If you've been reading this blog over the last week, you'll know we've been following the very interesting copyright / fair use issues brought up by the Lane Hartwell / Richter Scales saga. I won't recap on all the rights stuff in this post, but readers can go to these previous posts for the
start, the
middle, the
end and the
next churn of this tale.
However, TechCrunch wrote a
summary post on all this last night, and I was most struck by some of the resulting comments from photographers and their supporters , which seemed tantamount to economic and commercial irrationality of the first order.
I won't quote individual people, but to summarise their position it seems to be that the logic is:
(i) I am a professional photographer, and that is how I want to make my living
(ii) I have here some commodity images that I want you to buy at a price I wish to sell them at, based on metrics I have defined
(iii) If you try and use my images under Fair Use I will come after you waving takedown notices, copyright law etc etc
Leaving aside the issues around point (iii) which have exercised us all over the last week for the moment, I am increasingly left scratching my head about the the mental model in points (i) and (ii) - it strikes me that Photography is a part of the media industry in even greater denial than music, movies and print. Consider the economic background in which this little tableaux is being played.
- The cost of content capture has gone down by 2-3 orders of magnitude - we all take snaps on mobile cameras now, and the intelligence of these devices has ramped up quality
- The cost of aggregation - of displaying, finding and distributing media - has become several orders of magnitude easier via online technologies - Google, Flickr etc.
- Cost of distribution - broadband - is near zero on a per Mb basis
In other words, the industry is commoditising hugely, so the value of any individual photo
must have fallen significantly over the last few years, unless it has some unique subject or art that differentiates it. If not, the market value of any bog standard photo, when it is competing with a huge number of similar images, must be near-zero.
So sadly, the wish to make a living as a photographer may fly in the face of economic reality today, unless the photographs are of some rare merit, subject or some other "USP".
However, by definition that will be rare - so point (iii) - Copyright - is increasingly being (ab)used to create an artificial barrier for the bulk of commodity images (as it is in Music and Video as well). Leaving aside the point that this is not what the point of copyright is, just look at the history of trying to extort value from something that is a commodity by using artificial barriers. A cursory study of this in related areas shows that it seldom works in the medium term, and won't even work in the short term if there are alternatives - and boy, are there alternatives.
Added to that is the odd behaviour of the photographer as a service provider - in nearly every service business I have worked in, the idea is to make it very easy for the customer to use you - here the gig seems to be to make it harder for a customer, even when there are near free alternatives available. However, the value of something you won't buy is actually zero.
In fact, it seems that the value to these photos is only added when someone else does use them and creates the value - eg in the Richter Scales example.
Clearly, any system where monopoly rents are extorted when others create the value is just not going to work if there are alternatives
Not only that, but for any individual photographic service provider, there seems to be a total unwillingness to allow "taster" or "teaser" work to be samples, In every other service industry I know of, people give away sprats to catch mackerels.
And lastly, a very good point is made by Michael Gray in this post re
reputation management - Lane Hartwell's Google reputation is going to brand her as a "difficult" person to do business with for a long, long time as in the online world you play globally, and the memory is persistent. And in a world of choice, we tend to not choose "difficult" people
Seems to me that pro photography is a non sustainable business as is, certainly at the jouneyman level, and needs to change its ways radically to survive. In this respect its no different to any other media.
And then I thought about how Pro Photography would work if it worked like any other service business I know.
- You'd give way samples - use my photos for X impressions, help yourself. Lets talk if the volume hits huge levels and you can afford to pay me
- Hey, how else can I help you succeed in your project?
- Problem paying - OK, lets see what we can work out?
Sorry Lane et al, that's actually how service businesses work in every other area where competition exists. (To be fair, I suspect that is how many photographers work in reality)
Update - Looks like Mike Masnik at Techdirt went through
much the same thought pattern at much the same time as I did - but Mike added in something I had decided to omit ie that we consultants are in the same boat...stuff gets reused by others all the time. As Mike points out, we don't mind, for many reasons.
In fact we want people to use our stuff sometimes...all these photographers could do well by reading this paper of ours on
new media economics for example.
But there is something Mike omits too - much of the really high value stuff we just don't put up on the blog...its as simple as that. If we put up all our reports on the blog, we're not naive enough to think people would drop £1,000 wodges on us each time they took some.
Update II - Paul Kedrowsky makes a parallel point re the Hollywood Scriptwriting hoo-ha - at just the time TV is under threat, this is not the time to
drive off your audience. Shutterbugs could usefully learn a similar lesson, esp in the light of Mike Butcher's comment below.
