Posts by halftone 21 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Mar 2013
How the fuck do I eat attribution? Creators need a sustainable ecosystem. No ecosystem, then only rich kids and hobbyists can create. I've done my share of starving in a garret, thanks. The world certainly doesn't owe me a living, but I don't owe you or anyone else free stuff, whether or not you are gracious enough to tell other people from whom you stole it.
I believe I downloaded and tried one of these RC apps, for Samsung TV. It found the TV and controlled it very well. A few weeks later I found my 2GB data allowance had been used up - which never happens. I took a look at what had been using it and the app had uploaded 169MB to somewhere in the previous 24hrs, despite me not having used it at all during that period. I deleted it, after leaving that info in a review at the Play Store.
Eerily reminiscent of the Hargreaves Review, and the nonsense that followed on from that. Wherein Google, salaried academics, Big Culture and thieving punters all whispered in the IPO's shell-like how all that archaic copyright stuff was preventing the economic progress of them getting something for nothing.
You really don't understand that when you hire an electrician, you hire him to wire one installation? You cannot then use his work to rewire 10 or 100,000 more houses at no extra cost to yourself. You want your lawn mowed, it will cost less than mowing all the grass in the world. There's no need for copyright, because the value for both parties is fixed to the amount of work.
The only value of a photo is its reproduceability, and that value in going to be different for 1 copy than it is for x copies forever, and being able to sell the image to the rest of the world for life+70 years. Probably you don't actually need or require copyright anyway. You want a license for whatever use you envisage, and if you need exclusivity, that too can be fixed into the contract. This will be vastly cheaper.
It's like taking a taxi. More use = more money. If you want the title to the car expect a higher price.
Most photographers just don't like selling copyright anyway. Not many want to look back on their life's work as just a pile of paid yellowing bills. We actually care about our work. It's what motivated us to try and get good at it in the first place.
Things that occur to me:
- monkeys cannot own copyright, since they have no status in copyright law. The monkey is just an arbitrary event, qualitatively no different from an equipment fault that caused spontaneous exposure
- the photo would remain, like Schrodinger's cat, of indeterminate reality until extracted from the camera, and post produced by Slater - none of which the monkey could have done, or did
- Slater's post work would be sufficient to assert copyright, ie it is not purely mechanical but involves creative input
As far as I can see this just shifts the creative input required for copyright, from the moment of exposure to the post-production, without which there never would have been a photo except as an unobserved abstraction.
Wikipedia is now out of date. That is the point here: Government has introduced new exceptions to copyright, with 'quotation' being one of them. What 'fair dealing' means in the context of quotation will only be established by case law.
'Quotation' is not the only problematic new exception. The expanded education exception will allow the education industry pretty much free use of anything, and on a massive global scale due to the proliferation of MOOC's (Massive Open Online Courses) and VLE's. It's hard to see how text book publishers will survive.
Photographers have expended vast effort trying to educate the idiots at the IPO over the past 8 years, and last summer's consultation on the new exceptions pointed out all these problems with the draft SI's. As with everything else we have said, we were ignored. IPO has no excuse: they are wilfully stupid, malign and arrogant and the entire department needs putting in a sack and drowning.
'Copyright infringement is not theft'
I see this moronic statement a lot, invariably from thieves who create nothing and want to feel it's a victimless crime. It's a zenith of entitlement: not only entitled to take without paying, but entitled to feel no guilt or responsibility toward the victim, with no awareness of consequences.
You big stupid child. Do you not realise that you harm independent creators the most, and you play right into the hands of corporate aggregators and publishers, whose product is you, Soylent Green.
Do you not realise that the selfish culture you espouse is spreading off the web into wider society, as untenably low wages, workfare, unpaid internships, elective slavery?
No small gallery or shop can survive where 9 out of 10 customers are looters and shoplifters. We don't have the DRM, the legal teams, the ability to buy government and shape law. And no, I didn't make that number up. My own sample audit showed 92% of repros of my work are infringements. This is consistent with ASMP statements in the US, and Picscout's findings. Please grow up. and quick.
Ah, the pitiable whingeing of freetard entitlement, never a thought for the victim.
Much as I loathe and detest Getty, sending out those scary letters was probably the best - in fact the only constructive - thing they have done.
As a pro photographer I am sick to death of my photos being stolen and used in ways I would never permit at any price. I had put hundreds of pictures online for people to look at and hopefully enjoy, and from 1996 until a few years ago people understood what was fair and what was not. Now I can't do that any more. In 2012 I did a sample audit and found infringing uses outnumbered legit 14:1; all had metadata stripped, almost none linked back to me, a majority claimed to be copyright of the thieves.
Naturally, like any shop in a neighbourhood of looters, this is untenable. I've taken the internet's advice that 'if you don't want it stolen, don't put it on the internet'. Of course this is elective suicide, but you leave me no alternative.
According to you, I am supposed to spend the next several unpaid man-years sending out 7,000 DMCA take-down notices. Frankly I'd have preferred that Getty send the boys round with a nailgun. However this is now academic: this embed wheeze is a play to become the Google of image libraries and Getty are back on form as a fat destructive parasite. It's another nail in the coffin for professional creators, another neoliberal triumph of siphoning wealth uphill c/o the seductive fib of 'free', when every penny of ad revenue is a tax on goods and services that nobody can escape. It's just an illusion that some other mug will pay. Wake the fuck up, internet. You get what you pay for, and handing control to advertisers, axegrinders and corporations is not freedom of any sort.
Not really. You're getting mixed up, wrong Boogeyman. The reason digitised PD artworks from British museums are 'copyright' is that the museums did very lucrative deals with Corbis back in the late 1990's. The museums gained cash, Corbis gained the exclusive right to digitise and license. This was certainly invidious behaviour on the part of the museums and galleries, considering that most of the art had either been purchased with taxpayers money, or donated or bequeathed to the public. But our cultural institutions have long been schizoid, part philanthropy, part money-grubbing gravy train.
Having done the work to digitise, Corbis naturally assert copyright of their digitised versions. It is questionable whether that is valid because there is no copyright in mechanical copies, although there is a counter-argument that accurate copies of paintings require a great deal of skill and judgement (they do - it's not like photocopying). However nobody has dared challenge the validity as far as I know, because in general it is cheaper to pay Corbis repro fees than pick a fight with an organisation whose lawyers have access to Mr Gates significantly large wallet.
Despite BT's quoted claim that service would be 'restored by Friday', it was 3hrs short of a week before we had phone service (& ADSL) restored in Hanwell W7, on an 840 exchange business line. It came back 0830 today (Tuesday). This is the second outage in 6months, the previous was 3 days.
There are no FTTC cabinets round here - no Infinity, ever apparently - because the copper is suspended on poles back to the exchange.
I'd have moved to Virgin cable by now if it wasn't for their tariffs, their traffic shaping, their absence of fixed IP and their local reputation for sheer bloody ostrich in dealing with problems on this lump of ex-NTL network.
You do realise, I hope, that "privatised" railways enjoy approximately 3x x the amount of public subsidy that nationalised BR ever received? £3.9Bn in 2011/12, 35% of revenue, came straight out of taxpayer pockets.Subsidy went as low as 26% at one point, but then the accidents due to cost-cut maintenance became embarrassingly lethal and Railtrack collapsed,. Perhaps your idealised view of privatisation contains nuts..
"Let's repeat the mantra of the internet again, if you don't want people to copy your digital property - don't put it on the web!
The internet is like a public street. If you leave something out there there's no guarantee that the public will behave in a trustworthy manner and not take it."
Where do you park your car? If I can take the numberplates off, or they've mysteriously fallen off, I can have it?
Intellectual property is NOT the ownership of ideas, it is ownership of a particular realisation of ideas in some medium. Nothing prevents anyone creating their own song about Strawberry Fields or writing about a school for wizards, or taking their own pic of a London bus on Westminster bridge, They just must not copy someone else's work.
There is no serious objection anywhere to genuine orphan works being made available for cultural purposes, but there is objection to OW being made available for commercial exploitation. Especially whilst HMG refuses to impose any meaningful duty of care in preserving ownership information.
OW is something of a canard however. The vast majority of inaccessible works are inaccessible because owners and publishers can see no economic case for publishing them.
Everybody with a dog in this fight should go and read Thomas Macauley's 1841 speeches to Parliament on copyright. He set out the reasons for copyright and foresaw all the problems and the need for balance that we are now grappling with (and screwing up totally), http://www.baen.com/library/palaver4.htm Of course most will not, because they've convinced themselves that the world has changed and their sense of entitlement counts above all else.
Yes, registries are coming, notably Plus as I wrote about here http://www.epuk.org/Opinion/985/on-the-plus-side
Plus is now involved in the implementation of the Hargreaves Hub and also EU plans.
But the reality is that whilst that will enable people to protect their work more effectively if they choose to, the vast majority of photos will never be registered and will be open to exploitation. The legal framework for their use is absolutely pivotal, and government seems bent on adjusting copyright to the economic advantage of large aggregators and publishers on the one hand, and on the other to indulge the voting public. There is an absolute refusal to understand that virtually all creative work that these two fight over is the work of individuals who are piggy in the middle. No corporation ever created a single song, or photograph, or novel, or poem. It isn't clear who will, exceot those wealthy enough to indulge themselves as a hobby, once copyright has been inverted by OW and ECL. Both of which enable corporates to grant themselves permission to use and fling some money in a pot, to be collected by the creator if they ever find out.
Very few creative people will leave the UK, as (mostly) low paid vocational workers that is not an option. Average UK freelance pro photographer income is £18.2k according to the most recent BPC survey http://www.british-photographic-council.org/news/british-photographic-council-industry-survey-shows-true-value-of-creators-copyright.
Most will simply stop creating and either find other jobs that provide a living, or become unemployed or prematurely retired. Jonathan is unusual in that he can adapt to shooting in and selling to Germany, whilst still living in UK. Most of us cannot.
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