Less Orange Online After Syracuse Demands Sports Images Be Pulled

Two newspaper photographers yanked their images of Syracuse University sports games from a popular photojournalism web site after officials from the university's athletic department threatened to revoke their press credentials.

Syracuse graduate student Kirk Irwin, who shoots for the independent student newspaper The Daily Orange, and Niko Kallianiotis, a staff photographer at The Watertown Daily Times, each deleted their Syracuse photos from their online portfolios at SportsShooter.com.

The university threatened to revoke the sideline passes issued to the photographers' newspapers on the grounds that the images were being used commercially.

The action sparked enough concern that representatives from the athletic department held a meeting this morning with Daily Orange student journalists and faculty from the university's Newhouse School of Public Communications.

The meeting lasted a little over an hour and was civil, according to people there. Though no resolution was reached, the university will investigate whether the web postings are actually a commercial use of the images.

"I believe they don't fully understand what it [SportsShooter.com] is," Irwin says. "They are much more concerned that this is a commercial site."

The university has no copyright control over the images, and thus no legal grounds to tell photographers how to use an image in an editorial context.

The university's athletic communications director, Sue Edson, says the athletic department has two concerns: First, it is worried about that the SportsShooter portfolios are a commercial use of Syracuse athlete's images, a violation of NCAA rules that could render a student athlete ineligible to play.

Second, the athletic department has had to field complaints from freelance photographers who see the photos on SportsShooter and want credentials for themselves. Due to limited space at the Carrier Dome - the stadium where Syracuse's football and men's basketball teams play - the university only hands out sideline passes to photographers working for editorial outlets.

Edson says the issue is bigger than just Syracuse University, and hinges on whether SportsShooter, which photographers pay a fee to join, is a business venture. "I don't think there's going to be a cut and dried issue about what is the intent of SportsShooter," she says.

Bob Gorman, the managing editor at The Watertown Daily Times, says Kallianiotis took down his images as soon as he got an e-mail from Syracuse athletics asking him to, then told Gorman about it. Gorman wasn't willing to fight a First Amendment battle on behalf of a web site he had no connection to, he says.

Still, he told the school he thought their policy will be impossible to police. "I didn't believe this was a decision they were going to be able to uphold in the long run," he says.

Syracuse communications faculty members are standing by Irwin, but say they see the athletic department's point.

"The question was asked, is an online portfolio promoting the photographer for trade purposes?" said Tony Golden, chair of the Newhouse School's photography department, who was in the meeting this morning.

Many would argue that it is not.

"I think [Irwin] has the right to turn around and post his photos back on SportsShooter," says Harry DiOrio, a regional director of the National Press Photographers Association and himself a Syracuse alum. DiOrio has worked as a photo editor for The Daily Orange and as a photographer the Syracuse athletic department.

"We checked in with other photo schools to see how they handled this, and they've never heard of this, it's never been a problem," DiOrio says.

Daily Orange sports editor Tim Gorman (no relation to Bob Gorman), says the Orange also called around to other schools and found no one who had the same problem.

"I'm not sure why this is a problem here in Syracuse and not in the rest of the country," he says, adding that he hopes Irwin will be able to restore his photographs online.

Still, the threat of having the athletic department revoke their press credentials hangs over the Orange, which has lost credentials in the past, Tim Gorman says.

"Every year it's something different, we have a different clash with athletic communications," he says.

"They can decide who gets passes or not. That's their right," says Sung Park, a former newspaper photographer and one of the communications professors who sat in on the meeting this morning. Still, Park says he believes an online portfolio is not a commercial use of a photograph or an athlete's likeness.

It practically goes without saying that countless photographers of all stripes use the web to publish portfolios of their best work. SportsShooter itself claims more than 2,600 members, many of whom have posted sports portfolios to show off to potential clients and to invite critiques from other photographers.

One concern that came up in the meeting is SportsShooter's terms of use, which say SportsShooter can use images its members upload to promote the site, including in a brochure.

One sentence in the terms says, "In connection with the operation and promotion of the Site, you agree that SS has the right to copy, cache, modify, publish, display, distribute, translate, create derivative works from, and store the Posted Content, regardless of the medium, technology, or form in which it is used."

SportsShooter executive producer Grover Sanschagrin says that copy is there to protect SportsShooter's legal interests, and that the web site makes no copyright claims on the images its members upload to the site.

"There is language in there that says we have the right to promote," Sanschagrin says, such as when SportsShooter highlights photographers' images on the front page of the web site. "Any usage we would ever make would be to promote the photographer," he adds.

Related Links

• Kirk Irwin on SportsShooter


• Niko Kallianiotis on SportsShooter