Anonymised, illustrative composite. A seller switched brokerages after a listing expired unsold. The new agent, working to a tight launch date, saved the old listing's photo set and used it for the relaunch.
At a glance
A condo seller left one brokerage for another after a listing sat unsold for six months. The new agent, working to get the relisting live before a weekend open-house window, pulled nine photos straight off the expired MLS record rather than commissioning a new shoot — the unit hadn't changed, and the photos still looked current.
The brokerage's own advertising still had to carry its own name regardless of whose photos it used: RECO's advertising bulletin requires the brokerage name to be “clearly and prominently identified” in all advertising, which meant the relaunch already had the first brokerage's name cropped out of the photo set — a step that made the reuse harder to spot at a glance, not by design.
The photos had been taken by a freelance photographer the first brokerage hired and paid for directly. Nobody on the second file asked who held the rights to them, because the assumption — common, and wrong — was that a paid-for photo belongs to whoever paid for it. The photographer's standard contract with the first brokerage did not assign copyright; it licensed use to that brokerage for that listing. When the images turned up under a different agent's name at a different brokerage, the photographer sent a cease-and-desist within the week, attaching the original invoice and a screenshot of both listings side by side. The photographer found the reuse the ordinary way freelance photographers watch for it now — a routine reverse-image search on their own portfolio, run periodically across every listing site, not a special investigation triggered by this file.
The photographer's original invoice for the shoot — the first brokerage's cost, not the second agent's — was $340 for the full set. That figure is a fact about this file, not a market rate for real estate photography generally, and it is not the number that mattered here: the second agent had paid nothing for the images and had no licence to use them at all. Re-shooting the unit for the relaunch, on a rushed one-day turnaround instead of the photographer's normal week-out booking window, cost roughly 60% more than the original invoice — the price of urgency, not of the photography itself.
Copyright in a photograph belongs to the person who created it, by default, in Canada — not to whoever commissioned or paid for the shoot. Treadstone's own guidance on this for small businesses is direct: “if the work was created by a contractor or agency, check whether your contract actually assigned copyright to you” — ownership turns on what the contract actually says, and silence defaults to the creator keeping it. The first brokerage's licence from the photographer covered its own use of the images for that listing. It said nothing about a different brokerage's right to reuse them for an unrelated relisting, because that brokerage was never a party to it. A seller changing brokerages does not carry a photo licence along with them; the licence belongs to the two businesses that signed it, not to the property. Canada's Copyright Act sets the default nobody on this file checked: the author of a work is its first owner of copyright, by default (s.13(1)), and any assignment of that copyright — even to whoever paid for the shoot — is valid only if it is in writing and signed by the photographer (s.13(4)). A verbal understanding that a paid-for photo belongs to whoever commissioned it does not clear that bar, on this file or any other.
The second agent's brokerage pulled the photos within a day of the cease-and-desist and commissioned a fresh shoot. Remedies for unauthorised use in Canada run from an injunction and damages through to an accounting of the infringer's profits and statutory damages a court can award without detailed proof of loss — but before any of that, the practical first step almost everyone starts with is a cease-and-desist letter, which is exactly what resolved this file. No further action followed once the images came down, and no payment changed hands beyond the cost of the second shoot.
The tell was the assumption itself: the seller paid for those photos, so they're the seller's, and the new agent works for the seller now. None of that connects to copyright ownership. The seller didn't commission the shoot — the first brokerage did, on the seller's behalf, under its own agreement with the photographer, and that agreement is what actually controls who can use the images and where. Before reusing any photo from a prior listing, the safe question is not whether someone paid for this, it's whether there is a licence that covers this use, and if that answer isn't on file, the honest default is to assume no.
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