Image on Book Cover without copyright notice

[LesPalenik]

Found on Amazon one of my images on a cover of a small travel book that has been published both as paperback and Kindle ebook.
The cover contains the book title, my image, and smack under the image is the writer's name. As it is customary on Amazon, you can display the "Look Inside The Book" section that shows the book cover in full size (in this case without any copyright notice).
 
Here is the link to the book:
http://www.amazon.com/Moon-Spotlight-Georgian-Cottage-Country-ebook/dp/B00AUZSA0W/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1392449770&sr=1-1&keywords=georgian+bay#reader_B00AUZSA0W

The same image was published last year also in Ontario Travel Guide 2013, and they did include both name of the stock agency and my name in the left bottom corner.
 
http://canadatravelguide.advanced-pub.com/Vizion5/viewer.aspx?issueID=1&pageID=112

Coincidentally, the same scenery is displayed also in panoramic format as the top image on my blogsite, so the image has been around:
http://www.advantica.wordpress.com


Short of buying the book, I don't know if the image acknowledgment / copyright notice is included inside the book or not, but that particular book cover design would imply that the image was created by the person whose name is underneath the image. Is it legal not to include imagemaker's name and copyright notice on the cover? (maybe not so important in a traditional paperback book that would include such information inside the book, but it's a different story to present a digital publication without the option to peek inside the book).

[Ellis Vener]

"Short of buying the book, I don't know if the image acknowledgment / copyright notice is included inside the book or not, but that particular book cover design would imply that the image was created by the person whose name is underneath the image."

If it is the only name on the book cover, as a buyer I assume that is the author's name. I have had several photos published as book covers for different authors and publishers and I've never been credited on the cover.

[petermfiore]

Usually on the back cover the credit is given to either the artist/illustrator and or photographer. Sometimes on the Copyright page.

Peter

[Justinr]

If it was a legitimate sale through an agency then I'd just take the money and get on with the next photo. It sounds a bad thing to say but I doubt that anyone will care who took the photo to be honest, it's a commodity game nowdays.

Which agency was it BTW? I've been looking at Alamy but they don't give a hoot for image quality above and beyond dust on the lens and file size.

[LesPalenik]

Thank you all for your helpful comments.
I bit the bullet and bought the Kindle version of the book, so I could see also the inside pages.
Well, there was a credit notice for the image at the last page of the book, attributed to myself and Dreamstime, the selling stock agency.

However,  my initial problem was that the image on the cover was displayed without the credit notice, and all Amazon visitors can see only that page, not the page with credits inside the book. Such is obviously the nature and disadvantage of the digital implementation and presentation of the ebook that was never an issue with the physical paperback.

[kaelaria]

Unless it's a photo book about the photographer - no one cares who took the image.

[MarkM]

Is it legal not to include imagemaker's name and copyright notice on the cover? (maybe not so important in a traditional paperback book that would include such information inside the book, but it's a different story to present a digital publication without the option to peek inside the book).

The law has nothing to say about attribution, let alone specific placement on book covers. Copyright allows you to control how your images are published and enter into whatever kind of legal contracts you wish in order to extract value from them. You likely signed an agreement allowing your agency to deal on your behalf and they didn't specify that the image should be credited on the cover. That's not surprising because that kind of credit would be unusual on the cover of a travel book.

If you feel you need to have the credit, you are free to demand this from anyone who wants to license your images, although I imagine it will be met with a response that is less than one might hope.

[Colorado David]

Well Amazon is likely to start suggesting these guidebooks to me now since I've clicked your link twice.   I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think I might know why you are concerned.  I agree that they are within the law, but the image is now on the internet and unattributed.  Are you afraid that image is in danger of becoming an orphaned work?  That would be my fear.  Yes it is small enough, but stranger things have happened.  There's probably nothing you can do about it now except to be diligent about watching for unauthorized use.

[LesPalenik]

I think I might know why you are concerned.  I agree that they are within the law, but the image is now on the internet and unattributed.  Are you afraid that image is in danger of becoming an orphaned work?  That would be my fear.  Yes it is small enough, but stranger things have happened.  There's probably nothing you can do about it now except to be diligent about watching for unauthorized use

I'm not so concerned about it now, after I found out that the image has been purchased legally and also as you say, the primary image is quite small.

However, the interesting and relatively new phenomenon is that once an image is incorporated into another picture without a credit to the original author and placed on Internet, it becomes a new image, and can indeed become orphaned, and distributed widely without any reference to the original imagemaker.
 

[Phil Indeblanc]

I'm happy to say that I've only heard of this from others with no first hand experience, but....
 I think there is an 85% rule(image altered more that 15% can be considered original).

[MarkM]

I'm happy to say that I've only heard of this from others with no first hand experience, but....
 I think there is an 85% rule(image altered more that 15% can be considered original).

This really doesn't make any sense. It sounds very precise to talk about percentages of change, but it doesn't really mean anything because you can't quantify a change to an image. If I crop 15% off the image is that a 15% change? If I desaturate a color image, what percentage change is that? Can I get away with only desaturating 15% of the pixels?  See what I mean?

If this is a rule in any legal sense, we should expect to find it codified either in statute, common law, or in legal precedent, but I doubt you'll find it.