This started making the rounds yesterday. The Stolen Scream: A Story About Noam Galai. I thought it important to post here. Wanted your thoughts to be a part of the conversation.
IMHO, this is:
Exciting.
Scary.
Different.
Opportunistic.
Cannibalistic.
Visionary.
Divisive.
Should we celebrate it or hate it? Lawsuits or a new suit of clothes that recognizes the times?
Two obvious sides with no obvious answer. And on and on… It’s our newest classic challenge as a rapidly evolving industry with the rapid deployment and sharing of information.
What say you?
(via the nice folks at fstoppers)
Cannibalistic.
A lot of people are blaming the companies, but the CEO didn’t design the cover for their mag. The account didn’t design the companies flier. Another artist did. Even the lame, wanna be Banksy street “artist” shown can’t even be creative enough to come up with their own work. And I know advertising agencies are jumping on flickr to snag some free photos. In a time where the clients budget is getting slashed, so much so that istock is too expensive, they will go to flickr. I know. I’ve seen it done at an agency I used to work at. People think that if photos are on a massive photo sharing website that’s it’s public property, but if you keep your photos on your own site it’s more like it’s private property.
Don’t get me wrong though. I totally think it’s wrong. And Yahoo! (flickr) says they will back you up:
“If you believe that your work has been copied in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, or that your intellectual property rights have been otherwise violated, please provide Yahoo!’s Agent for Notice with the following information (your “Notice”):”
Actually the CEO of a company can be found PERSONALLY liable for the actions of the company–see the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. It’s happened at Limewire and many other companies. This is one of the reasons CEO compensation is so through the roof. (not legal advice, look it up).
I feel for the guy. His photos were clearly stolen with no attribution or compensation. He’s taken a pretty passive stance though. Sure, there’s no way to 100% protect your work. But he certainly can find someone who will fight to get him what he is entitled to.
Copyright is intended to promote creativity. But it does exactly the opposite, as many responses in this post prove. The ONLY reason this image went on this journey, was because creative people chose to ignore the copyright. If it had been registered and litigated from the beginning, it would have been ignored. Also, many of the images shown in this video are adaptive and like it or not, are too far removed from the original to be classified as infringement. i.e. derivative works that fall under fair use.
I’m of the opinion that this guy was indeed slighted out of a few grand, particularly in terms of the published works, but even that would depend on the countries that used image and what their IP stances are with the US. The important thing many of you aren’t focusing on is how much MORE money he’s likely to earn as a result of people hearing about this story and discovering his work?
@ markh. you should watch the panel from today’s post at:
http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2011/03/keep-our-rights-share-our-work/
This does not excuse the results but I wonder how many of the infringements were actually intentional. To spread like this, the image was being stolen from those that had already stolen it and if the original theft uploaded again to Flickr / etc with a different license, things get messy quickly. The video made it clear that the original creator was long lost.