More on stock smile galleries
Date: January 15, 2014Category: Author: David Hall
In my post last week about stock smile galleries, I used examples of four identical smile galleries of clients of Prosites. Danielle, our social media director, tweeted a link to the post to Prosites saying, “Using a stock smile gallery to market your dental work can be detrimental to your site.” They responded, saying, “We agree . . . which is why we give our members a sample gallery and encourage them to upload images of their own patients.” We replied to that by tweeting, “Your clarification helps a lot. Feel free to comment on our post for more clarity.”
What followed, though, was mysterious to us. They deleted their earlier tweet, and then I got a threatening e-mail from them, accusing me of copyright infringement.
Having previously been in the book publishing business, I’m pretty well schooled in intellectual property law. I’ve had a couple of courses in it and read a couple of textbooks. So I’m well aware that written into the copyright act is a doctrine called “fair use.” I e-mailed them back and quoted from Kirch’s Handbook of Publishing Law, Second Edition, where the author explains the fair use doctrine, and specifically when copying a copyrighted work is permitted:
“What was the author’s purpose in copying a portion of the copyrighted work? The fair use statute itself approves such use for purposes of ‘criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching . . . , scholarship, or research.'”
My purpose in posting images of their smile galleries was to critique them – they’re all the same. It’s essential to making the point to post the actual galleries. So I’m on pretty firm ground, and those who know me well know that I am not easily intimidated, when I believe I’m in the right.
But anyway, their initial explanation sounded reasonable. So why, if that’s what they’re really doing, did they delete the explanation? To me, it seems like they are uncomfortable with their practice of posting stock smile galleries and I’m wondering if their initial response was maybe not true, and that’s why they didn’t post it. We won’t know, because now they’ve become silent.
What I know is what I see, and that is that every Prosites dental website I have seen that has a smile gallery posts photos of the same cases.
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