My brother has published his memoir.

[Eatingricecrispieswithafork]

So my brother has written and published a book, we're estranged, well I'm estranged from my family, it's a shit show tbh.

Anyway during a Facebook messenger discussion, he told me he was writing his memoir, he's had an interesting life, I don't won't to say more as I'm trying to remain anonymous, anyway I told him to leave me out of it, he said I was only briefly mentioned in he named his 3 siblings. It came out before Xmas and despite telling myself to leave it, I bought it, I was dismayed that he had a few details. Of my childhood and adolescence and it was inaccurate, so I was a bit enjoyed, but was hardly mention3d in his later life ... then I got to the end, the photographs including 2 of me, 1 in particular was incredibly triggering, as it was taken during a very traumatic time for me and he knew that. He never asked my permission and I explicity told him I wanted left out of it. I Think he's either thought i wouldn't care or if I did i wouldn't have the money or the no how on what to do about it if anything, it's left me feeling like the lion cub that's been abandoned for the hyenas, they the family all know I'm autistic and struggletho with a lot of the nuances and aspects of everyday life... I just need some advice, your thoughts and if anyway has any knowledge about publishing laws and privacy. Thank you in advance.

I do not know the law but I agree with the previous comment about the Streisand effect tbh. Especially if the photos in new editions are blurred rather than removed.

I think this is very sound advice.

Like you, I have a dysfunctional family. My childhood was traumatic. Fast forward to now, my sibling is in competition with me about who had it worse. So she would dismiss some of my experience, change some details about my experience.

I am guessing your brother feels like the biggest victim and want to believe that you had it better than him and perhaps that's the reason he has portrayed some details inaccurately and dismisses your traumatic experiences and has published those photos.

Childhood trauma ruins sibling relationships too.

Screenshot the communication with your brother so you can prove what he said to you.

I'd be tempted to write to your brother and say, "Give me the childhood photos I asked for and I won't ask my solicitor to write a letter to your publisher asking for all copies of your book to be recalled and pulped due to the untrue statements you have made about me and the use of my image without my consent."

If he said anything derogatory and untrue about you publicly, it is libel. If the photo was taken in a private place, there needed to be consent or a model release.

Whether it is worth pursuing these courses of action legally is only something you could decide. If you feel strongly about it, see a solicitor but it will cost you. They can write an appropriate letter to the publisher.

I was once looking at a book on the history of children's TV.

Over the entry for Captain Pugwash, a cartoon about pirates, there was a sticker. On it was printed (I can't remember the exact words) a statement saying the information below it was wrong.

Basically, there was a myth that one of the characters had been called Roger The Cabin Boy. As in, a crude joke about paedophilia in a children's cartoon. It was not true - but the book entry had presented it as fact. The makers had made the publishers put a sticker on every copy with the apology and correction.

It is possible to get changes and it's worth a go. You might try speaking to a solicitor (some do free consultations) and asking about your rights.

I Googled 'Solicitor free consultations'

For what it's worth, my mum wrote and published a book which was almost certainly of far more general interest to more people than your brother's silly little memoirs will be to anyone, and it was still a very small print run and I don't think it has been read by very many people.

Contact the publishers legal dept (the address of the publishers should be in the front few pages or google it). Authors should have written consent from anyone whose photos they include if they don't own the copyright of the photo - it's a fairly standard author contract clause. If you've explicitly not given consent then he should not have included you.
If he self published then contact the legal dept of the company.

So you are not the copyright holder of the photos so there is no line to go down there. Which is a shame because it's the easiest.

Assuming your holiday photo is somewhere public (since a random passerby may have taken it) then you have no case there in terms of privacy.
A photo in your own garden : the photographer would have needed the property owner's permission to take the photo. But that's irrelevant to whether your privacy has been breached. You might be able to say you had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the garden as the person in the photograph.

You do not need permission from individuals to publish their photos if they are taken in a public place. Think about famous photos in newspapers - they didn't ask people in famous war zones, tragedies etc if they could publish. A paparazzi photographer doesn't ask a celeb for permission to publish a photo taken in the street outside a restaurant.

I know your child's school will ask permission but that is not the same thing. They do that for safeguarding purposes.

Your brother can write about you. You cannot stop him doing that

Your brother can lie about you. And you have only limited recourse if he does
If the lie is damaging to your reputation in the community, you could sue him for libel.
If he said "OP had a favourite toy as a child and it was a stuffed badger called Mooky" and that is a lie, then unless you can prove it has damaged your reputation (eg you lost earnings or were shunned by your golf club or something like that)

Also you need to be very rich to sue for libel.

He may technically be in breach of his contract with the publisher if he told them he has your permission but that is between them and him.

So to summarise: your legal position to stop publication and have the book withdrawn is quite weak and would be entirely on the photo in your garden and whether you had reasonable expectations of privacy.

But unless you have very deep pockets, do not bring in lawyers.

My advice is move on. It's a tiny book that barely anyone will read.

If it is on a website I would be temped to write an awful review and get all my friends to do the same. Not just to get my own back but to limit the number reading it and encourage it to be quietly buried. You would need to do it under another name and make it generic e.g. boring, poorly written etc.

But this was a provable factual error by the authors, which both made the book and its publishers less credible, and was presumably pointed out by the powerful BBC’s well-resourced legal division as actionable for bringing BBC children’s programming into disrepute.

It’s an entirely different situation to a few details of a shared childhood and adolescence being presented in a way that a sibling feels is inaccurate (I can guarantee you that my siblings and I would write substantially different memoirs about the ‘same’ childhood) and two childhood photos in which the OP appears alongside her brother, which have been published by a very small local/vanity press.

OP, are you sure it is a traditional publisher rather than a vanity publisher where the writer pays to be published? The way they advertise themselves can hide this but you can tell by looking at their conditions.
I.am asking because unless your brother’s memoir focuses on something of interest to lots of people, most likely hardly anyone will buy or read the book.

The review idea - yes, use a pen name, give it no stars, call it dull, badly written, boring, didn't bother finishing etc.

Honestly op, hardly any will read it and fewer will care.

He has written about the past, it's something he's done not going to do.

It is of very little interest and even revelations about the very famous/influential/rich, are tomorrow's chip paper within a week.

Unless he’s done something remarkable I doubt anyone will want to read it. But if I were you I’d still contact the publishers.

Op unless he’s well known
who the hell will buy it???

People need to stop telling the OP to get solicitors to write letters and threaten legal action etc. The only people who will benefit from that is the solicitor.

Of course they will write a letter, they’ll write anything you’re prepared to pay them to write. That doesn’t mean they think you have a case or anything like that, it just means they get to make money. See the thread where a poster’s ex had their solicitor write her a letter demanding that she change the blinds in her living room because he couldn’t see in.

Less than 10% of libel/defamation cases succeed, and you have to have a lot of money to even try.

As for the publishers not wanting the publicity, the reality is that no-one is going to say “oh, those are the people who published Fred Bloggs’ memoirs, not going to use them because they allowed an unsolicited photo.” Because no-one is going to know who he even is, or care.

As for misrepresented information, I’m not going to say that you’re wrong, but it’s possible that you have your truth, and he has his. There may actually not be a right or wrong here if you remember things differently. And as much as people don’t like to think so, it is very possible to remember things from your childhood differently to how they happened.

But either way, what he’s written is his recollection of events. In the same way that Harry wrote his. And that didn’t seem to do the publisher any harm.

You need to just forget about this and move on. It’s easier said than done I know, but you don’t really have any other choice here, because you’re not going to win this one,and the more you try, the further you will be drawn back in.

The publishers should have made sure that your brother had permission for anything he published - they are VERY hot on not being libelled. However, you really don't have to worry. Memoirs don't sell. They really don't. Unless you are royalty, notorious or otherwise famous, nobody is going to buy the life story of 'someone who's had an interesting life'. EVERYONE thinks they've had an interesting life, but reading a memoir of someone who a) isn't a writer and has had no advice on how to write a memoir or b) has had a life with a few interesting bits but in other ways a life just like hundreds of thousands of others but is self-centred enough to believe they are extraordinary - is like wading through glue.

I bet he's had to pay for this to get published. You can contact the publisher and tell them that your brother has libeled you but if they are a vanity publisher then they won't do anything because they don't care, they just wanted your brother's money.

If it is in fact Keith McNally - owner of some fabulous restaurants, who is British and has 3 siblings including one sister - quite a few people will read it. However, it isn’t on sale yet but some early prints have been distributed a couple of months ago - there are comments by Anna Wintour and Richard E. Grant on the book.

This is excellent advice

You’re confusing two things — permission to use photos, and libel. Nothing the OP says suggests libel. She says ‘a few details of my childhood and adolescence were inaccurate’. To constitute libel, these inaccuracies would have to be proven to be defamatory, causing damage to, or likely to cause damage to, the reputation of an identifiable person.

And they will have been far hotter on clearing permissions with whoever took the photos, than people who are in them. If they’re childhood photos and the OP is old enough to have grandchildren, it’s probable the takers are dead.

But not been published by a very small publisher

Unfortunately for you, photographs do not belong to the subject of the photograph but to the photographer or the person who purchased/was given the photo rights by the photographer.

Ah, I thought the OP was also complaining about what was said about her and her family as in 'the few details were wrong'. This could be construed as libel, depending on what was said and a reputable publisher would certainly have investigated before publishing. The photographs I agree they will not be bothered about, unless they show OP in a particularly bad light (not literally of course, but naked or doing something illegal).

But I still maintain that nobody is going to read it anyway, except close family members, and it probably won't be written in the most readable way in any case.