Carlos Santos, a comptroller for Australia-based Photolibrary, has been fired due to an email he sent to over 1500 photographers explaining an accounting problem he discovered after Photolibrary acquired Index Stock in 2006.
The “accounting problem” Santos discovered is representative of what I believe to be an industry-wide exploitation of photographers by their agencies, (or should I say suppliers by their distributors).
Read the PDN article by Daryl Lang here:“link text” http://www.pdnonline.com/pdn/newswire/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003680768

As many of you may know, I have been in a 5+ year battle with Corbis for the loss of over 12,600 original images. The initial lawsuit I filed had over eight counts of accounting discrepancies some of which involved the practice of under-market value sales and “cut-of-a-cut-of-a-cut” foreign sub-agency royalty fees. Eventually, I had to drop everything except the actual loss of images due to the costs of hiring someone like Price/Waterhouse to go through everyone’s records and prepare a report.

Sadly, more important than my victory against Corbis over the loss of most of my selects from 2000-2001, is the fact that the issue which affects nearly EVERY photographer represented by an agency was never brought to trial.

If you don’t believe this is problem that affects you, just do a Google on Edward C. Greenberg,(my brilliant and affable lawyer), and read up on all that he has to say from his 20+ years of experience on rights and royalties issues; you might be surprised and you should outraged.

Let us keep Carlos Santos in our thoughts for trying to make an honest attempt at correcting a problem and lost his job for making a decision that hurt the company pocketbook “unnecessarily”.

btw— Let us not forget that PACA represents Agencies, not photographers!

Cheers to All, Chris