Posted by Doug
Wed, 07 Dec 2005 14:38:05 GMT
I was saddened to read this story of Behind the Scenes of Image Theft. It’s about a photojournalist, David Leeson, and some images he took in Iraq. He gave some of his best images to the Army for them to use in their yearbook. This CD of images was then copied and passed around many, many times. The sad part is then the ever growing list of people who have tried to pass the images off as their own.
There’s a lot of talk about “information wants to be free”. Sharing information with your friends is one thing. Claiming authorship of said information is another. David’s tale demonstrates several times, what he wanted most was proper credit for the images. We’re not talking about someone who’s extorting lots of money or scamming the public for more and more money. Just a photographer looking for proper credit. This story clearly shows why we need copyright in the first place. It would be wrong to abolish copyright.
An interesting side note about this story. Mark Hancock, another photojournalist, recommends always ingest and never copy images from your camera. This is so that you can at least assign copyright to the EXIF data at the earliest possible moment. The interesting part of David Leesom’s tale is often people would discover he was the original photographer of his images by the copyright in the EXIF. I’m surprised none of the people who were stealing credit for the images had the sense to alter the EXIF.
It’s clear setting the copyright in the EXIF data isn’t foolproof. Almost any image editing program can strip all the EXIF when saving images. However, it is a tool in protecting your work. There are also lots and lots of Photoshop actions for adding watermarks to your images. I’m sure these type of batch jobs are possible in other image editors too. Obviously you don’t want to watermark your original images. I think that was David’s mistake. He gave out his originals without some means of enforcing his “terms of use”.
Posted in Copyright, Freedom, Photography | Tags EXIF | 3 comments
Posted by Doug
Thu, 01 Dec 2005 13:23:24 GMT
From Boing Boing:
Gisela sez, “I got tired of waiting for someone else to start the ‘No Xmas for Sony’ thing, so I opted to do it myself. There is an image that I have taken up using in my sig files around the Internet, linking it to Mark Russinovich’s blog on the Sony rootkit debacle. So far, in less than 1 hour of it being live, it convinced someone not to buy a Vaio, so I am quite pleased with it.”
Previous installments of the Sony Rootkit Roundup: Part I, Part II, Part III
Posted in Copyright, Freedom, Politics | Tags rootkit, Sony | 1 comment
Posted by Doug
Fri, 17 Jun 2005 13:50:00 GMT
I saw this comment made by Jason Schultz of the
EFF. It was on a thread on [http://boingboing.net][Boing Boing]] discussing how a
local bakery is now refusing to accept outside art to put on cakes because of copyright concerns. I’m pasting it in it’s entirety here because there’s no way to link to just this portion of the post. The more I see stuff from the
EFF, the more I encourage others to
support this valuable organization.
As an actual copyright and trademark attorney, I feel this sort of discussion highlights exactly where our notions of “property” and “culture” cause confusion and tension between what the law is, what our intuition is, and what we wish the world was like. Most of us probably wish that we could easily go into our local bakery with our favorite comic or cartoon character and have it put on a birthday cake for our child or best friend. Sure, we wouldn’t mind paying a bit more, if it were easy and relatively cheap. However, because the copyright maximalists have been able to frame copyright in terms of “property”, this reality is increasingly difficult to achieve. Property rights are generally thought of as absolute and impenetrable, e.g. my favorite San Francisco anti-parking sign that says “Don’t even think about parking here!”
Yet kids love culture, as we all do. And their love of copyrighted and trademarked characters helps make those characters valuable, just as the creators’ inspiration and skill have. Consider if no child loved Dora the Explorer; how valuable would the copyrights and trademarks in the character actually be? Not very. Yet the love and obsession of fans do not garner any “property rights” in the character or any rights at all, according the maximalists. Even those willing to pay to use their favorite characters are often chilled from doing so because the maximalists argue they must come and beg permission from the copyright owner or face up to $150,000 in fines for their sins and indiscretions.
Does this mean the creators of the character should have no rights?
Certainly not. But it may mean that they shouldn’t have absolute rights. In theory, that is what “fair use” is for, to balance out the rights of the creator with the rights of the public to enjoy that creation, especially in a private world that does not compete with the creators’ business. In the case of Dora, that is the making of commercial cartoons and books, not cakes. The fact that Dora is popular on cakes comes from her popularity among her fans, not the skill of the hand that draws her or the voice that speaks her words.
Finally, all too often, we see a perspective like Tshaka’s, where the argument is made that if you don’t enforce your rights, you lose them.
Nothing could be further from the truth in this context, even for trademarks (i.e. the only time you lose your trademark is if it becomes generic for the class of goods you sell; no one would ever start calling cartoons “Doras” and birthday cakes aren’t even in the same class of goods). What Tshaka is really worried about, it seems to me, is a loss of control over the use of one’s creations. The idea that someone other than the creator might actually make use of the character without permission is what drives copyright maximalist authors, owners, and advocates crazy, not loss of rights or even, often, compensation.
It is this battle for control that is at the heart of the copyright wars and little else. From the perspective of consumers and fans, characters like Dora have become part of our lives and we shouldn’t be ashamed or intimidated from enjoying that fact, even if it involves putting their image on a birthday cake. From the perspective of the Copyright Maximalists, however, even a “Let them eat cake” policy is far too lenient and infringing of their rights.
Posted in Copyright | no comments
