Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

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

<< < (3/9) > >>

wraith808:
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.
-rxantos (March 19, 2011, 04:16 PM)
--- End quote ---

So the same copyright protections don't apply to him as to everyone else?

All the photos i upload to Flickr are under "All Rights Reserved" and i also write it in the description just in case..

--- End quote ---

If someone did the same to someone with the means and motivation to take legal action, that he did no work to come up with the image would not hold up in a court of law.  And how much something is worth is rarely a function of the time it takes to create said work in the case of photographers.  Photojournalists get paid quite a bit for just snapping a picture that is At most. including creative thinking, one day. The work itself, 1 hour.  So what's the difference here?

jgpaiva:
This kind of reminds me of a psychology experiment I saw somewhere:
One person is given 2 choices:
1 - he gets 5 bucks and the person next to him gets nothing.
2 - he gets 10 bucks and the person next to him gets 20 bucks.

Personally, I would always choose option 2, but incredibly some people choose option 1.
In this matter, my opinion is this: had he never had the misuse of his picture (which I see as publicity), would he ever have the cover of the national geographic? Would he actually make any money from the picture he posted to flickr? Also, if the people who made money on his photo had to pay for it, would they even buy it? In this situation, I tend to go for the "no publicity if bad publicity" moto.

My father (a civil engineer) told me an interesting story that sounds pretty much like this: In the early 80's, when Autocad came out, it was way worse than its competitor (which I can't recall the name). However, it had a main difference: it was way easier to copy. People ended up getting hooked on Autocad since they could get it for free, and now it has a very large share in its market (which I would say it's a monopoly, but I'm not sure).

I'm pretty sure that if this guy knows how to manage his publicity from now on, I'd say he has more open doors now than he had before his picture got posted everywhere.

AndyM:
One person is given 2 choices:
-jgpaiva (March 20, 2011, 10:26 AM)
--- End quote ---
Was he given a choice?

JavaJones:
I tend to agree with jgpaiva overall. The opportunities this creates for him are more than he likely would otherwise have had. So although there is unfairness in the profiting from his work by others, he too can now potentially profit more. Interestingly, although he was *not* given a choice, the end result may be much like the $5/$10 experiment; he may be getting less than others off his own work (who knows), but at least he's getting something, and that's better than nothing. It doesn't change the underlying injustice of abuse of rights to his creative work, and as a matter of principle one might decide to get hung up on that, but in the end, practically speaking, of what value is it? I'm very much in favor of standing up for one's principles, but ultimately I do feel that doing so ought to have practical value in some way...

- Oshyan

wraith808:
Sometimes it's not the money, it's the principle.  And people are equating this to "at least he has more opportunities".  What if that's not the point?  He clearly states in his video that he doesn't care about the fair use by people who aren't making money off of it.  That would tend to make the experiment *not* apply to him, wouldn't it?  And that would tend to make the arguments that he's getting something from the use of his art irrelevant.  I'm sure that the first person who took his artwork wasn't thinking 'wow, he'll get exposure and might get something from this'.  That NatGeo wanted to make sure that they erred on the side of caution, did their homework, and offered him a contract pretty much seems a spurious argument when looked at from this perspective.

As AndyM rightly says above:
One person is given 2 choices:
-jgpaiva (March 20, 2011, 10:26 AM)
--- End quote ---
Was he given a choice?
-AndyM (March 20, 2011, 11:45 AM)
--- End quote ---

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page