Does anyone know. who owns the copyright to image
607387712 of Marilyn Monroe on Gettyimages.com. Evidently Getty doesn’t.
It seems that Getty has the rights to license the image for “Standard Editorial Rights,” but that does not include commercial use rights or print cover rights. Evidently it also doesn’t include the right to license a use for wall décor because Getty will not license the image for that purpose.
One presumes that if Getty licenses the image for an editorial use they just keep all the money, or maybe they pay a share to Visual China Group (VCG) who acquired Corbis.
The credit line on the photo is “Frank Povolny/Twentieth Century Fox/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images.” Since Povolny is an unusual name, I was able to determine that there is a Frank Povolny who lives in New South Wales, Australia, but from looking at the family picture on is Facebook page I suspect he is not the person who took the Monroe picture in the 1950s.
Getty got the image from Corbis after its acquisition by VCG. It seems highly unlikely that any information about how Corbis got the image, or the rights that were granted, were passed along to VCG. Presumably, Corbis got the image from Twentieth Century Fox. Given that the picture was taken before the change in the 1976 copyright law, the copyright probably belongs to Twentieth Century Fox, not the photographer. However, it is probably impossible to find anyone at Fox who knows if they still own any rights to the image, or what rights they granted to Corbis.
One wonders how many other images there are in the Getty collection where the ownership cannot be traced.
Marshall Retail Group (MRG) would like to use this picture of Monroe for wall décor. MRG is America’s largest, independent specialty retailer in the casino-resort and airport marketplace, but they can’t license use of the image because they can’t determine who to pay. For 60 years, MRG has provided clients with a portfolio of attractive, successful brands that turn pedestrians into window shoppers, window shoppers into buyers, and buyers into loyal, repeat customers. The premiere retail development company currently operates more than 160 stores across the United States and Canada.