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A row has broken out over restrictions imposed on how newspapers, magazines, TV broadcasters and digital publishers can use pictures taken at Oasis reunion gigs, as the band prepare to play the first night of what is expected to be the most profitable tour in UK history.
Photo agencies and publishers have been told they can use shots of the first concert, which takes place in Cardiff on Friday, for one year and then the rights revert back to the band and management.
The industry norm is that such deals for independent photographers from agencies are struck in perpetuity, so publishers can continue to use shots for pieces such as band retrospectives, tributes and to illustrate future concerts.
The News Media Coalition (NMC) – which represents national newspaper groups including Guardian News & Media, the Telegraph, the Sun and Times publisher News UK and the Mirror and Express owner Reach – has lodged a complaint after 11th-hour negotiations failed to sufficiently improve the terms.
The NMC also represents agencies including Thomson Reuters, Associated Press, PA, Shutterstock, Getty Images, France’s AFP and Spain’s EFE.
“News photography has had a significant role in amplifying interest and telling the visual cultural story of artists such as Oasis, it’s part of the legacy,” said Andrew Moger, the chief executive of the NMC. “And that does not stop after 365 days.”
It is understood that the initial terms proposed were for the right to use images for just one month.
While the one-year permission deal has been agreed for the first gig, the NMC is pushing for better terms for the remaining 40 dates.
It has written on behalf of news agencies and its news publisher members to Oasis’s management about the restrictions imposed.
“Oasis Live 25 will attract editorial coverage throughout the 41-date tour and for years to come,” Moger said. “We invite the concert organisers to withdraw the ‘shelf-life’ of such newsworthy material and not to diminish the copyright work of photographers who are in their own way artists too.”
The NMC said that the “highly unusual” restrictions would hit independent news agencies in the UK and abroad, as well as publishers and broadcasters who use stills to illustrate editorial reports.
The row is the latest issue to beset the highly anticipated tour, which brings brothers Noel and Liam back together for the first time in 16 years.
Earlier this week, it emerged that the UK competition watchdog had written to Ticketmaster threatening legal action over the way it sold more than 900,000 tickets for the reunion gigs.
In March, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published concerns that Ticketmaster may have misled fans in the way it priced tickets for the band’s comeback gigs when they went on sale last August. Some fans paid more than £350 for tickets with a face value of £150.
The watchdog said that since then Ticketmaster had failed to provide any undertakings that it found acceptable to resolve the issue of the way it sold the tickets.
The CMA is concerned that the ticketing company may have breached consumer protection law by labelling certain seats as “platinum” and selling them for almost 2.5 times the price of standard equivalent tickets, without sufficiently explaining that they did not offer any additional benefits and were often located in the same area of a stadium as standard tickets.
The regulator also said fans were not informed that there were two categories of standing tickets at different prices, with many waiting lengthy periods in online queues without understanding they would be paying much higher prices than they expected.
Oasis was approached for comment.
