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Fascinating story about the consequences of sharing your art in the Internet age

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Renegade:
Here's a twist...

You're standing around somewhere when someone nearby snaps a picture of some of their friends and you're in the background doing something. You do not own the copyright in the image... Now suppose the composition has some sort of unique quality like being funny or whatever, and you play a significant role in that. It goes viral or is used commercially.

Is that a problem?

jgpaiva:
I see things in a different light, as that's the way I feel with the way I work.
An example: I distribute GridMove for free for everybody but companies, so that the publicity from personal use can get me some enterprise users. And It has worked a few times already. I'm pretty sure that if I asked for a registration fee from everyone I wouldn't get 10% of the revenue I get with this licensing scheme.

I agree that there are is a important points here: his licensing was not respected. The comparison would be if someone used GridMove's sources and created a new app from it, sold it and it got very popular that would make me terribly sad. Still, if in the end some company found that they were using illegal material and wanted to buy me my version for more than 100 times the money I've gotten up to this point for this work, I'd sure be glad!

I understand it's terrible when someone's work gets misused. What I don't agree is that this specific guy is a victim in his story.

Now, the point that app raised is a different story. It's terrible that his photo is spread all over, but I guess renegade is right: today, any image becomes a stupid meme from one second to the next: any image of ourselves posted on the web could become widespread in days. This actually makes me wonder if I shouldn't rethink the places where my photographs are posted.

[edit]
AndyM: I think you made a good point also: whereas I do have a choice on the way I license GridMove, the way this guy's work was used was not his choice, I'm not sure how I feel about that.

AndyM:
I have no quibble with any of the logic here (can't say that very often about a conversation, except maybe around here).

I do think the question of choice is quite important, but in the real world there's often little or no choice about things that happen, and perhaps only some choice about how to deal with those things after the fact.

iphigenie:
There's a big difference between commercial use in ads, shirts etc. and non commercial reuse for learning, sharing, sampling etc.

And the greater good is NOT criminalising the latter in order to prevent the former. Not matter how good a story you trot out.

I have had my images reused, my copy copied word for word to be used on a competitors brochure etc. but I will never consider that in order to protect me for this, people should be given the right to take children to court for "plagiarizing" Harry Potter on a home video, or make it ok to put limitations on my device that prevent totally legitimate use in order to protect from hypothetical non legitimate use.

After all we can also never forget that everything we create, write, code is hugely inspired from things we have seen, read etc. that has someone else's copyright. We are all sharers, remixers and plagiarists - learn-by-by-copying-and-doing is how we are wired.

For example the image in question is hugely reminiscent of art that others were doing before this guy did it - he inspired himself and copied the style, and it is very similar to many others - it doesnt make it right to pinch it, not when it would take the shirtmaker 10 minutes to do a good enough image to use... On the other hand most of the other "offenses" he mentions are people inspired by the t shirts to do a graffiti... and articles about the story.

Actually it is not clear at all how this all started, who was inspired by what where...

PS: many of my "reusable" images on flickr are CC of course i dont mean those when i say that my images were reused without permission

J-Mac:

Or is anyone suggesting that a 1 day of work  is supposed to bring you money for the rest of your life?-rxantos (March 19, 2011, 04:16 PM)
--- End quote ---

Depends...  If he worked at a video store - or at any "job" - for a day, the paycheck he receives is all he gets.

But he created a piece of art - and though it is only a photograph, it is still his "art" - not just performed one day of work. As long as other people decide to sell his art and make money, then yes, that is supposed to bring him money for as long as anyone is using his art commercially!

Not my opinion, but black letter law.

As of his work stolen, either he was really really REALLY dumb to put work on flickr and expect that no one will use without telling him. Or he did it on purpose to get publicity for his work. Either way, he does not deserve pity.
--- End quote ---

Really dumb? Maybe so. How does that make it OK to steal his art? And yes, that is stealing; how can you honestly think otherwise? People do "dumb" things all the time, but that still doesn’t give anyone the right to steal from them because of it! Do you really believe what you said there? If a person performs a "Dumb" act then nothing that happens as a result is wrong? Nothing can be considered criminal because after all, the person did a "dumb" thing? Please tell me that you don’t truly believe that. Sure, there's a lot he could have done to protect his work... Well, actually the only real protection is to not put anything of value online for display. Of course the value of anything isn't really determined until you find out what people are willing to pay for it.  But in no case should theft have to occur in order to find out.

Jim

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