Parents use AI to remove school photo watermarks, leaving photographers unpaid

Some parents are using artificial intelligence to remove watermarks from digital previews of school photos and print them without paying, Yle reports. The Finnish School Photography Association says it has heard of individual cases in which images were used without permission.

Photographers do not receive payment from schools or day-care centres for taking the pictures. Their income comes only from images that families choose to buy, said Outi Simström, the association’s vice-chair.

Photographers must prepare for shoots and use professional equipment without knowing how many pictures they will sell. They also carry out several stages of work before preview images are made available to parents, Simström said. Most school photographers in Finland are small-business owners.

Photographs are protected by neighbouring rights for at least 50 years from the end of the year in which they were taken, said Emilia Hodge, an expert in intellectual property rights. Images generally cannot be copied or published without the photographer’s permission. If a photograph qualifies as a work, its protection lasts longer. Contracts with photography studios may also restrict how galleries are used and prints handled, Hodge said.

Simström also warned parents about uploading children’s images to AI services. Images of minors are personal data, and it may be difficult to remove them from an external digital service later. Mikko Säteri, executive director of Finnfoto, an umbrella organisation for Finnish photography associations, said some service providers’ servers are outside the European Union, where rules and terms differ.

Removing watermarks to use photographs without permission is not new, Säteri said, but AI has made it possible to enlarge image files enough to produce prints. Photography businesses are now looking for technical ways to protect and trace images used without permission.

School photography has been a Finnish tradition for 160 years. Säteri said he was concerned about whether photography businesses could survive in the age of AI, while Simström said the tradition was currently doing well.