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)
This affects the music industry in much the same way. Good luck being an up and coming musician who wants to eat and live under a roof.
Well, definitely an awful practice and I am sure many lawyers would willingly take such a case to return the money to its owner. I think it’s worth considering. It’s not a shame to ask for your rightful remuneration. Regards!
First off, let me say that what happened to him is wrong. Crazy and exciting but never-the-less wrong. Next, I guess i’m trying to see where the line is with art. Do artists always have to be paid? I can see why some would, but occasionally you have that one who comes along and makes a name for themselves without receiving anything in return. This piece should be a great motivator to him to continue to create art that touches individuals. And maybe next time he will make some cash off it!
“Do artists always have to be paid?”
Just as much as accountants have to be paid, engineers have to be paid, doctors, you get the point. Being an artist is not equal to being a volunteer, unless specifically stated by the artist, through a Creative Commons license for example. It is a full time job after all.
“Making a name for yourself” means nothing if people can’t value you to the point of being able to present a fair proposal on the table, a pragmatic proposal that falls outside of romanticism (eg “exposure” or “free beer”).
It’s one thing to see all these people freely using his piece for their own purposes (commercial or personal), it’s another having those very same people (especially corporations and small businesses) open their wallet and actually showing formal respect and pay their dues to the guy, as they do with anything else they consume and sell.
PS: It’s also impossible for you to make a name for yourself when the picture is shared around with no proper identification attached to it, or worse, when others pass it off as their own.
What I see here is some sort of unintentional symbiosis: he never affixed any copyright notice or watermark on the image itself, and never really took notice (he mentions going back after 6 months to check on his page) until it was too late. Would any of this have happened had he been a bit more careful? Who knows really.
I don’t understand… why not file a lawsuit? Sure most of these there is nothing you can do, but book covers? Magazine covers? playing cards?
A lawsuit against “who” (or rather, how many) and with what money?
I’m a bit surprised at how happy he seems that his photo has been stolen and profited from by the thieves. I can understand the desire for recognition and getting the photo out there as an artist. But seeing others take credit and profit from it is sickening.
Just another reminder to watermark your photos (especially when posting them on Flickr and similar sites that people think are sources of ‘free’ photos) and protect your copyright.