Since there isn't much content in this forum I thought I'd make a post similar to one in the Blogging forum titled What copyright do you own when publishing a feed.

This one concerns a photographer by the name of Lane Hartwell who had a photo of hers lifted by a music group and used in a song that made fun of the next internet bubble. She's a freelance photographer that does work for Wired News and a photo of hers was taken from the Wired website and used in the video that became a bit of a viral hit last month.

What I found interesting about this story is that a small singing group saw nothing wrong with using photos taken by various photographers/artists and just incorporating it into their own work without bothering to 1. get permission 2. Give proper credit.

The subculture that was parodied in the video and song quickly came to the defense of the music group and blasted the photographer for protecting her work and her rights. If you do a search for Lane Hartwell you'll come across just about every blog that covered the story and dragged her through the mud after she filed the DMCA complaint and YouTube took down the video until the creators complied with her request. The ironic things is that all of these bloggers and "people in the know" who saw nothing wrong with a photo she took being used without her permission or crediting her and who seem to think the internet is a free-for-all where anyone can take what they want- all have copyright notices at the bottoms of their blogs.

Why Lane Hartwell Popped the "Bubble" video.

Most people online today expect to get anything thats available online for free.
meaning software, music and even photos and the likes.

I admire the people who gives away their hard work for free but I also respect the ones that wants money for their work.

I work in a college in the UK and you would not believe the number of students who believe that if its on a webpage it there for the taking... we even had one student hand in a piece of work printed directly off the web (with the url across the bottom) and try to tell the teacher that it was their work

Starlord
AKA Darran

MikHoSoft,

I read that argument when reading the blogs and comments during this "controversy" and I have to agree with your sentiments. The people who give it away for free should be commended but it should also be noted that they lessen the value of what they do overall.

Starlord,

That's pretty funny.

Originally Posted by MrBrownThumb

What I found interesting about this story is that a small singing group saw nothing wrong with using photos taken by various photographers/artists and just incorporating it into their own work without bothering to 1. get permission 2. Give proper credit.

I really hate marring my photos with a giant copyright stamp across the bottom, but stories like this one are the reason why. I have a few of my own; this one being 'lifted' without permission to a still non-paying client is the reason I set up an .htaccess file to prevent hotlinking to all but a few domains.

Some people will go so far as to say that even with an obvious copyright notice, they're "giving the person free advertising." Except that the person who owns a photo, or anything else, gets to decide whether they want to advertise it or not.

Originally Posted by MikHoSoft

I admire the people who gives away their hard work for free but I also respect the ones that wants money for their work.

A photo is generally worth more when its owner is able to sell or lease exclusive rights to it. An advertising campaign isn't going to buy an image unless they're the only ones who'll be able to use it, at least for the length of their campaign. A person can publish a photo on their own site, even share it on forums, but then take it down if there's enough interest in it. By making unauthorized copies and releasing them to the world, people can do great harm to the long-term value of another person's work.

I really hate to say anything like the RIAA's message, but as digital cameras get more accessible, more people are making great photos ... and more of the photos floating around the web are made by individual hobbyists.

This is exactly why I started watermarking my photographs. I don't consider myself to be a professional photographer (I am most definitely in the "hobbyist" class, and I make no claims otherwise), but the pictures I take are my pictures of the things I see. A lot of the things I take pictures of are things that no one else seems to see, or at least take pictures of, and they become rather unique as a result. I Don't want some idiot profiting off of the stuff I do.

The scary thing is how many people will still steal a photograph with a watermark or a business brand mark on it. My silk wedding flower client has been going through a number of content theft issues for the past 6 months, and even putting watermarks on the images hasn't stopped it. Some people just have balls.

My attitude toward the subject is that, if it's free and legit (e.g the stuff over at www.sxc.hu), then my using of it is acceptable (and yes, I take pics from stock.xchng and use them). But I don't expect anything for free, and I don't consider it an entitlement either. MikHoSoft nailed it though: some people not only want things for free, but expect them.

I've noticed a lot of people will take any image and use it as their own. The shocking part is how many think it's ok to do so. I'll use royalty free images from stock image companies and lately I've been using images from Flickr that are published under one of the creative commons licenses (It does require a photo credit and link).

I think pretty much all the same issues we've discussed in the other thread apply, such as which country's laws take precedence, etc.

One of the hard things in all this is how easy it is to lift someone else's image and reuse it. Unless the original photographer (or someone familiar with the image) catches it most people aren't going to know.

I keep thinking something needs to change in copyright laws, but I have no idea what that is. The laws as is make a lot of sense, but it's becoming more and more difficult to enforce those laws and if you can't enforce them they aren't doing any practical good.

That's true, Steven. The very nature of publicly posting a web page and the insecurity of it has gotten to the point where photographs and text continually get stolen. That's what needs to change fundamentally...the security of the 'net.

Hence, the watermarking. Forrest is right...it's ugly as hell. I hate doing it, and I'm nowhere near the artiste that he is with his camera (that must kill him a little inside each time). But it's a necessary evil.

A lot of people, especially this current generation, do not take the internet seriously because it is as they say "it's just the internet." Technology is a business too and people don't seem to understand that. Yeah, it's just a bunch of pixels, but there is another human on the other side of the screen...

Originally Posted by vangogh

One of the hard things in all this is how easy it is to lift someone else's image and reuse it. Unless the original photographer (or someone familiar with the image) catches it most people aren't going to know.

And everything that might come up in a Google Images seo thread applies here. Spiders can't read images very well - although this is changing more quickly than you'd think. Forget alt text; this means as easy and practical as Copyscape is, nothing like it is available to photographers ... or people who put just about anything on the internet in binary format.

Digimarc is the closest thing. They change a series of pixels in an almost invisible way, leaving behind a pattern that will stand up to even some heavy editing. They also offer hosting, visible watermarks, and all that.

It would be easy to write software to compare two images and count the number of matching pixels, or the number that were within a few percent of each others' values. The problem is the sheer number of images that are available over the net; a compare tool would still have to figure out which ones to compare. Even without human supervision, it's a needle in a haystack.

The law should be changed. We need to strengthen international copyright treaties, and we need to stop giving the RIAA and MPAA a different tier of legal rights.

We've come into a time where people have dozens of sites that want to be monetized, and need compelling text and media to grab the ad-clickers' attention. There's a lot of demand for writing, photography, video, sometimes music ... there's also an unlimited supply of the stuff. With the free stock houses, creative commons, Wikipedia, and then the falling price and plateauing quality of digital cameras, anybody can find legitimate images. Somehow, the perception needs to change.

Lane Hartwell:

For Hartwell, it comes down to respect for her property -- the photographs she sells to earn a living. "They all have value to me in relicensing as editorial stock," she said. "I can sell that."

I don't like the idea that a person's rights are defined by what they can sell, but that's how things are.

The law should be changed. We need to strengthen international copyright treaties, and we need to stop giving the RIAA and MPAA a different tier of legal rights.

I strongly agree, copyright infringement may end up ruining the entertainment and technology we all take for granted. I decided to expand on what I've read in this thread and talk about software piracy in an article I wrote..

Question to spark some discussion back on topic: are there any forms of copy protection that could curb unauthorized use of photos (like software with CD Keys, etc) without ruining the content of the photo (water marks)? Or at least something that would let people know it's stolen.

I'm not sure the infringement will ruin things. I wonder if it's us and the way we do business that needs to adjust. It might sound strange, but think back to when VCRs first came out. The entire movie industry was up in arms, because they thought people would stop going to the movies. Instead the movie industry learned to profit from the sale of video tapes.

I have a hard time seeing how there will be international agreement much less enforcement. I wonder if it's realistic we'll be able to prevent things like people taking images and if instead we should learn to adapt the way we do business.

I'm not sure if that's the way to go, but more and more I've been thinking it might be.

That change seems to be slowly coming in the music industry, but not for the reasons we're mentioning in this thread. It's become feasible for a band like Radiohead to host their own album, sell it themselves, and avoid a lot of middle men. The popular view in music is all groups should give all their music away - whether they'd like to or not - and the good ones will make their money on tee-shirts. The Grateful Dead chose to do just that, and were a cult favorite. Others choose to sue their fans, and while that seems morally repugnant, it's their right.

The VCR thing makes me think of the porn industry. That's one I don't have anything to do with, but it's the #1 employer in photography, so hard not to know the basics about. They turn a blind eye to their stuff being pirated, but embed their url and assume people want never-ending variety. For a lot of photographers, there's simply no way to break even from image 'theft.' Saturation really does hurt the commercial value of a work, even the original master Old Ansel said he was beyond lucky to get a good photo every month.

Then there are people like me, who are trying to build name recognition and not sell any of my portfolio images under most circumstances. I'm always up for commissioned work, and I'm trying to raise name awareness, so exposure helps me. And yet my images have occasionally been taken and used in downright insulting ways. Especially when I'm not profiting directly from them, I'll be damned if someone else unilaterally decides to profit from something I spent a week living out of a tent to capture.

The broad market - people who want or need images - will change in response. People know to look for CC on Flickr. But people do still have the right to show their work on their own terms if they choose to ... and the law shouldn't try to change that.

Forrest here's an example of what I mean in regards to your situation. You say that selling images isn't your business model. If anything your images would be used to promote you and help you get commissioned work.

So it's in your best interest to have more people see your images, but you want your images seen in the way you want and that doesn't always happen when someone takes your images without your permission.

Why not make it easier then for people to use your images?

Make it easy for someone else to use your image in the way you want. Be open to it. You can still offer the images under some kind of licensing that requires them to only use the image as is and give a link back to you or something like that.

It will always suck that some people will make a profit from your images, but unfortunately it's probably going to happen whether you want it to or not. Instead of getting worked up fighting every instance of it figure out a way to profit from it yourself.

You can still go after the biggest offenders if you want.

I think you're right that many people will come to look for creative commons images on sites like Flickr and use the images responsibly as the idea is promoted more, but I don't think everyone will do that. It's still far too easy for someone to visit your site and download images and use those images without your permission. That doesn't make it right and I don't think it is right. But I think it's going to continue.

I'm not saying my ideas here are the right solution, but I wonder if in the end they'll be a better solution than constantly trying to fight something. If you spend your time worrying about and fighting every person who uses an image without your permission you might stop them all, but you probably won't have much time for anything else either. In the end I think that ends up causing more harm to you than the people who took your images in the first place.

Like it or not I don't know if any law is going to prevent the unauthorized use of images. Ideally it could be prevented, but I think the technology makes using the images too easy. If a law is unlikely to prevent it why not look at the problem in a different way and figure out a way to profit from it.

If you make $100 does it matter all that much that someone else makes $1 riding on your coattails even if they did nothing to deserve it? Is it worth losing $100 to keep that person from making $1?