish the most bizarre cases where my work was stolen. I found the pdf below via Google and it is an image I made a longer time ago, which is a portrait of Austrian writer Vea Kaiser in Prague. So far so good.

The original image is here:
http://photos.oka2.com/#!/index/G0000n7QSipzJqQ0/I0000b_3LICEFJnU

I contacted the publication http://www.lequotidien.lu/  in Luxembourg. I was in touch with the editor in chief who admitted that probably their correspondent “found” the image on Google and they just used it.

He admitted that they used the image without checking the copyright holder, without asking me as the author, without license fee and without mentioning my name as the creator of the photograph.

He seemed to be understandable, we agreed for a higher license fee then usual because of all the above mentioned infringements and he promised to pay my work, what unfortunately never happened. I contacted them several times again but never anybody replied, maybe they will now.

With bizarre in the beginning I meant that the case seems to be very clear but anyway the publication is waiting that I will sue them, probably expecting that I will not. The next step will be a copyright lawyer.

I had about 40 cases of copyright infringement in the last months and it is becoming more and more. I am not talking about bloggers which use my images without asking (they could ask and maybe I even would agree), but about commercial use on the internet and print. Here I found the image :

https://twitter.com/bressanserge/status/644751167352930304