Voluntarily letting everyone use your picture(s)

[Lax Jought]

Being relaxed about IP doesn't mean it will end up shared by our fellow humans - it will be owned by our new corporations.

This is not true.

The owner of copyright with regard to photographs on Wikipedia remains with the photographer.

Very generally speaking, unless otherwise agreed to by the photographer say for example if the photos were taken under commission, the copyright of pieces of art work (ie. photographs) always remain with the artist (ie. the photographer).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights#Re-use_of_non-text_media

If a 'corporation' other than Wikipedia attempts to take ownership of your photo or reproduces your photograph without acknowledgment to you, you would go through the usual process to assert your copyright ownership over it.

 

[Paul T.]

This is not true.

The owner of copyright with regard to photographs on Wikipedia remains with the photographer.

Very generally speaking, unless otherwise agreed to by the photographer say for example if the photos were taken under commission, the copyright of pieces of art work (ie. photographs) always remain with the artist (ie. the photographer).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights#Re-use_of_non-text_media

No.

I'm talking about the pressure for Orphan Works legislation - which people like Getty are pushing, precisely so they can use photos for which they haven't bought copyright. So they can make more money. It's the new digital land-grab.

 

[andersju]

No.

I'm talking about the pressure for Orphan Works legislation - which people like Getty are pushing, precisely so they can use photos for which they haven't bought copyright. So they can make more money. It's the new digital land-grab.

Lax is right: the copyright still belongs to me (for life + 70 years here in Sweden), and while I have published the aforementioned pictures under a free license, there are still some restrictions that anyone wanting to use the pictures would have to comply with. And everybody has the same rights. BigCorp doesn't "own" Wikipedia content any more than you or I do.

Also, this has nothing to do with orphan works, which is about works where the author cannot be located at all (often because he or she is dead and nobody can trace ownership). Orphan works is not about letting Big Evil Corp use some old photos; it's about letting everybody use these old photos. It's about photos (and old books, films, recordings etc) for which it's not possible to buy the rights, precisely because nobody knows to whom the rights belong.

Orphan works legislation is incredibly important to preserve our cultural heritage and it always truly saddens me to see fellow photographers oppose such laws, but perhaps this is the wrong time and place to open another can of worms. 😉

 

[emraphoto]

You are all living in a fantasy world.

The paradigm for access and control of information, data, images, text, etc, has all changed.

You can no longer claim that "charging more for everything" makes the price of everything higher and gives it a higher worth. You can no longer protect the process.

That's the thinking of a Medieval Guild.

Technology and the world have changed. You are no longer in control. You have to define a new way to derive income from your work.

Making no sales and getting no income due to stubbornness defines you in your commercial endeavors. Your work is intrinsically worth nothing if you don't make money from it.

You have to realize that there are literally trillions of images being created every year. (and is it all being put up for grabs online) It is not the same as the previous century where photography was a "black art" and there were very few true masters who could charge top dollar for high grade photographs. Now, every goon can buy a cheap camera and turn out technically perfect images by the hundreds of thousands.

Artistically, that is another story.


You may not believe it, but the reality is that any entity can procure almost any image for free. There is very little that is unique, unless you are paid to exclusively create the content. Your idea that you can withhold your content for ransom is ludicrous.

i am in complete agreement with what has been said here. i cannot stress enough how much anyone wanting to move forward needs to pay attention to the above post.

i am a nobody. i will not bore you with the minutia of my career. believe my position of credibility or not, up to you.

bedside manner aside, I love film is 100% correct.

 

[Lax Jought]

but perhaps this is the wrong time and place to open another can of worms. 😉

hey why stop now?

😀

 

[Chriscrawfordphoto]

i am in complete agreement with what has been said here. i cannot stress enough how much anyone wanting to move forward needs to pay attention to the above post.

i am a nobody. i will not bore you with the minutia of my career. believe my position of credibility or not, up to you.

bedside manner aside, I love film is 100% correct.

What he said isn't correct. Ilovefilm is an editor,so he has a vested interest in convincing us that our work has no value. My own experience is that while people would love free images, when push comes to shove, they'll pay if they want what I have. You of all people, emraphoto, know that we cannot live on air alone and that making photographs costs money in addition to the money needed for the photographer to eat and have a place to live. Most of the zillions of free pics available suck, and if those photographers who did good work had the brains to do so, they'd ignore the free stuff and make sure they got paid for their good stuff.

 

[Lax Jought]

You may not believe it, but the reality is that any entity can procure almost any image for free. There is very little that is unique, unless you are paid to exclusively create the content. Your idea that you can withhold your content for ransom is ludicrous.

I agree with this up to a certain extent.

If a photographer asks too much for his photos, there are always another million photographers out there with something similar who is willing to come to a mutual agreement with a buyer.

 

[emraphoto]

What he said isn't correct. Ilovefilm is an editor,so he has a vested interest in convincing us that our work has no value. My own experience is that while people would love free images, when push comes to shove, they'll pay if they want what I have. You of all people, emraphoto, know that we cannot live on air alone and that making photographs costs money in addition to the money needed for the photographer to eat and have a place to live. Most of the zillions of free pics available suck, and if those photographers who did good work had the brains to do so, they'd ignore the free stuff and make sure they got paid for their good stuff.

of course i know this Chris. i also do not dictate how the market reacts.

the pittance currently paid for work has been an indicator for me to seek my funding far outside the quarrelling for payment via an editor/purchaser model. if I Love Film is an editor then it would be even more prudent to pay attention to what he is saying.

in early spring of 2012 i had work run coast to coast, in every major paper in every major city. a career coup! as i was on assignment i received $200

that is not an amount of $ i want to chase. it is now almost two months later and i still do not have payment.

many folks i know and work with are organizing themselves in a way that assignment/media renumeration is only icing on the cake and i am one of them.

my current projects will all be available for free. for everyone and anyone and the $ i need to produce them and live are almost 100% in place. enough funding to carry me through to next winter.

i cannot change my way of thinking on this as the past two years have underscored it via experience. i am after far greater $ than usage agreements will provide.

if you want to see other organizations heading this way check out Noor and the 'Foundation" section of their website. right now, organizing as a not for profit foundation is more in tune with my ability to continue working than chasing copyright infringement around the internet.

 

[I Love Film]

No, I am not an editor. I was an editor 30 years ago. (A little earlier in this thread Chris was calling me a "pissant" and a faker who obviously had no credentials. Now, however, Chris claims I am a confirmed editor heading a comprehensive conspiracy to delude photographers and not pay them)

The amusing fantasy that I have some sort of "vested interest" in devaluing other people's work because of some long vacated position in publishing is patently idiotic. Talk about non-comprehension of what you read. (I was also a pro photographer in the past, so my "vested interest" in lowering prices for photography is obviously a sign of a schizophrenic conflict)

Just because Chris wants his photos to have a high value "because he has to eat" doesn't mean that will magically make it so. (McDonald's can now quadruple their prices, because everybody has to eat) And the "zillions" of other photos floating around don't all "suck" (which I find a sophomoric word used by the vocabulary-challenged)

PS: The handful of people that ended up paying you for your work "wanted what you have". The millions of people you never heard from or didn't pay you didn't. You're making a straw man argument several times over.

What he said isn't correct. Ilovefilm is an editor,so he has a vested interest in convincing us that our work has no value. My own experience is that while people would love free images, when push comes to shove, they'll pay if they want what I have. You of all people, emraphoto, know that we cannot live on air alone and that making photographs costs money in addition to the money needed for the photographer to eat and have a place to live. Most of the zillions of free pics available suck, and if those photographers who did good work had the brains to do so, they'd ignore the free stuff and make sure they got paid for their good stuff.

 

[Vics]

Roger, Chris are right. And I am not a professional photographer.

Plus one for that.

 

[haempe]

Lax is right: the copyright still belongs to me (for life + 70 years here in Sweden), and while I have published the aforementioned pictures under a free license, there are still some restrictions that anyone wanting to use the pictures would have to comply with.

This is so not correct.
The authorsrights belongs to you (non-negotiable).
You give away the copyright (the license to use).

 

[andersju]

This is so not correct.
The authorsrights belongs to you (non-negotiable).
You give away the copyright (the license to use).

No. I gave everyone the license to use it under certain terms. This is not the same as giving away the copyright, which to me implies transferring all rights to someone else. I relinquished a subset of the rights given to me by copyright law, but not all; specifically:

"You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)." (Attribution)

"If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one." (Share Alike)

"For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work."

(Short name for the license is BY-SA and the full legal code here.)

Now, considering the terms are very generous, I suppose some would say it's practically the same as giving away copyright, in which case we're just arguing semantics. But for some people wanting to incorporate some of these pictures as derivative works in another work, the "Share Alike" part might make it impossible:

"The Share Alike aspect requires all derivatives of a work to be licensed under the same (or a compatible) license as the original. Thus, if a person were to use parts of a BY-SA movie to create a new short film that new short film would also need to be licensed as BY-SA. The advantage of this license is that future users are not able to add new restrictions to a derivative of your work; their derivatives must be licensed the same way."

...and the only way to get around having to license the new work under the same license would be to ask me, the copyright owner, for permission.

 

[haempe]

Andersju, this may be.
I wanna note to keep apart the authorsrights from the copyrights.
The authorsrights are non-negotiable coupled to the person of the author (or his inherits for 70years after death) in contrary to the copyrights, which are transferable.
A authorsright is for example the possibility to forbid a use which is unconscionable for the author, even if he no longer holds the copyright (for political advertising or so).
The copyright is the permission to use, which can give away by the holder partial or complete.
This is from german law, if I remember correctly the scandinavian law is similar builded in this area...

 

[Luke_Y]

Out of genuine curiosity, are there any examples of serious for-profit usage that might have occured?

So this could very well be a myth then.

Not Wikipedia, but an interesting example from Flicker. As I understand it Photo published on Flicker with CC license, evidently no model release on hand, evidently (naively?) neither photog nor model expected commercial usage...

Photo ended up in a Virgin Mobile marketing campaign (with attribution) where the photographer was unaware of it and the model feels they are depicted in an insulting manner...

HERE and HERE

Should provide for some interesting discussion on the subject. 😉

 

[andersju]

Anderju, this may be.
I wanna note to keep apart the authorsrights from the copyrights.
The authorsrights are non-negotiable coupled to the person of the author (or his inherits for 70years after death) in contrary to the copyrights, which are tranferable.
A authorsright is for example the possibility to forbid a use which is unconscionable for the author, even if he no longer holds the copyright (for political advertising or so).
The copyright is the permission to use, which can give away by the holder partial or complete.
This is from german law, if I remember correctly the scandinavian law is similar build in this area...

Indeed. In Sweden we don't talk about authorship rights as separate from copyright, but rather, that copyright consists of 1) moral rights (the right to attribution, the right not to have your own work used in a way that's insulting to you or your artistry, etc.) and 2) economic rights (usage, distribution, all that). And the moral rights can never be transferred.

It's good that you point this out because the notion of moral rights is one big difference when comparing (most?) European copyright law to US copyright law. In the US, you can waive all your rights to a work by dedicating it to the public domain. In Sweden, waiving your moral rights is simply impossible, which has always struck me as somewhat bizarre. I can't put a work into the public domain even if I wanted to. (Some years ago I even double-checked this with an expert at the Swedish ministry of justice, who confirmed.)

 

[mdarnton]

No one has posted this link yet, right?

 

[emraphoto]

Solutions are sometimes outside the box. Complaining about folks not paying seems a waste of time. Finding the relationships and networks so I can keep working? Far more productive.

Convincing folks who don't want to pay, to pay? Good luck

 

[nighstar]

That's great, I've been thinking of doing something like this too.

i see you're in Australia too. 😀 i volunteer at a local RSPCA shelter. it's a very rewarding job, but it can be heart-wrenching too when you photograph an animal, fall in love and then get home with the photos to find out the animal has already been euthanized...........

as for the actual topic of this thread. eh, i'm over it.

 

[I Love Film]

Here is some "fine art" I took this morning of a storefront. If anyone wishes to pay me $5000 for this, it is yours.

If you don't want to pay, you can have it free, do anything you want with it.

 

[furcafe]

As an amateur who does paid work from time to time, I sympathize w/both sides to this issue. It's very unfortunate that discussions tend to get so polarized.

On the 1 hand, it is very true that the old business model for professional & commercial photography, particularly for things like stock & anything related to traditional print media, has changed & it's unrealistic for anyone to think that they can reverse history by imposing guild/union-like restraints on supply. On the other hand, many photographers are able to produce photos of commercial value, regardless of whether it was originally shot for purely artistic or personal purposes, & they should be cognizant that their work can be valuable should they want to profit from it & take the necessary steps to protect that value.