Scoopt.com, a new agency which sells
amateur-taken photographs to newspapers and magazines, decided that
the invasion of privacy involved was too severe and the legal risks
too great to justify using the video, which it returned to the
person who offered it to the company.
"It involved the Royal Family, a video of the
Royal Family. Essentially it was private pictures and videos of the
Royal Family taken for a particular event that through some bizarre
sequence of events ended up with somebody who sent it to us," Kyle
MacRae, the founder of Scoopt, told OUT-LAW
Radio, the weekly technology law podcast.
"My initial instinct was that this is private.
We then considered it commercially and thought actually this could
be pretty valuable," he said. "But you have got all sorts of issues
involved. We don't own the copyright nor do we have any legitimate
licence to that copyright, nor does the Scoopt member who sent it
to us. Do we have an over-riding public interest story? Is it worth
it? Is this going to change the nature of the Monarchy in
Britain?"
"If any of that is true then, yes, we put it
out to market, if it shows some kind of blatant hypocrisy on the
part of the Royal Family then great, we've got a news story. In
this case it was just completely harmless, it was innocuous, it was
nice," said MacRae. "We weighed all that up and 24 hours later we
just decided we weren't going to handle this."
Scoopt was established 18 months ago in order
to represent people who used cameras and phones to capture
important news events or celebrity gaffes. As cheap digital cameras
and camera phones have spread, so has so-called 'citizen media',
where ordinary people provide the pictures and videos used by
mainstream outlets, often for significant fees.
"We're the broker between members of the
public and mainstream media," MacRae said. "So if somebody happens
to get a newsworthy photograph or video and they want to make some
money out of that it's very, very hard for the man in the street to
deal directly with the press, so they come through us and we then
licence that content commercially, at professional prices."
Copyright stays with the creator of the
content, while Scoopt and that person split revenue 50/50, said
MacRae.
The agency supplied the pictures of US
baseball star Cory Liddle's plane, which he crashed into the side
of a skyscraper in New York last year. Scoopt-brokered images were
carried on the front page of The Times and The Guardian, as well as
by The Sun and other papers internationally.
MacRae says that his agency tries to operate
ethically, which is why it turned down the Royal video, and why it
advises would-be snappers to behave in a humane manner.
"We've been asked in an accusatory tone
sometimes that by waving the dollar signs at people are we
encouraging people to become paparazzi. Or, more seriously, to put
themselves in danger," said MacRae. "I think there is a risk that
people will go too far. If you come across an event where people
need help then help them, don't take photos."
"A professional photo-journalist can probably
justify shooting rather than helping, that's their job. Members of
the public aren't, it's just the wrong thing to do, you drop the
camera, you help where you possibly can then you get yourself the
hell out into a position of safety," said MacRae.
