That old chestnut - photog rights and public misconceptions?

[muzz]

My daughters have been dancing in a competition/festival over the last week or so here in WA. As usual at these events, photography and videography is forbidden inside the auditorium by the organisers. There are commercial photographers available at the venue to take photos on stage - a booking fee is payable and purchase is optional from there upon review of the images on computers at the venue or via the internet. Videos are also purchased by paying a fee in advance. None of this seems odd or unreasonable to me.

What I did find odd (and unreasonable) was the announcement at the beginning of the session that photography and videography inside the auditorium was forbidden as it was an illegal act, and offender's equipment and images would be confiscated, the dance school would be disqualified and hefty fines would be imposed. I haven't been able to find any evidence that this is in fact the case, and my email to the committee asking for further details so far has remained unanswered.

The venue management leaves the rules and terms relating to the use of the venue to the hirer and as such have no specific policy regarding photography. They were more than happy for me to take photographs of my daughter's Christmas concert last year on behalf of her dance school.

Access to the final images and videos differs in an interesting way also. The video company requires that order forms be signed by the dance school staff prior to ordering them. However they have no record of signatures to compare and accepted any signature on the form as far as I can tell. There was no attempt to identify the person ordering the videos or what their relationship to the dancer was. They also made no enquiries when picking up the videos as to whether the person collecting them was the person who ordered them. It seemed a rather futile attempt at some sort of butt covering exercise which really had no obvious function other than to imbue that some sense of privacy prevailed.

On the other hand, the still images were all available for viewing by any interested party at the venue, and there were business cards with a pre-printed password already on them to allow viewing later over the internet by anyone who picked up a card.

There are a variety of reasons why restrictions apply to photography in this situation and as far as I can tell, there is no need to justify their reasons and I don't have an issue with this particularly. I don't however like to be threatened unnecessarily, particularly if the threat is false and made by someone in a position of authority - it's really just bullying in my opinion.

Just my observations, but I'm interested in other people's views.

[gstark]

That certainly sounds a little odd, but I suspect that it's probably just a matter of being very poorly worded.

First of all, and as I understand it, the taking by you of photographs is not illegal. They've got that wrong.

The property within which this event was held, by your description, is private property, and as such, as the legal occupiers of the premises, they will have a right to dictate terms and conditions of entry. Those terms can and may well prohibit the taking of photographs by yourself or any other non-authorised person, but that does not make the taking of photos illegal. It merely means that they're not granting to you a license to take any photos within those premises. But those terms and conditions must be made very clear to you prior to your entry.

Did they repeat that announcement about it being an illegal act at any point during the day? Was any of this stated upon any tickets or freely available documentation prior to or at the point of entry? If not, how can they possibly hope to deal with people who may have arrived subsequent to the making of that initial announcement?

Did they have licensed security personnel on hand, perhaps like the bouncers you may see at a pub these days? To my knowledge, they all need to be licensed these days, but they also need to be very careful if exercising any sort of physical effort against you.

They would have absolutely no rights of confiscation at any point in time; I think that the only remedies available to them would be to ask you to cease your activities, and if you failed to comply with their reasonable request, they could then ask you to leave the premises. If you failed to leave quietly, they would be well within their rights to call the police and have them remove you from the premises.

Whether they could physically eject you (manhandle you) would probably depend upon whether they were licensed, but again, they would not have a right to use excessive force, and nor would they have any rights of confiscation of any of your personal property.

I expect that Alan (Raskill) may be able to add a little more insight to this, at least from a NSW perspective

[Raskill]

I read with some amusement that they would try and confiscate your gear.... I would REALLY like to see them try and take $4000 worth of gear out of my hands.... I sense they wouldn't like my reaction.

Realistically, they would have NO power to take any gear from you. Your private 'goods and chattels' cannot be taken from you, unless there is a law or regulation that you have broken. A policy is not a law.

They could however, prohibit entry of camera equipment (including mobile phones if they wished), and anything else. They could also ask you to leave if you used them, and then, presumably use reasonable force to make you leave (I doubt it would come to this however).

The threat to disqualify teams is pretty damn draconian however.

I would assume that if they have a private company taking images and selling prints and print packages, then the private company has gone some way to forcing the organisers to take this stand. By making parents to scared to take images of THEIR OWN children, they make sure that you're buying their product (in theory).

In fairness, the mum or dad with a camera makes this sort of 'print or package' sales almost impossible. Why buy great images for $x, when the MWC will give them to you for free? We bitch about the state of the photographic industry here, so this is the flip side of the coin.