One of our clients who is older than he likes to admit, laments the days of faded Polaroids, cracked family picture albums and faded family snaps.  He is known to say, “If a house if burning to the ground and the kids and the pets are out and safe, the one thing people will run back into the blaze for are the family photos”.  Such photos are simply irreplaceable family treasures.  We think such words are truly spoken.

We have represented many a professional photographer whose spousal union wound up in divorce court rather than eternity. Although sometimes the divorce seems like an eternity.  The ownership to imagery and copyrights to professionally shot photos are typically part of the marital estate and must be accounted for like any other asset. The value of the imagery, the copyrights, equipment, studio etc. are often the subject of extended and expensive disputes by and among parties, expert witnesses and lawyers.  The values of such items are often hard to determine with exactitude.

But how about dueling spouses who, during the course of their marriage, have produced more photos than happiness?  Just today the NY Daily News reports that a divorcing couple who agreed on shared custody of their kids could not agree on how to divvy up 7,000 photos taken during a 21 year marriage.
After a full-blown hearing and presumably lots of attorneys’ fees, the judge awarded 75% of the photos to the husband and 25% to the wife. While the photographer did not claim to be a professional, according to the judge the husband, “equated his collecting of photographs of the family with the hobby of collecting rare books”.  The judge also found that, “The husband was intricately involved with the taking, compiling, and cataloging of thousands of photos”.  The couple had paid $2,100 to scan all of the images but were unhappy with the result, hence the litigation over the originals.  The article does not go into depth as to how the split is to be made, but it is not uncommon in divorces to simply start picking items in turn in the same ration as the split. As far as we know neither party had registered any of the images.  Such registration could have eliminated the dispute in whole or in part as copyright registration establishes a presumption of ownership.

Under certain circumstances, even pictures with no commercial value may be worth fighting over and paying lawyers to do just that.  Another lesson to be learned… in The Copyright Zone.

Ed Greenberg