TWO intellectual property lawsuits filed by US photographers have taken on Google and Meta, accusing the digital giants of copyright infringement over ‘a lack of safeguards and action to prevent unauthorised image use’.

Reporter Will Shipton covered the "David v Goliath" story on his photography news site Inside Imaging.

According to Mr Shipton, there could be similar copyright or intellectual property risks for photographers here in Australia.

“I think that various news agencies using the Instagram embed is a pretty big problem for photographers in general and anyone that’s using Instagram as a creative in instances where their work might be newsworthy or used by some third party,” he said.

“Loads of photographers definitely experience it and other people in other creative fields.

“A lot of the time, news agencies, news outlets, bloggers need visual graphics for their piece and they can’t necessarily justify licencing an image directly from the photographer or through a stock agency so it’s the path of least resistance to have a graphic on the article using the embed API.

“It’s a bit of a loophole.”

Mr Shipton said instances like this could be an issue for photographers who don’t wish for their work to be associated with certain articles, pertaining to a ‘moral rights issue’.

“Obviously they’re not going to make a licensing fee so they’re going to also lose money and will only benefit from the exposure there might be from users seeing the embedded image and clicking on it and going to the photographer’s Instagram page,” he said.

“Some photographers I’ve spoken to said you’ve got to pick your battle sometimes.

“But if major mainstream (news outlets) have the budget to licence photos and images…photographers have every right to (being paid).”

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