Aug 21, 2009: Whale of a High 5

In the deep blue waters of the South Pacific, cameraman Marco Queral gets up close and personal with a humpback whale.

'They decide whether I can take pictures of them or not. They must be in a right mood to let me get into this position.'
With a playful flick of his colossal tail Queral could be dead. But instead this curious, intelligent humpback whale takes a shine to Queral, and the two end up drifting through the seas together. The astonishing contact between the 50ft king of the ocean and the minuscule human was captured off Hawaii in the South Pacific last week.
Queral said the jaw-dropping moment was all down to luck, and little to do with the skills he has mastered over 17 years.
He said: 'The success in getting these shots is pretty much always down to the whale.'

With a playful flick of his colossal tail Queral could be dead

dar512;589171 wrote:

Yeah, but those fins might tickle going down.


I'd be worried about getting diver-tickle-itis. :greenface

Shawnee123;589249 wrote:

That is a stunning photo. I so want to be in that water.

monster;589264 wrote:

maybe there are land whales?

monster;589268 wrote:

I'll see you in 2.5 hours then?

Dear Editor at The Cellar

Please confirm you have paid for the use of the picture(s) of the whale and diver. We believe that the use of this material has not been authorized by Specialist Stock (the copyright owner), our agents, or the law. Specialist Stock has no record of you paying us or our agents for the right to publish this material.

Use without prior agreement is a breach of copyright. This is an international law relating to rights managed pictures such as these. A license to publish these images is required, as well as a fee, whether the images appear in printed form and/or on associated websites.

Having published these images on your site, there is a license fee of £45. Since you may not have known about this breach of copyright, we shall accept £20 provided we hear from you within 24 hours.

We can prove that we represent the photographer, the picture(s) and the rights to sell it. The information in the notification is accurate and under penalty of perjury, Tom Walmsley of Specialist Stock is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

These pictures were not taken in Hawaii (as some bloggers linking to your site suggest) but in the South Pacific. There are no whales in Hawaii in the summer.

Yours sincerely,

Ruth Garner, Office Manager

SPECIALIST STOCK

Hello Ruth, I am interested in making the Cellar's use of the image legal.

Does the £20 cover licensing for the rest of the life of the website? How do I remit payment?

As an aside, how much would it have been to license the image from the start? An image on our Image of the Day forum may get between 1200 and 10000 views. The whale page has been viewed roughly 2000 times so far.

Thanks,

Tony

Dear Ruth,

I'm a fairly regular viewer of the cellar and I'd just like to say GO F*CK YOURSELF.

Have a blessed day.

Oh and Fuck Cancer too!

HI Tony,

Thanks for your reply. The £20 offer was for the week that it has been in the news so far. Our yearly fee for worldwide web use is £120 but we could offer you £160 for ‘the life of the website’.

I will send you an invoice for the use you would like to purchase with payment details included.

Many thanks,
Ruth

Ruth, I shall take up a collection amongst the regulars and we shall pay for the week. Please forward an invoice. We highly prefer Paypal. Payment by cheque will have to be in US$, so if you require a cheque, please send along a rate in this currency.

I do wish you, and similar rights-clearing folks, would come up with a business model to support non-profit organizations that aren't major money makers. We are a money-losing operation, just a forum that shares 2000 views of such things. We earn about $15/month through google ads and overall operation is about $200/month. Payment of this fee will be double our gross earnings for the month.

Nevertheless, we are happy to be legal. And we would get very serious about legal use... if you guys would get serious about a fee structure to support us. It would allow us to get the facts right as well -- and to better credit you, and the photographers. This would help preserve your fee structure, as people would notice that sites are working within it.

If you hosted the sold images as well, that would give you a true count of views, and complete control of use. You could easily find the sites hotlinking it, and either prohibit it (creatively, with an alternative image!) or send them invoice letters as you have done here.

One of our alternatives is to reduce the image size or crop it until it's fair use. Nobody wants that, although more and more profitable websites are doing it.

If you want to see what happens to copyable rights-held property when the businesses don't care to support a sustainable model, look at the recording business. They started to offer rights-free downloads only last year. That means they spent roughly a decade fighting the tsunami coming their way, instead of working with it. During that time, consumers' needs were not actually being addressed. This fostered a community of piracy that has now killed the industry entirely.

Don't be like that, is merely my suggestion to the winds.

Tony

Payment of this fee will be double our gross earnings for the month.

Undertoad;592625 wrote:

No that is a great idea!

Directly insulting a lurker: $2
Directly insulting a regular: $5
Not recognizing a regular: $10
Posting something NSFW and not labeling it: $10
Posting copyrighted material: £2
Posting copyrighted material that is then found by rights-holder: £20
Posting in RFN NSFW and admitting it's you: you receive $3
Posting a bathing suit model in RFN NSFW and passing it off as yourself: $50
Posting in IotD without using the right date format in subject: $10

Undertoad;592829 wrote:

You can make up for it in RFN NSFW.