Disney Responds to my Letter

William,

I told you that you would get a response. And I also knew that it would be a patron­iz­ing answer to your com­plaints. Their let­ters to guest com­plaints are always the same. If I were you, I would just for­get about it. Don’t let this one awful expe­ri­ence ruin your desire to shoot great pho­tos in Dis­ney theme parks.

You have already wasted too much time and energy on this. Move on with your life. As my par­ents told me on more than one occasion,“CONSIDER THE SOURCE”. Dis­ney secu­rity cast mem­bers are low paid cast mem­bers. They are just look­ing for some excite­ment and for some­one to pick on. It’s their job to harass pho­tog­ra­phers because some­body above them told them to do so. They are just car­ry­ing out their orders, but sadly, it seems that they “enjoy” mak­ing a pho­tog­ra­phers life mis­er­able. It is what it is. Please keep shoot­ing beau­ti­ful pic­tures at Dis­ney theme parks. Dis­ney offers a visual par­adise for the photographer’s cam­era. Just take the risk and you will find that most of the time you will be left alone. Trust me on this. I have been shoot­ing pro­fes­sion­ally at Walt Dis­ney World and Dis­ney­land for over 23 years an count­ing. If I ever get harassed by Dis­ney secu­rity, I some­times play dumb. If that doesn’t work, I will get tough with them. I am usu­ally shoot­ing for them, have cre­den­tials with me say­ing so, and Dis­ney secu­rity still won’t let up. It can be aggra­vat­ing at times, but it is what it is. In con­clu­sion, LET IT GO MAN!!!

Yeah, this seems like a canned let­ter that they send out to any­one who has a com­plaint. What a load of mess. I still think we should orga­nize a huge photo walk to take place at dif­fer­ent places around Dis­ney simul­ta­ne­ously so as to make their secu­rity man­agers heart pop.

As a pre­vi­ous post men­tioned, it’s their prop­erty and they make the rules. Unfor­tu­nately, just like TSA at the air­port, each agent enforc­ing those rules also uses their own dis­cre­tion and that can vary widely from one agent to the next. I would have liked to see a more “situation-​specific” let­ter from Dis­ney, had I been you, but it is what it is, I guess. Sorry it ruined your experience.

And if I come to your house, you DO have the “right” to ask to see my ID. And I have the “right” to tell you no at which point you can tell me to high-​tail it off your property.

One more thing to keep in mind, is that Dis­ney prop­erty is not only pri­vate prop­erty. But they actu­ally incor­po­rated it into the Reddy Creek Improve­ment Dis­trict. They have their own gov­ern­men­tal juris­dic­tion. So the secu­rity there is not just pri­vate security!

The secu­rity per­son­nel involved here appear to have over­re­acted but the same can be said of you as well. It’s Disney’s prop­erty, they make the rules. If you dont want to abide by those rules (in this case pro­duc­ing some ID and answer­ing some ques­tions), your choices are sim­ple, either leave or esca­late it up the chain of management.

Per­son­ally I would have asked the secu­rity per­son­nel involved to accom­pany you to guest ser­vices to work things out. You’d be out some time but the sit­u­a­tion could have been smoothed over much more effec­tively. Instead you made a big deal out of it and now it’s the rest of us who may may pay for it.

Think of it this way, when these secu­rity per­son­nel, and per­haps oth­ers who are briefed about your alter­ca­tion, encounter a pho­tog­ra­pher, par­tic­u­larly one with a tri­pod, they may get has­sled because of this. Thanks a lot.

Here is what you said in your ini­tial post.

“Don tells me that if I don’t pro­vide him with more iden­ti­fi­ca­tion that he’s going to call the Orange County Sheriff’s Office.”

They have that right. And you have the right to not show it. But when you don’t they can then have you removed. I didn’t say they did ask you to leave, I said they have the right to ask.

As for the right of them to ask you not to pho­tog­ra­phy their build­ing see this:

Copy­right pro­tec­tion also extends to archi­tec­tural works, specif­i­cally for archi­tec­tural works cre­ated after March 1, 1989. How­ever copy­right pro­tec­tion also has lim­i­ta­tions. A release is not needed to pho­to­graph a build­ing or prop­erty vis­i­ble from a pub­lic place. How­ever, per­mis­sion is needed to pho­to­graph and repro­duce images of a build­ing pro­tected by copy­right and not vis­i­ble from a pub­lic place. Enter­ing pri­vate prop­erty to pho­to­graph a build­ing or related pri­vate prop­erty may also trig­ger a claim of tres­pass. To avoid such claims, pho­tog­ra­phers, pub­lish­ers and film­mak­ers use a prop­erty release, some­times known as a loca­tion release.

http://​fairuse​.stan​ford​.edu/​C​o​p​y​r​i​g​h​t​_​a​n​d​_​F​a​i​r​_​U​s​e​_​O​v​e​r​v​i​e​w​/​c​h​a​p​t​e​r​1​2​/​1​2​-​d​.​h​tml

No that isn’t why it is pro­hib­ited to smoke in Florida. The law states all work­places, not pub­lic places!

http://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​L​i​s​t​_​o​f​_​s​m​o​k​i​n​g​_​b​a​n​s​_​i​n​_​t​h​e​_​U​n​i​t​e​d​_​S​t​a​t​e​s​#​.​C​2​.​A​0​F​l​o​r​ida

Any­ways, I’ve said what I need to say. You appar­ently don’t get my points, that’s fine.

Hope you return to WDW soon. Be sure to share you pictures.

I’ll be back in Decem­ber. And I’ve got it on my photo list to grab an HDR of the House of Blues. Be sure to sub­scribe to my Flickr stream to see it!

Funny how some peo­ple here are ref­er­enc­ing Disney’s intel­lec­tual prop­erty vs. secu­rity (which any nor­mal human being with a mod­icum of com­mon sense knows is sim­ply another word for cor­po­rate con­trol). Those folks should check out “Free­dom of Expres­sion ©: Overzeal­ous Copy­right Bozos and Other Ene­mies of Cre­ativ­ity”. They might learn some­thing. Dis­ney is a bully. Period. Don’t take that “secu­rity” crap for any­thing else (I’m not lean­ing on the agents here — they’re sim­ply doing what they’ve been told to do if they want to keep their job). As long as they’re at it, what about spy glasses, micro­phones, lit­tle old ladies with false bras? Stop the para­noia and start look­ing at your dwin­dling rights. Dis­ney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you. You go there, you’re pay­ing them. Tough!

I still can’t believe our bizarre expe­ri­ence at Epcot. We were there last week with a group of 11 extended fam­ily mem­bers. We were try­ing to have that “mak­ing mem­o­ries” moment for our kids at the large mon­e­tary cost of a 5 day, four park visit. We were in Epcot under 2 hours when my hus­band wanted my son to wait on line to have his pic­ture taken with a char­ac­ter. As my son stood on line with my brother, my hus­band and I stood in front of the char­ac­ter to take the photo of our son. As my son smiled at us, we took a pic­ture, and the character’s han­dler jumped in front of us, blocked us from tak­ing a pic­ture, pushed my husband’s cam­era into his chest, stood guard between us and our son, and shouted, “Stop! This is not your child!” She fran­ti­cally waved her hand in front of my husband’s face almost knock­ing off his glasses. My poor son stood there in shock. I said,” This is our son.” She said, “No it isn’t, you were not in line with him!” I said, “He was in line with his Uncle and his cousins!” After that, a team of secu­rity peo­ple fol­lowed us, mak­ing every­one very uncom­fort­able. My hus­band was so upset, he wanted to com­plain to some­one in charge, so he went back to the entrance to talk to a secu­rity per­son and was sur­rounded and inter­ro­gated by 12 secu­rity peo­ple and was asked to leave the park for the day!!! This was his first day at the park with his son! He refused to come back to any of the Dis­ney parks after that. Dis­ney ruined our fam­ily vaca­tion, and stole all the magic out of what was a life­time of mem­o­ries for me and poten­tially for my son. It also strained our mar­riage because he didn’t want to give one dime to DIs­ney after that. We all had night­mares about this tragic day for about five days. We are still in dis­be­lief! They humil­i­ated us in pub­lic and embar­rassed us in front of other fam­ily mem­bers and strained our mar­riage. Now that’s some pow­er­ful magic! Not the good kind. All she needed to say was, “Ma’am is this your son?” All would have been oh so different.