Honest Sharing

This promotion is for all professionals who make their living creatingëren of images: photographers, illustrators, artists, designers. The work of these professionals is often shared on social media without permission.

The Image Rights Federation is a partnership between Pictoright and seven professional organizations representing the interests of designers, illustrators, photographers, photojournalists and visual artists. Within the federation, they work together to improve the copyright position of creators. An important part of this is that image creators can grow with all technological developments in the exploitation of their work. This includes control over the distribution of their work on (social media) platforms. On these platforms, large amounts of copyrighted images are shared daily. Previously, there was no law regulating this. This allowed these platforms to earn money for years with, among other things, advertising revenue, while a lot of material - from image makers, among others - was put online without permission and corresponding remuneration. This is called the "value gap.

That image makers can grow with all technological developments in the exploitation of their work

To close this "gap," legislation has been developed at the European level. Since 2021, the Copyright Act has briefly provided that social media platforms are responsible for the material posted and shared within their platforms. Therefore, platforms must also engage with rights holders of copyrighted material to do their best to obtain permission to distribute this content.

A call to the various platforms to fulfill their legal duty

Pictoright, the copyright organization for image creators, has been trying to enter into negotiations since these regulations were introduced, but without success yet. Therefore, the various organizations that make up the Image Rights Federation are making an appeal to the various platforms to fulfill their legal duty and enter into arrangements with Pictoright. Part of that call is the "Fair sharing social media!" campaign. Anyone can download images via the Federation of Image Rights website to share on their own social media to spread the call for fair sharing even wider.

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