Photo theft by Active Magazine of the United Kingdom, Altitude Media

SystemSystem Registered Users Posts: 8,186 moderator
edited November 17, 2006 in The Big Picture
From a friends website...Please pass this on around any UK and photog forums. Link

[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif] Theft of pictures by Active Magazine of the United Kingdom, Altitude Media - published by Graeme Kearon Spratley[/FONT]




Summary
  • Active Magazine of the United Kingdom "grabbed" pictures from my personal website and published it on their magazine. These pictures were taken either by me or by my friend SK.
  • Active Magazine never contacted either myself or SK to request permission to use these photographs.
  • Active Magazine never contacted either myself or any of the people portrayed in the photographs for permission to publish their images on the magazine.
  • I contacted Active Magazine, their parent company Altitude Media and the owner, Graeme Spratley to request compensation for and a resolution to their theft of my photographs and have been ignored.
I will be pursuing further action and evaluating alternatives.
Background
It was quite by accident that I found out about this theft. Parents of a friend of mine went to the UK and picked up a copy of Active Magazine because they thought my friend would like to see a UK bike magazine. The articles in that magazine contained a story and articles about riding in the Whistler bike park. The date of the issue was around July 2005.
Active Magazine is published by Altitude Media Ltd. of the United Kingdom. Graeme Spratley is the publisher of Active Magazine and is a principal of Altitude Media. Graeme also publishes Ultimate-ski, an electronic magazine, and Snow Magazine.
Active Magazine stole the pictures off from this story - the story on my personal website isn't even about riding the bike park but riding trails in the Whistler valley. I count 5 pictures stolen; 3 pictures were taken by me and 2 were taken by a friend, SK. In viewing the stolen pictures it is quite apparent that the stolen pictures published by Active Magazine were the low-resolution web-page quality images I put up on my site and not the original high-resolution images.
Here is the article published by Active Magazine scanned from the original in two parts - part 1 and part 2. To forestall any attempts by Active Magazine itself to accuse me of copyright infringement I note that I use the article to show the infringement, similar to using evidence in a trial. I note that the article is written by a Stuart Miller. I do not know if Stuart Miller stole the pictures or if the act of theft was by Active Magazine itself. In any event, Altitude Media is the publisher of Active Magazine and Active Magazine is the publisher of the stolen pictures. They have not responded to my attempts to pursue a resolution.

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