Here comes another lawyer?

Omigod.....Its* not over yet....the Photographer's RIAA Appreciation Society (aka PDN) has rushed to the defence of its own (pointer courtesy BoomTown), and alleges that other photographers are Deeply Upset and may Even Sue. Clearly attribution is insufficient, and only cold hard cash will do.

This is actually highlighting a very important issue, as sorting out how copyright and fair usage works in the online medium is going to a major driver - or inhibitor - of the development of media going forward. What is being continually (and conveniently) forgotten by the shutterbugs here is that copyright is not a licence of total control over all distribution, its a balance between incentive to create and allowing others to stand on the shoulders of what has gone before.

Now a lot of the Photomafia has wailed about the ethics of all this (without, I submit, a lot of knowledge of the history of copyright law), but I think we need to turn it around - i.e. how can anyone argue for the ethics of being able to stop significant creative effort via having a veto (automatic takedown) if a marginal work of total commodity value (eg snapshot of something that is available in large measure in the public domain anyway) is used for a non-material proportion of that work.

(Addendum - the strategic issue imho is this - in most cases, these photos are actually of minimal value, as plenty of alternatives exist in the open market and substitution costs are minimal - but this worked when content capture, search and transaction costs were high. However, the broadband 'Net has reduced these costs by 2 orders of magnitude, so the shutterbugs are now trying to protect pricing that is just not sustainable in the new market. To do so they are attempting to (ab)use copyright law to create an artificial barrier. Its just not sustainable I'm afraid, in a world of User Generated Content, Online search and digital media. One could in fact argue that the only reason this picture of Lane Hartwell's had any value was because Richter Scales used it. )

What I would also like to raise is the ethics around whether the images of the subjects of these photos, often snapped without release of their copyright, with minimal artistic input, should actually legally be sold for profit.**

One of the benefits of a digital world is that the original content creator (that's YOU) can find these shutterbugs and take them to task for unauthorised plagiarism of your lifework. One can hardly argue there is parody, transformation or marginal usage in a snapshot, so it ain't Fair Use

It would be interesting to sue the photographers for attempting to sell these works as well without paying you your due. And the legal argument over that would be interesting when applied to that of re-use of he images in, say a further derivative work like a video.

* The Lane Hartwell/Richter Scales Saga, that is

**One could argue that this practice, ethically, is somewhat akin to people who "sit" on url names - the words existed before them, they have just taken the .com and assigned themselves the rights to use the name. The difference is that in the case of photos there is usually an alternative source, so the "monopoly rents" are minimal.