Selling Photographs Of Zoo Animals That Look Like Wild Ones

[britishnature]

If you offer for sale an image or video footage of an animal and that image or footage is shot in such a way as to deliberately hide the fact that it was photographed in captivity and there is no accompanying description to prevent the buyer from assuming it is a wild animal in a wild setting, is the law being broken?

I was thinking of Fraudulent Representation (knowingly deceiving the buyer) and Description of Goods and Services.

[bednobs]

it would seem unlikely. After all picture of an elephant is just (unspokenly) saying "this is a picture of an elephant"
not "this is a picture of n elephant taken in the african savannah of an elephant who was having a great tme, while the photogrpher was hiding in a box"

[woofgang]

How can you tell what was deliberately done? Or did you do it? I saw in TV a film about filming small British wildlife and many of the shots were achieved by using captive animals or, in the case of pondlife, by temporarily housing the filmstars in tanks.

[Peter Pedant]

It depends on the facts and the statements used.

If you flogged photie as "cat in a box" - then no
but then if you photographed a dog and sold it as 'Cat in a box'
I am not sure if it is fraudulent misrepresentation

It would be misrepresentation under the little used Misrepresentation Act 1967 and would almost always allow you to roll back the contract

now here - an unexpected example - but this is the Law thread
and all sorts of incred things happen here....

Here we have the BMJ ( yeah British Medical Journal ) doing exactly the same thing

http://www.bmj.com/content/suppl/2005/04/22/330.7497.916.DC1

somewhat unrepentantly I recall
This was subject of a complaint and I contacted in real time the complainer and asked how on earth he detected the piccie had been 'doctored' ( pun intended ) and he replied that if you are a photographer it was easy

in the van zelsen case there was sunlight from two different directions

No court case tho
I would have thought that was legal overkill to be honest

[campbellking]

My friend and I went travelling around the States, involving visiting many National Parks. We soon realised that the postcards for sale at each gift shop involved the same bear stuck up the same tree, all with different captions underneath (i.e. Yosemite National Park, Shenandoah). Maybe we should have discussed fraudulent representation with them!

[Ellipsis]

> is the law being broken?

No. If a photographer takes a photo of a lion in a zoo, they probably want that photo to be usable is as many contexts for "lion" as possible, rather than just the "lion in zoo" context which would be rather limiting. So they wouldn't be "deliberately hiding" anything, they'd simply be taking a photo with the widest commercial range.

If they claimed in the description (or some other way, e.g. by making the photo available on a website that only offered photos that were taken in the wild) that the photo was taken in the wild, when it was actually taken in captivity, that would be a different matter. In the absence of such a claim, though, it's up to you what you make of the photo.