"Will Leibovitz Lose Photo Rights?"

[GoCubsGo]

This interests me quite a bit and I just heard it on NPR.
Come next month if Annie Leibovitz cannot somehow repay $24m she may lose the rights to her work.

August 4, 2009
A New York-based company that loaned $24 million to photographer Annie Leibovitz is now suing her, claiming she has failed to pay the associated fees.

Adding to Leibovitz's financial woes is the fact that those loans come due next month. If she doesn't pay, the photographer known for such famous images as a naked, pregnant Demi Moore and a nude John Lennon curled around Yoko Ono may lose the rights to her photographs.

Leibovitz is well-paid, says Allen Salkin, who has written about the photographer's troubles for The New York Times. "She has a contract with Vanity Fair that's worth supposedly tens of millions of dollars during the course of her lifetime."

So how could she end up in so much debt?

Salkin says it's unclear how exactly Leibovitz ran up her expenses. "What we do know is that she was running a studio in New York City that it seemed like the expenses got out of control. She then sold that studio and she bought three townhouses in Greenwich Village," he says.

Leibovitz started out with two townhouses, Salkin says, but when an expensive renovation caused a neighboring townhouse to become structurally unsound and she was sued, she bought that one, too.

"At the same time as all this was happening," he notes, "she had a lot of tumult in her personal life. She added two children to her family; her longtime partner, Susan Sontag, who's a writer, died; her mother and her father also died — all this in the last five years."

Last year, Leibovitz went to Art Capital Group — which Salkin describes as "basically a high-end pawn shop" — for a loan. "Anybody can go to them with their artworks — their Cezannes, Picassos — and get a loan against them, up to 40 percent of the appraised value," he says.

For collateral, Leibovitz put up her real estate — and the rights to all her photographs, Salkin says.

"She has risked something worth quite a lot of money — her entire artistic legacy — in order to get a loan," he says.

And that loan — for $24 million plus interest and fees — comes due on Sept. 8.

"This was a one-year loan in which it was assumed, Art Capital says, that she would have to sell her archive within a year in order to pay down the loan, and that she had agreed for them to be the seller," Salkin says. "So, unless she can come up with $24 million, according to the documents in the lawsuit, she is going to be in default of a very expensive loan."

It's still possible for a buyer to swoop in and offer, say, $50 million for the archive, Salkin says, enabling Leibovitz to pay back the loan, but, in that case, too, "she won't own her photographs anymore."

Article Link

 

[Plymouthbreezer]

Ouch.

As a person who replies on my creative works to partially pay the bills, I would never be this risky with the rights to my work.

I think she has a small ego problem, and this might have lead to an overinflated idea of her self worth.

Nonetheless, I hope for her sake, and the entire community she's impacted, that there's a good resolution to this.

 

[taylorwilsdon]

I immensely respect her work as a photographer, but I think she needs to take a serious look at her life if she's (a) borrowing 25 million dollars in the first place, and (b) can't pay it back now.

 

[Abraxsis]

To be honest, this might just be an intelligent move on Annie's part. Think about it, she is getting older and when she dies she will continue to be one of the most influential photographers of the 20th Century. Regardless of who owns the rights of the works. Look at the Beatles catalog, until a few years ago it was owned by Michael Jackson, but that didn't hurt Ringo/Paul/Yoko/George because their fame made them plenty of money. Same with Annie, she pockets 25 millions bucks, which she sets up in an "in perpetuity" trust fund and her kids, and her kid's kids are set for life. Annie walks away and continues shooting, making new pictures which she will have the rights for.

Also, per the article the Art "loanshark" only lends up to 40% of the value, which means if they do Auction off her works any proceeds beyond 25 million and some change would go into Annie's pocket. That is of course barring any weird contractual limits. It's basically like a home loan, when you default the bank sells the property, anything over what you owe them comes to you in a check.

In the long run, it is sometimes better to use what you got in hand, than waiting for something that might happen. She took 25 mil in a lump sum ... so what, it's not like they bought her rights to shoot new images. She still has god only knows how many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars worth of equipment, her talent, and her name (which can sometimes go further than talent so it seems). Maybe she knows this and laughed all the way to the bank ...