Wondered if anyone had any advice to offer please. I'm being threatened with legal action over a "Calendar Girls" style horse riding calendar I am creating for charity.
We borrowed a horse from a stables in North Yorkshire to do a shoot for the calendar. The stables (unbeknown to me at the time) gave us one of their customers horses for an hour, after asking the owners permission to do so of course.
Almost twelve months on and the girl who owns the horse has just emailed me telling me not to use any of the photographs and to remove all photographs with her horse on from the website, Facebook, and the calendar, or she will take legal action against me! She's also been posting threatening messages on our facebook pages.
The calendar is being printed right now. All proceeds are going to Multiple Sclerosis and Leukodystrophy research.
What to do? There is no law that I know of saying you can't take photographs of animals, unless they are on the owners own private property, in which case you need the owners permission, but these were taken on land owned by the stables and anyway, she did give her permission in the first place, though it has turned out that she wasn't told of the nature of the shoot.
The photos are at
www.hottotrot.org/jessejames.htm
andy