Sporting Event - CD burning rights

[Photos by Ursula]

Hi,

I've received a verbal agreement from a hockey dad that the team is looking for some pictures of the players during a game that I attended, the coach agreed that they were willing to pay a low fee for approx. 35-50 pictures. I took 40 pictures, but missed 6 team members. The discussion was, I was willing to burn a CD for each player for a ridiculously low price of $10 for each team member, but this would mean I'd have to cover another game and take more pictures(again verbal agreement). I've since taken another 150+ pics in order to cover the missing players and provide better coverage all all the team members.
Now the hockey dad wants to just pay the original suggested price for the 35-50 pics, even though I've now spent over 4 hours of my time and he will burn his own CD of my pictures.
He said this to me after I've taken all the pictures, and not before, knowing I would have walked away from it. What are my rights? I will loose $150+
Can I tell him I have the copyright to the photos and he can not burn CD's without my written permission? That it would be breaking copyright laws.?

Any suggestions/help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[Clickhead]

I would tell them to go jump...

Did you actually hand over a disk already to this person?

In future did you know that you can copy protect CD's and DVD's so that they are not burnable?

Look here: http://www.cd-writer.com/cd_dvd_copy_protection.html

Yes all the original photos are yours and you have copyright.. but how will you ever know if they have been burnt and distributed amongst themselves? You won't.. and even if so are you willing to engage in some long and probably expensive legal wrangling to recover such a small amount of money form them?

I did a wedding once... and many people wanted copies... not only did I copy protect the DVD of photos but I made sure I gave all copies out on the same day to prevent attempts to share them before I got paid.

[doctorjames]

Originally Posted by Clickhead

In future did you know that you can copy protect CD's and DVD's so that they are not burnable?

Sorry, I dont want to rain on your parade, but any method you put on a DVD or CD to stop a direct copy wont do anything to stop people from making their own dvds or cds from the data stored on the disc. Sure, it wont be as easy as clicking 'copy', but if they can see the image, they can copy it.

[lputman]

Did you already burn all the discs?
Was hockey-dad paying for all the discs?

I would tell him to go else where as that was not what was agreed upon. If the hockey-dad was paying for each team member's disc, I would tell him no deal and go directly to the coach to offer them for sale to each person.

[waffles]

Well, you were paid to get shots of the team. You were paid to provide between 35-50 pictures. And you were allowed to sell the CDs to the team. Let's look at all of those seperatly.

Allowing you to sell the CDs was a great move, and you should be happy you got to do that. A lot of people seem to think that they can buy the first CD and just copy them all. You've got a coach who seems to have a better idea of the way things should work. So try not to screw that up.

Now, you were being paid for those 35-50 pictures. And you took 40. Are you serious? What if shots didn't turn out as planned? What if something messed up? You were being paid to provide 35-50, not to take 35-50. You should have taken about 100 shots the first time.

Also, you missed 6 members of the team. So you didn't really finish the job the first time. That's more than an entire line change that just isn't there. I can understand not having a backup goalie who didn't play or something. But 6 people? Come on, you can't really expect to get paid to come back when you missed 6 people, can you?

What exactly was there in the second verbal agreement? If there was no mention of how many pictures he wanted or of the price, then I would assume that he was expecting the same agreement from before. That's totally reasonable if you ask me. Unless there were different terms discussed.

He's not the one who decided to go and process 150+ pictures. Yes, he could have done a better job explaining to you that he wanted the terms from the first deal, but you also could have done a better job in finding out what the terms were for the second deal.

You can't just take more photos than they want and tell them that they're getting all of them at a higher price or not getting anything at all.

You also can't use the fact that you spent so long editing the pictures as an argument. It happens. Sometimes you need to look at the edited versions of pictures instead of the one sstriaght out of the camera to see which are the best.

Go back and apologize. Give him the 35-50 pictures like he originally wanted on CDs that you're allowed to sell to the team. Or even better, give him more than the 50 that he asked for, but do it at the price you agreed to for 35-50. Don't let him pay you for the second game since it's not his fault you missed out on 6 players.

I mean, damn, I don't know of any legitimate business where you can be the one who messed up and expect the customer to happily pay for you to do it again.