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)
I routinely register my photos. If I had found one of my photos getting ripped off so widely, I would have no hesitation in taking money from the thieves who pirated it. I think the photographer was legally unsophisticated. Or a wimp. Or both.
This is scary stuff. It’s a good lesson as to why watermarking images online is important. I’ve never really been bothered by the political or artistic derivatives of my images, but selling products is a completely different story. I hate to give someone props for doing the right thing, but kudos to the editors at Nat Geo. I think it will be interesting to see how DRM develops in the photo world over the next feew years as situations like this continue to occur. I think the best thing for the time being is education for both up and coming photographers and consumers/web users (in a positive and constructive manner of course.)
Aren’t we going after the wrong people here. The horse has already bolted. Why cannot photo publishing websites like flickr stop people from copy other peoples works in the first place. In this day and age I fined it amazing that they have not or cannot install a program that stops downloading or coping of image that have stated copyright in the first place. Where do they stand on this matter? Don’t they have a moral obligation to protect and insure copyright law is upheld.
Bottom line, if you post your stuf online, its gone!! Watermark? CS5 = goodbye – content aware. If you want to sell it, then sell it. If you post it to Flicker, you just gave it up! He sould make his own t-shirts, stickers, cards… and reap the rewards of all the free press the theives have given him. At this point, its impossible to get the apple back from the those that have consumed it, so just use it to sell your own apples! Welcome to the new world.