I beg everybody again to sign up on this. I cant understand why people can sent 60 posts on Erin Leica post (I´m jealous) and almost nobody signed up in this:

http://blog.freelens.com/appell/petition/

The publishing house of the Jahreszeiten publishing house handed out a new contract and everybody who works them is forced to sign it. This means that you either sign the contract or not work for them. The Jahrezeiten publisher is a mayor player in the the German publishing industry with various publications. The most well-known of it is the travelmagazine “Merian” which also employs a lot of foreign photographers.

The major points of the new contract are:

1. ALL photographs produced during an assignment of the publisher have to be handed out to the publisher and can be used and distributed exclusively by him.

2. The photographer as well as his agency have no right at all to distribute any of the photographs shot during an assignment of the Jahreszeitenverlag.

3. The publishing house can use all photographs taken during an assignment for free and for any purpose in his publications. This applies also to the photographs distributed by the publishing house.

This means photographers lose virtually all ownership of their own work and say farewell to the copyright. The deterioration of working conditions which has been going on for some time as for example the new contract of the New York Times has to stop. I ask EVERBODY to sign the petition of the German photographer association Freelens (an organisation of 1800 photojournalists) against this new contract. Please click on the following link. Although it is all German the contents of it are explained below. You will see a couple of lines that you have to fill out:

http://blog.freelens.com/appell/petition/

Afterwards you find a list of photographers who signed up already. It is not updated yet there are more than 3200 so far.
I ask also EVERYBODY to spread this mail to colleges and especially to your AGENCIES as they will cease to exists once this type of contract become common practice. The best thing for the agencies would be to boycott the publications of the Jahreszeiten and not provide them with any pictures for the time being. Some photographers in Germany have already advised their agencies to do so.

It is essential for the survival of photographers that this contract is stopped because if it succeeds it is more than likely that this very contract will lead the way for other mayor publishing companies as Gruner & Jahr (for example Stern, Geo) or Bauer (for example Focus Magazine) in Germany and from there it will become global.