Textbook Licensing: Where the Clean-up Meets the Cover-Up

Many stock photography professionals remain largely unaware of the widespread and institutionalized practice of copyright infringement that plagues the textbook licensing industry. The dual purpose of this article is to provide a brief introduction to this phenomenon and, in doing so, to help alert photographers, vendors, and other stock photography professionals to the fact that major U.S. textbook publishers have been—and, indeed, still continue to—systematically infringe third-party copyrights in photographs that they use in textbooks and various other materials. We also will explore some of the various factors that allowed this situation to occur and go unnoticed, despite being an industry-wide practice that has given rise to some of the most egregious cases of copyright infringement in recent memory.