Lady Gaga at Lollapalooza 2010. Photo by Flickr user Original Natvanya.
A Lady Gaga concert is one of the biggest spectacles in the music world. Massive set pieces, pounding pop melodies and flashy dancers in an endless array of bizarre costumes — the whole thing is designed to be the best experience imaginable for a music fan. Unless you’re a photographer.
Gaga has landed on the wrong side of concert photographers everywhere after recently demanding that they surrender the copyright of any photos taken at her performances. Yes, you heard right.
TBD.com photographer Jay Wescott has published a release form he was given by Gaga’s camp which states that any photograph taken at a Lady Gaga show becomes the property of Lady Gaga. Copyright laws currently say that a photographer owns their image as soon as they snap the photo, so you can imagine how Gaga’s demand has set off a firestorm among professional concert photographers.
“It’s utterly disrespectful of the time, the effort and the creativity of the photographer,” concert photographer and intellectual property lawyer David Atlas told Rolling Stone. But it’s not the major media outlets who are feeling the hurt — it’s the photographers from smaller publications who are struggling to make it.
“Typically the person who has the least leverage gets the worst release,” Atlas says. “Maybe there’s a photographer that she likes who won’t have to sign the release form, but the people who get paid $125 to hang out for four hours at a concert have to sign this release. So on top of getting paid very little, they have no ongoing revenue stream from these photos whatsoever.”
Of course, this is not a new practice. Artists have long been wary of having their image distributed without supervision, and will go to great lengths to restrict who is allowed to take their picture and what they’re allowed to do with it. Some artists — Foo Fighters and Beastie Boys have been named — will force photographers to sign contracts turning over their images before they’re even allowed inside the concert.
So who’s at fault here? Are photographers at the bottom of the barrel being forced to stay at the bottom? As for Lady Gaga, we know she cares about photography as an art form (check out her work with Polaroid), but this latest incident isn’t making her any friends. So is Gaga genuinely trying to protect her intellectual property, or is the queen of pop just being greedy?
View Comments (2)
That is utterly crazy.
I understand that Lady Gaga treats herself and her performances as work of art, and I'll give her every right to do so. But the photo of her is, in that case, derivative work. And derivative works are intellectual property of those who make them, i.e. photographers.
She should be left dry and not photographed under those conditions. But, unfortunately, that's never going to happen. People are too weak in front of dirty blackmails like this.
If photographers really want her to respond, maybe they need to affect her income stream by not dealing with poloraoid, and letting polaroid know why.