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Photographer sues EMI over lost Blur snaps
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 4 October 2010
You see, this couldn’t happen these days, not since Terra Firma sacked all the cleaners so that there’s so much rubbish and dust in EMI HQ, if Citigroup do send round the bailiffs next summer they won’t be able to get in.
But once upon a time the London-based music major did have cleaning staff, albeit ones contracted from a cleaning firm, and sometimes said cleaners liked to bin valuable negatives that the record company was meant to be taking care of on behalf of leading pop photographers.
Well, that happened at least once. Pop photographer Paul Postle is suing EMI Records for failing to take good care of £170,000 worth of film and prints, mainly photos of Blur, and for failing to alert him to the fact said pictures had been lost.
According to the Telegraph, Postle owned the copyrights in the prints, but agreed that EMI should store them for easier access. The photos were then among others destroyed when three boxes of materials were put aside by an EMI archivist to be sent to a storage unit, but were actually thrown into a rubbish crusher and sent to the tip by mistake.
EMI claims that its staff member had clearly labelled the archived photos as not being rubbish to throw away, but that cleaners ignored the notice.
The pictures were apparently destroyed in 2001, but Postle only became aware of the loss when he was contacted by EMI lawyers in 2007 who had finally got round to suing the cleaning contractors and were trying to put a price on the Blur shots.
Under the so called statute of limitations, negligence claims must be made within six years of loss, meaning that EMI was suing at the last possible moment, and there wasn’t time for the photographer himself to take action against the cleaning firm directly.
I’m not sure what happened to the EMI litigation, it may be ongoing, but according to the Telegraph, Postle is now suing EMI itself over the lost photos. The major has not yet commented on the new lawsuit.
For legal reasons, we must stress Terra Firma have not sacked all the cleaners so that there’s so much rubbish and dust in EMI HQ, if Citigroup do send round the bailiffs next summer they won’t be able to get in. In fact we made that up. Though now we’ve put the idea out there, look out for that memo.
