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.