<p>I shoot for a Nightclub. I am a W9 independent photographer. They pay me a nominal fee to take photos for their marketing.. IE: Face Book & Web Site. I have no written contract with them. My question is, who owns the photos? All of my photos specifically list in the meta data that they are copyrighted with my Business name. A recent problem I just ran into is that my last shot their was someone famous that came to the club. I got a couple shots of this person and one of them was a $$$ shot so to speak. The club owners immediately sent the photo out to a bunch of popular media outlets for the big story. I was unaware of this and was approached (Called/Emailed) by 3-4 different large magazines asking me for a release/License grant for use for a reasonable fe that they were offering to pay because they saw that I was the photographer that took the shots. As I was on the phone with Us Weekly Magazine and one of their editors in the process of sending him over the files with my W9 and invoice for payment one of my photos (The one they specifically wanted to run) showed up on E's website and it was circulating in minutes on TV and every other celebrity news outlet on line.. So obviously this ruined my chance to sell the License as they didn't want it now. I contacted the club and asked them nicely to stop distributing the photo all over the place that they were causing me to lose out of a nice pay day. The owner of the club called me and was not very nice. Stating that I shoot at their club and that they OWN each and every photo case closed! If someone knows how the law works please advise me.</p> <p>Thank you, Dale</p>