Reliable overview of our rights?

[FrankS]

Bill,

I've said this before and I'll say it again: Photographers as a group need an organization to help them defend their rights as citizens and to protect against the erosion of these rights. Bill, I sincerely and respectfully ask that you start such a group! (There would have to be international chapters of course because of differring laws.)

Someone else said that photographers need to be as outspoken as gun-owner groups and as well organized. (Now I don't happen to be sympathetic to the gun owning issue, but it makes my point that if citizen rights are written into a constitution, it should be defended.)

 

[Pablito]

Bill,

I've said this before and I'll say it again: Photographers as a group need an organization to help them defend their rights as citizens and to protect against the erosion of these rights.

ASMP has done this, their forms and guidelines are useful:

http://www.asmp.org/

Not a substitute for the Krages book but very helpful.

 

[bmattock]

Bill, I sincerely and respectfully ask that you start such a group! (There would have to be international chapters of course because of differring laws.)

Don't think I haven't given it some thought.

You have seen this site, yes?

http://www.photopermit.org/

 

[FallisPhoto]

What is legal is not synonymous with one's constitutional rights. ....

So that earlier post of yours was a nonsequiter?

I doubt you had to feed your cameras or film through x-ray machines on a public sidewalk. One's constitutional right to take a photograph does not extend to insides government facilities .

The government buildings I was speaking of were freely accessable to the public, and are public property. I'm talking about things like the Botanical Gardens, some of the National Museums, and some of the other tourist attractions, not the Pentagon.

There have certainly been many attempts made to stop photographers from taking photos of certain government buildings from public places, and it remains unanswered in the courts whether this is legal or not.
...

Thank you for making my point. If you are arrested now, it doesn't much matter what the courts decide five years from now. Five years from now, you will still have been punished.

But at the moment, the law remains on the side of the photographer....

Depends on what you mean by the law. Certainly many of its agents are not.

You must think I am amazingly uninformed. ...

Actually, I think you are living in "theoryland" instead of in "practiceland." In practice, there are all those people being arrested. They are not all just being annoyed and harrassed either, they are incurring real, honest-to-god damages, at the hands of government, and there will, in all likelihood, never be criminal prosecutions for these abuses. Five years down the road, the courts may well decide that what the photographers did was legal, but in the meantime, they have arrest records, have served time in jail, are subject to all sorts of abuses and etcetera.

IF you bothered to read the book I cited earlier, you'd have a really good idea of what is legal and what is not as regards photography.

Lawmakers keep screwing with that. IF what they did ever gets to the Supreme Court (and that's a pretty big if), then yeah, those laws may be ruled unconstitutional (might not too). In the meantime though, they are laws and they are enforced just like the constitutional ones.

 

[bmattock]

People need to decide what their risk level is and decide how to respond to demands that they a) stop photographing something and b) delete their photos depending upon how strongly they feel about defending their own rights. I said that in the beginning. I completely understand if a person decides that it is not worth their time, effort, and aggravation.

I also said that if no one stands up for our rights, we lose them.