My thoughts
Regardless of the legalites, this is a very grey area and one that I’m well used to as the majority of my collection was not taken by me! (I’m talking slides).
Besides the obvious issue of good manners in asking the photographer first before using any image, in my case I don’t know who the photograher was for many of my slides so I get around it by adding their from ‘my collection’ which is acceptable by law as this statement covers the fact that I’m not claiming to have taken them and I don’t know who did.
There are actually 2 issues here as the use of images for financial gain without consent aside, a lot of people in the hobby are just as concerned about people posting or uploading photos that they claim to be taken by themselves. The comment above re adding your name to the photograph via a Photoshop layer is the only real way you can get around it when posting images to the web.
As to the legalities, it’s a minefield. When talking about this subject to publishers, one question that often is difficult to answer is – if you went to court, how can you prove the person whose used your photos was not standing right next to you and took the same photograph at the same time with the same camera? Clearly it can be done, but for small time claims associated with aviation books and not big corporate advertising, the benefits would outweight the financial cost of proving it.
Best thing really is to contact the author/publishing company, explain your concern and hope for apology/free book/small payment etc.
That said though, the auther could still come back and say at no time did your website tell me the images were copyrighted and I couldn’t use them – like I said it’s a minefield!
Let us know what happens…
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