 Sherry King |
Property release question My husband belongs to a car club whose members frequently have vanity plates (US). We have been to a few car club events and I have collected a number of photographs of these vanity plates. I am considering making a book of the photograph collection. I know that a property release is needed if I, say, photograph your very identifiable house, but what about car license plates? I might be able to track down some of the owners, but probably not all. Could I post the plates on my web site and point the group to the web site to ask for help tracking down the owners? Thank you.
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Mark Feldstein |
Off hand, (and this is really a bad place to be getting legal advice) I'd say "no". There's a reason why DMV restricts access to vehicle registrations and identity of owners. Someone might consture what you're seeking as an invasion of privacy. Besides, how many club members can identify the other members based on license tags versus seeing the entire vehicle. I think you have two readily available alternatives: (1) Contact the car club and see if based upon their membership records, whether or not they'll contact the owners for you and ask them to get in touch with you directly. OR (2) Try asking DMV if they'll cooperate although I'd say that's pretty unlikely unless one of the plate owners left the scene of an accident without identifying themselves. And even then, DMV (at least in California) would contact the owner first and tell them someone has requested their identify based on tag information. The best suggestion I have is wait til the next rallye, find the owners of the particular cars you want to photograph and then ask them for a property release to publish a photo of their car or plates or both. In addition, Sherry, before you go to all the trouble of finding the owners, try finding a publisher interested in doing this kind of a book first. That might save you a lot of time in itself.
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R K Stephenson |
Hi, Sherry, Many states (mine included) will give you the name and address of the plate owner for a small processing fee. (It's $6, here, last time I checked.) Just ask DMV and you may get what you need without too much hassle. Cheers, RK
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Sherry King |
Thank you both for taking the time to answer -- valuable information. I will look into the DMV (didn't think they would supply the information) and little more market research and detective work. Thank you.
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