[art] When You're Not Successful And People Still Help Themselves To Your Content

3327.

My friend, Jeff Fisher, has been a successful graphic designer for a very long time and I much admire him. He's published two very good books and put himself out there in the world in what still seems to be a courageous way: He stands up for himself in the matter of holding people accountable for simply helping himself to his work, which he has gotten justly paid for, but is just as likely to see his work used across the world by small businesses who don't understand that graphic work has value as well as by desperate designers in 'crowdsourcing' online logo factories.

A personal blog he maintains is http://jefffisherlogomotives.blogspot.com/, and it's got good reading there.

It's kind of a funny thing to acknowledge but I, too, have been similarly done. It's a funny thing that obscurity and lack of success does not bring immunity from this. In a recent posting I mentioned that a few people have, in the past, helped themselves to my own online stuff, specifically, the PDX downtown skyline picture I snapped in 2004. It's even being used in unauthorized places today, as this Google Images search will show.

The commonality I mentioned in that post that the three authorized users have is that, at first, they found the image on the web and simply appropriated it, without asking. At the moment I discovered that, I was a little wounded; after all, all three were fairly savvy online users, all had good ideas, and all were good people. I say this because I want to pointedly add that once I contacted them they apologized and since I liked them and what they did, I agreed to license use of the picture because of that personal reason.

But I think it goes to show that no matter how obscure or unsuccessful you are, you put something up on the web, out it goes and, Berne convention or no, people will use it. Now, I still, after all these years, have profited pretty much not at all because of another thing; I had, and still have, no real strategy for holding such kyping accountable. I'm not the DMCA sort, but simply helping yourself to what I do online without so much as checking in with me isn't cool either.

So this is a work in progress, still, even 12 years after the original was taken.

And, yes, I might have imagined that this would happen ... but I might have also imagined people could send me an email on it. And I've evolved in more ways than that; I'm much, much less inclined to use something off the 'net without making sure it's available for such (I'm thankful to Wikimeda commons for this … most people there put stuff in expecting it to be shared and used), or simply creating my own (I've the skill to do so).

I guess what I'd say to anyone putting stuff on the web right now is, have some sort of plan in place for dealing with when people help themselves to your stuff.

Be ready to contact them. Because, for some reason, they won't contact you.

And so it goes.

[art] My Photos Get Around, Tom Peterson Edition

3073.

Casting ones art upon the waters is a dicey (as in, 'throw of the') proposition.

One hopes that the exposure gets one the good kind of notoriety, perhaps the notice that encourages people to support you, either with money or, at the very least, encouragement. And, just like the roll of the notional dice, it's a random thing.

Latterly, I've found this photo:




… the Tom Peterson's that was, out in the wild. Two places.

First, and most flattering, is this:

Which is in the Tom Peterson's Facebook channel and refers to a BuzzFeed listicle here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/portlandia/16-surefire-signs-you-grew-up-in-portland.

It illustrates point number nine:

It's not only flattering that someone thought my photo was nifty enough to illustrate, but that it did the job it was supposed to do. Also, being chosen to illustrate a Buzzfeed listicle, I think, equals achievement unlocked in some way. So what if I'm an amateur? Every photo I take, I think composition. Every one. If there was any artistic technique anyone should learn before doing any sort of art, it's composition. Randomness isn't a sin, mind … but if you're making any sort of visual impact, you're not only taking a picture, you're orchestrating a scene.

Take pictures that way and even your snapshots become memorable.

Another place I found is a blog entry. Disappointingly, I was not credited. Now, I know by putting the photo out on the intarwebz, I take this risk; depending upon the kindness of strangers. Fools' errand these days, to be sure, but if we don't share, we wind up having a very dull world. In September, 2012, a blog called Noticing SW Portland, which is fortunate to have been linked to by OregonLive according to the About section, commented on getting free tomatoes from a friend with the post Tom and Tomatoes, in as much as free IS a very good price, an idea I am pretty much down with. The illustration to evoke Tom?

Yepper. That's mine. Renamed, too.

For what it's worth, I'm not going to run this woman down and hassle her about it; I did post it to Flickr with a CC-BY-SA license, meaning anyone can have it, remix it even for commercial purposes, as long as they credited me for it. Because of this, I've changed the licensing to CC-BY-ND-SA, reducing the rights I'm releasing … no more commercial re-use, and no more redistribution if you remix it.

Now, I'm aware of the legal status of the CC licenses. I use them as a notice; it's easier to affix a Creative Commons license with my approximate desires than it is to endlessly tell people how I feel about it. CC isn't hard to parse and its something everyone should be aware of.

So, by posting to Flickr and affixing the CC-BY-SA, I made my intentions clear. Buzzfeed recognized that; a local blogger did not.

If she does happen by this post, though, I do ask one thing; just credit the photo, and we're square.

Even though I may be seen as an amateur by the world, my photos are not free for the taking. They might be free for the asking. At least you can ask. Terms can always be negotiable. 

[art] Fool Brittannia: Brit Photogs Like to Take Pix In Public? You'll Love This …

2332.

… and by love,  we mean, of course, hate. Looks like the Her Majesty's Government is out to get photographers, mostly by making copyright much harder to maintain, and by making it impossible to get pixs in public without going out and getting releases from pretty much everyone you might meet.

I don't know what it is about politicos sometimes. The Intarmets makes them crazy. I personally acknowledge that some tweaking might be necessary in the age of drag and copy, even though I think the DMCA is used more as a bludgeon than a shield, but that's what you get when you let 19th century thinkers in the 20th Century try to define the landscape of the 21st.

The DMCA has its flaws and its strengths. But if you think the DMCA is bad news, you'll probably take it in a choice between it and the UK's proposed Digital Economy Bill thats making its way through Parliament right now, though what I've read of it will do more to strangle whatever digital economy they have there – at least amongst the little guys.

This article at the web site Photoactive portrays two millstones that the Lord Mandelson is trying to hang round the necks of British photogs right now. Both are pretty obnoxious.

The first one is bad enough: it will effectively strip copyright from works photographers create unless they register each one – and each version of each one – with a government agency that is yet to be created. That runs counter to all conventional wisdom about creative ownership – and that CV seems to echo the Berne Convention, which is a fairly-commonly accepted international standard, which boils down to, essentially, when you create it, you copyright it automatically. That's a very clear, understandable, and common-sense standard that anyone can wrap their beans around and seems quite reasonable. Of course, you can't charge for that; that's probably the rub.

The second one is, if it could be possible, even worse. One of the things about taking public photos is that you don't have to get permission from everyone in the photo to publish it. There is a principle called a "reasonable expectation of privacy", which essentially boils down to if you don't want to have a picture of your face taken in public, don't show your face in public. That's why they call it public. I shudder to think of all the epochal photos of people that would never have happened if the proposed UK standard was in force anywhere … I think of The Kiss (excerpted illustration right, used under fair use) by Alfred Eisenstaedt, the famous photo of a grateful sailor bowling over a pretty nurse on V-J Day in 1945 in Times Square.

Under the Digital Economy Bill proposal, any picture taken in public will be considered to contain private information on anyone in the frame. That means you can take a picture in the street but you can't publish it unless you either pay or get a release from anyone who'd of been in the shot?

Could you do that? I couldn't. I'm willing to bet that, no matter what resources that any UK photog has, they don't have nearly enough to secure the rights to take entire street scenes. And I doubt The Kiss would have ever happened.

More locally, some time ago, PMerc's Matt Davis (if I correctly recall the sitch) snapped a picture of a fellow reclining on his stoop in NE somewhere, maybe it was up Alberta or something, and when it appeared on his blog, the subject demanded compensation.

While the area of his front porch might be physically sacrosanct, since you can be seen by God, Zeus, Horus and everyone on your front porch, you don't have the right to demand payment from anyone who happens to snap you. And the picture itself was kind of charming in a disheveled, slatternly way. How much of life would we all miss through the eyes of inspired photographers if we decided that just because you were in a public place you really were in a private one? Or how little sense that actually makes?

Of course, the Lord Mandelson probably thinks nothing of it. And Britain is, sadly, a country where there are so many CCTV cameras that even George Orwell's house is famously under scrutiny by several. And some English songwriter made a song that was about what mad dogs and Englishmen do.

Well, this law is about as daft as it gets, and that's before you even try thinking about the curtailments of civil liberties – a subject I'll leave for the reader to deduce.

As far as dogs go, this sure looks like one. It's to be hoped that cooler UK heads prevail.

You don't promote a digital economy by preventing the proles from taking part in it.

Technorati Tags: art, photography, UK, Great Britain, England, Digital Economy Bill

[IP] The Associated Press Protects Something, Somehow

2173.This is apropos to anyone who thinks about design, blogs, or blogs about design, because in the end it goes back to copyright.

Copyright is something every blogger should think about, actually. In the days before something could be copied-and-pasted with just a few presses of buttons, only those who published were the one that had presses. These days, of course, everyone with a few hundred dollars, a netbook, and a net connection, can lift and republish whatever content they see fit. Even, most of the time (Flickr's "spaceballs" notwithstanding) it's a simple matter of dragging (or saving) a photo to your desktop and – bingo – you have an illustration.

Copyright is the device by which, in a perfect world, every content creator would be ensured a way to make money off the "sweat" of their creative brow, all the time, or at least be ensured of the credit. And I know few people who disagree with that idea. But a World Wide Web who is desperate for content is a gestalt entity that can be very greedy at times. Content is repurposed without the creators' content a great deal of the time. Even my own meagre talent has been 'borrowed' without permission from time to time.

On the up side, my strategy for responding to this has been to request credit from the people who borrow my work, and in the give-and-take environment of the Web, this has worked rather well. So far, every use of one of my banal photos has been credited, after I requested it.

I believe that you take a certain risk when simply posting your photos to a blog, which is a very easy place to 'pick' stuff away from, that someone will simply borrow what you've posted. I don't believe that when you do so, you allow that your work is available for giving away and you shouldn't expect be enabled to do something about it. That is to say, expect to see your stuff copied-and-pasted, but you can still put your foot down and say "credit me" or "pay me", you don't give away that right.

Which means that, as far as the Associated Press and I go, we are really on the same page (you'll excuse the dead-tree pun). But the thing about the AP's new DRM system, as this article notes, is that while they call it a "wrapper", it's not seeming to wrap much. I'm not quite sure here where the 'protection' comes from.

As an expert quoted in the referenced article states (and actually, with more clarity than my circumlocution):

You'll be forgiven if you find it difficult to square the reality of hNews with the AP's pronouncements about it. Ed Felten, the eminent Princeton computer security researcher, couldn't figure it out, either.

"It was hard to make sense of this, so I went looking for more information," he wrote on his blog. "AP posted a diagram of the system, which only adds to the confusion—your satisfaction with the diagram will be inversely proportional to your knowledge of the technology... hNews is a handy way of annotating news stories with information about the author, dateline, and so on. But it doesn't 'encapsulate' anything in a 'wrapper,' nor does it do much of anything to facilitate metering, monitoring, or paywalls."

My reading of the article is that this new system goes down to a sort of markup, HTML essentially, that embeds rights and tracking info into the article, which is fine – as far as HTML goes. But if there's really a phalanx of people repurposing AP content at will without so much as attribution, then it won't take too much gumption from such types to strip the HTML right out.

And if you're the type who doesn't do any more than strip a few quotes or a paragraph out, fair-use-style, and link back? Well, the AP says those aren't the droids they're looking for.

On a tangetial tack, I find it amusing that the AP is insisting on a DRM approach – even though even Apple has abandoned that idea. DRM doesn't seem to be the holy grail that big-money content creators have thought it would be.

What does it all go down to? Even in these DMCA days, it's good to have what might seem an old-fashioned approach to using other content. A good one would be:

1. Remembering that Fair Use, the princple in United States law that allows you to quote, excerpt, and use excerpts from published works for your own blog articles, doesn't allow you to borrow wholesale. If you're using more than a few paragraphs, it might be time to look into asking permission.
2. Just because it's easily grabbable on-line doesn't mean the creator put it on line for you to use at will. The Berne Convention, which the US subscribes to, implies copyright on all original content.
3. If you want to be sure you have permission to use something, ask! You'll be pleasantly surprised how many content creators will allow you to use something if you only ask them (and credit them).
4. Don't simply repurpose content and figure the creator will 'appreciate the exposure'. Payment and/or credit is much better. If I could make bank on the 'exposure' I've gotten so far, I could retire right this very real second. Exposure doesn't really seem to translate into fame and fortune.
5. If you feel you must borrow content, get in the habit of crediting it as a matter of course. Whatever you do with it, link back to the creator.

As a relevant example, this article I wrote here a few days ago now features a panel from a recent Mother Goose and Grimm strip that I thought was topical and incredibly funny. It would have been grand to simply help myself to the image I wanted (computers make it easy as pi) but it seemed to me a better way (especially since I can just link to it anyway) would be to get permission. After a polite request in which I exactly specified exactly what my purpose was, permission was given – not only now do I have a great post with a great illo, but I can also caption the graphic with the phrase used with permission, which looks slick and professional.

Copyright is important, and too important not to think about. Especially since everyone is creating content, pretty much all the time.

Technorati Tags: Copyright, C, DRM, digital rights management, online copyright, Associated Press