Gulp!

<p>Those who know me through PN will also know that I have a small number of historic images of David Bowie from 1969 which have been very widely reproduced. From time to time I carry out a web search to see where these pictures have wound up, particularly the best-known one of him in a flowered shirt on a bandstand in Beckenham UK. I have just done a Google image search for this image which has turned up 25,270,000,000 results (yes folks, that's 25.27 BILLION). Try as I will, I cannot help thinking that if every user had paid just 1 cent royalty, I would have received $252.7 million dollars. Or to put it another way, it puts me right up there with Bill Gates in having given hundreds of millions of dollars to charity. Isn't life strange? :-) </p><div></div>

Maybe you've answered this before but why

haven't you been paid? Not by random Bowie

fans maybe but there must be some should-

be paying used among that.

<p>Craig, I HAVE received numerous fees for the use of this material, maybe $4000 - 5000 over the years. At the same time. I have allowed a charity which is trying to restore the bandstand free use of the pictures and at various times full-size files without watermarks have been sent out in press packs by various galleries - God knows where they ended up. I'm not really crying in my beer about how I've been ripped off (although I have - I have just fired an agent who bilked me out of £640 in fees while on his way to total debts of £380,000 and bankruptcy). I am sure the vast majority of the people who have posted my pix on the web are fans, bloggers and other not-for-profit folks - I was merely astonished at the sheer number of times my pix have been used, one way or another. 25.27 BILLION? - try as I will, I can't get my mind round this number!</p>