Should your photographs and art be worthless, available to all for free on the Internet? Rich executives at powerful corporations who want to profit at your expense think so. Your input is due TODAY.
Please share: http://www.naturalexposures.com/calling-all-photographers-artists-help-copyright-alliance-protect-your-copyright/
Embedded Link
Calling All Photographers & Artists-Help Copyright Alliance Protect YOUR Copyright | Natural Exposures, Inc.
Calling All Photographers & Artists-Help Copyright Alliance Protect YOUR Copyright. It’s time to put down your cameras, art brushes, sculpting clay and
Google+: Reshared 4 times
Google+: View post on Google+
Comments
This is what trolling on behalf of the copyright industries looks like. They're pretending to protect your "art," but they're actually destroying the commons on behalf of a few rich corporations.
The principle should be that once the economic value of a work drops to zero, copyright is counter-productive. Millions of works are now "orphaned" — they can't be sold, but law won't let them be seen free either. And copyright terms extending to life plus 75 years? Copyright is designed to protect the artist — not their great-great-grandchildren.
And it's not the great-greats that win in all this. It's the corporations who buy the copyright.
+Dana Blankenhorn – how do things get 'orphaned'? (example..)
Copyright that is held by the individual who created the art should be valid for the life of that artist, once assigned to anyone else – including the legal fiction of a company – a ten year clock should start before it becomes public domain. Art created for someone else should immediately have a 10 year copyright.
+Joshua Caldwell I'd be willing to negotiate on that, but I think you're on the right track.
+Dana Blankenhorn The proposal that photos of mine which have been separated from me by theft might be classified as "orphaned" and made available for free and magically-legitimized use strikes me as similar to calling illegally obtained money laundered through a legitimate business "orphaned money". There's all of this "orphaned money" out there which might benefit the economy if only it could be put to use legally. In other words, what you're describing is the business model of the Mafia and drug cartels, only in the case of photography technology executives want to profit off of our photos laundered through their site or others by serial copyright violators (or the deliberate removal of EXIF metadata on some pretense such as reducing storage cost).
Do those same technology companies propose the same treatment for their Web site designs, their software, and other forms of creative property, if those creations become similarly separated from their rightful owners by any means, including theft? Of course not. Singling out photography and photographers for unusual treatment under the law reveals the hypocrisy of the proposals to create that odd construct for labeling stolen property as "orphaned".
Copyright protection does not destroy the commons, there's ample room for content creators to designate several types of creative commons licenses. There are also many types of fair use. As for the value of a work dropping to zero, if there's a commercial use for it, its value isn't zero. Creating a clearing process for stolen works however would drive the economic value of photography towards zero, and that seems to be the agenda of the so-called "orphaned works" proposals.
Regarding the 75 year term, photography is often a family business, the Muench family for example is in its third generation. The value of art often climbs only after the death of the artist. The families which suffered as the original artist was struggling to make ends meet definitely deserves more than anyone else to finally reap any rewards which come after the artist dies. My son and daughter have both won awards in international photography competitions, and being 15 and 17 at the moment, they could easily manage my portfolio for the next 75 years. So your claim that 75 years is to "great great grandchildren" is colorfully dramatic but patently false. Then you claim that the family (great great grandchildren or whatever) doesn't benefit when they sell copyright rights to corporations. That's a bizarre statement when you seem to prefer that instead the family should not have those rights for 75 years at all.
So no, this is not what "trolling on behalf of the copyright industries looks like". It's what photographers tired of disingenuous proposals to legitimize the theft of our work look like.
May I use your writing for profit Dana if someone else steals and re-posts it without attribution, making it an "orphaned work"? If that were happening to you every single day, if major corporations and start-ups were profiting from the theft and creating proposals to legitimize and legalize it, I suspect that you'd have a very different take on the topic.
Whether it's laundered money or laundered photographs, legitimizing the theft of property, the theft of someone's hard work, is a sleazy business.
+Jeff Sullivan There is no theft going on with a link. There are many technological solutions for your problem of re-posting, like digital watermarking. And the question in terms of copyright law we were discussing involved the length of the copyright, and whether it should extend past the economic value of the material in question.
The rest of what I say I agree with.
If there's a link and the source is known (and there's no copyright violation)+Dana Blankenhorn, how is the photo "orphaned"? The sort of use you seem to be describing, like an on-site Share function, is typically authorized in a site's terms of service.
The orphaned works proposals I've seen have proposed to legitimize the use of any photos separated from their creator, including ones which may have been separated from through copyright violations (right mouse click save and re-upload).
That technical solutions may theoretically exist isn't particularly useful or relevant while they're not being implemented in current editing software or checked by sites using photos (Facebook, Google, etc).
+Jeff Sullivan Right now millions of books are subject to copyright, have no income, and are thus "orphaned." They literally can't be read because the copyright owners have no incentive to distribute them and the copyright has many decades to run.
How does checking a book out from the library sound when these issues are applied? The author does not get more money from the library buying the book.
I think every technology has its own separate issues, and the more tech we have, the less responsible the 'artist'.
If a machine is actually doing the work, regardless of who programed/built it, or who is operating it, where does the value come from, and to whom does the remuneration go?
I'm aware of that story often being circulated +Dana Blankenhorn, but books are only part of what will be affected by orphaned works legislation, and presenting a partial view paints a very inaccurate and misleading picture of the topic.
Photographers have legitimate and serious concerns about this issue, as described by the American Society of Media Photographers describes:
What are “Orphan Works”?
"As described in a 2005 report that the Copyright Office prepared for Congress, an "orphan work" is a work (such as an image) that is protected by copyright but whose copyright owner cannot be identified and located. It is clear that such a situation harms both creators and users. However, the remedy that was proposed to the 2006 Congress was needlessly unfair to creators, leading ASMP and many other groups to seek changes when the bill was introduced."
"ASMP lobbied the issue all year long, presenting our case to Congressional staffers, testifying before the House and Senate committees and, at one point, asking our members to fax letters to their elected representatives. ASMP also helped form a coalition of creator associations (including overseas groups) to press for amendments to the House and Senate bills."
You may talk about the additional applicability to books if you like, but that does not contradict or invalidate my original points about photography, as your original, unnecessarily rude response seems to imply.
A library does not profit from checking out a book +Malthus John, and obviously reading a book from a library is legal, perhaps under "fair use" or similar laws.
For technology-based use of copyrighted material, there is a precedent for opting in on a system where a third party profits off of commercial use, and making micro-payments to the content creators. So little to no new technology would be required to implement such a system.
Consider +Google AdSense /Adwords. You publish your text and images to a Web page such as a blog, you opt in to let Google serve ads (and they send traffic through search as well), and Google profits off of your content. Google pays you some percentage of their ad sale revenue. That sort of model could be implemented with current content created by writers and photographers, not just for ad sales but to enable other commercial uses as well such as Web use of images and other uses which are served by microstock agencies today. It would basically automate the low end of the image licensing market, and enable a "pay per use" model where the fee starts at zero and scales with the magnitude of the use.
Instead the way photography tends to be handled in these orphaned works proposals is to validate the use of even stolen photos and ask questions later. As +The Economist explains, "critics say the rules will help big firms fleece photographers and flog pictures that users upload to social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/05/orphan-works
For images currently found online, it's highly likely that they originated online, so any proposal which implies that their creator is not readily available or that such content separated from its creator is not most likely stolen, is inherently disingenuous.
It sounds like 'orphan' is just double-speak for 'stolen'. I was hoping for some examples where that is not the case so I can better understand.
I agree that it should not be a big deal at all, technologically, to embed some kind of creator stamp. Notice that the camera brand shows up automatically? The manufacturers could help by a connected, online registration when you buy a camera, enter your serial #, and associate it with your name. Then photos would have your name along with the equipment name, which is arguably less important.
Also, places like G+ & FB need to work on solving this issue as well (as well as software companies). They are like the library-to-books comparison I was going for. They don't directly profit, and it's not illegal for them, but they are certainly involved in spreading the "problem".
There's obviously a completely different social perspective on these 2 areas (and all others). We value information and education, so we set up this system that enables the sharing of books, especially to people who can't afford them. Photos don't really have that kind of social benefit.
The information age, and computer revolution have changed most things in life by now, but there are still many more to come. Anything that can be done by machine probably will be – and that means entire classes of work are often axed. I fear that we are now in the era that will forever change the way we view 'art' and artists, and it's not going to be easy for those who make their living there.
+Jeff Sullivan
+Malthus John Orphan is not double-speak for stolen. It means there is nothing to steal, no economic value. The work is abandoned by the market.
You're trolling for Mickey Mouse now.
In case you didn't understand the context of this quote +Dana Blankenhorn, it is specifically referring to stolen photos, re-uploaded and intentionally separated from their creators:
"critics say the rules will help big firms fleece photographers and flog pictures that users upload to social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram."
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2013/05/orphan-works
So your limited personal definition of orphaned works is clearly false in the context of the past 8+ years of legislative proposals, and your insults of "trolling" against anyone who tries to explain this to you are pointless and obnoxious. Please engage in the discussion in a factual and professional manner, or go somewhere else to issue cheap shots and insults.
+Dana Blankenhorn – I offered you a chance yesterday to enlighten me on what other instances you're talking about. (you didn't respond)
At this point you're just talking past Jeff with, as he just said, your own pet-definitions, and your troll remarks are coming from left field.
Perhaps you have a valid point, that there needs to be another category here, but that in no way negates the theft issue that Jeff is talking about.
BTW, the "market" is a fictional, abstract entity. People are the actors within it, and the only person who can abandon a possession is the owner. If this did not happen, then possessions changing hands without permission is still theft, is it not?
+Malthus John Oh! You offered me "a chance." And since I didn't take :the chance" in the way it was "offered," I no longer count as human?
Copyright needs to get back to its purpose, which was to provide incentives for people to create more stuff. That means its terms must be shortened, and it should be allowed to run out when the economic value of the work is gone.
That said, there are many technical ways to easily protect copyright protected materials online, including photographs. Before you scream to lock up your fellow citizens, try them.
+Dana Blankenhorn – I used that word (chance) in reference to the 'gentlemanly' expectation of a response when you ask someone a question. That's all. Drama much? You count as human in my book. You're even welcome for dinner!
I agree that the length could be shortened.
I'm dubious whenever the word "incentive" pops up in this context. I don't believe (because science shows otherwise) that anyone, including artists & entrepreneurs generally need much outside influence in order to do their thing.
I also did not scream, or even mention the word 'law'. You'll note all my suggestions centered around handling it with technology within the distribution agents. It's already illegal, so new laws won't help much.