Quote Originally Posted by masdog
Alright, folks. Get your thinking caps out. I have a rather tough question for you.

Every year, my Fraternity puts on a Halloween Fest for the children in the local community that benefits the Arthritis Foundation. This year, our advisor, who works for Telemundo in Milwaukee, has managed to get us commercial ad space on CBS.

We need to put an ad together, and they want to use some photos that I shot at the event over the last two years. I have no problem with using the images in the commercial, but do I need model waiver releases to use these pictures? Many contain children in them while at the event, but I am worried I do not have the rights to put the photo on TV.
A few important questions. Was it a public event? Was everyone aware by sign or otherwise that it benefitted the Arthritis Foundation? Were these basically group photos of more than one child at a time or did you center in very closely on a single individual?

The television station would likely have gone with these photos without releases given the nature of the event. The law revolves around reasonable expectations. At a public event there is no reasonable expectation of privacy and given the nature of this particular event there was a reasonable expectation that photos would be taken and used in a news or public relations context related to the Arthritis Foundation. This is also not a model situation either.

Ronnoco