In a letter to its contributors, Corbis has disclosed it will be seeking liquidation of the Sygma business entity in France. The company acquired Sygma in 1999 and has had numerous well-publicized legal and management issues with the former agency’s photographers, staff and assets.
Sygma will soon be handed over to a French tribunal, which will make all following decisions. According to Corbis, the company has been forced into liquidation by very large settlement awards in cases of missing Sygma images—cases that began prior to Corbis’ acquisition of the archive—and still-ongoing legal actions.
The Bill Gates-owned company says it has spent millions in attempting to resolve issues stemming from Sygma’s lax image library management. For example, in 2005, Corbis settled with Sygma photographer Arthur Grace, whose lawsuit alleged that thousands of his images were lost or damaged. At the time, Corbis executives admitted to poor inventory practices and chose to settle the matter.
Corbis also spent close to $20 million on the Sygma Access and Preservation Initiative. The preservation initiative began in 2004. Since then, Corbis archivists reorganized the collection to reclassify it by photographer and opened an 8,600-square-foot temperature and humidity-controlled facility near Paris to house 50 million negatives, prints, transparencies and contact prints. Corbis intends to continue maintaining the facility.
As part of the preservation initiative, Corbis also worked to negotiate agreements with more than 10,000 Sygma contributors. Corbis says that most of these photographers have signed on to have their archival Sygma images distributed by Corbis—which means that the vast majority of the images in the Sygma collection will remain available at corbisimages.com after the liquidation of the business entity.
“We would like to reassure you that this affects only a very small part of the Corbis business and is an isolated situation, specific to one of our French business entities.
Please note that this will not affect your representation agreements with Corbis Corporation or any other Corbis business entities outside of France,” reads the letter from the Corbis contributor relations team, which invites further inquiries by email.
So what does this mean? Sygma images remain available, largely through Corbis—and when not, through the original photographers’ collections, distributors and estates. The hard-copy materials have been preserved for posterity in the Sygma Access and Preservation Facility, which appears to be a separate business entity not subject to the liquidation proceedings. It seems that the only thing that changes is that the business carrying the Sygma name will no longer exist, and Corbis can eliminate the drain of Sygma’s $92-million debt on the rest of the company’s operations. In short, those owed by the Sygma business entity are highly unlikely to collect on those debts—as is the case with any bankruptcy proceeding.
Paul Melcher offers additional insight gleaned from French-language press coverage.