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The Art of Intellectual Property
dpilgrim writes "When digital technology meets intellectual property, most of the attention focuses on the movie industry or the music business. I was surprised to discover how much of an impact there is in smaller areas like professional photography, and put together some reflections on my experience." This is why when I get married I want to make sure I contract only for the photographer's labor.
I have to agree with the professional photographer in this instance. This isn't a case of fighting an uber-huge corporation that has billions of dollars to spare. This guy is effectively cheating a good source of revenue out of a photographer who is trying to earn a living.
;) As one who has tried to get his art featured in several galleries, I can attest to this! Let's face it- photographers earn a living off of one thing- the final proof. It's very difficult to set up a shot, get the lighting perfect, and have a harmony of composition just right- combine this with the fact that many people want their wedding pictures to be *perfect* and you can see the photographer's dilemma. That shot that you've worked so very hard on is being distributed to hundreds of people, who will never pay you a dime for your efforts. Even worse is the person who stands over your shoulder just to snap the same shot you do... Come on people! It's not like the photographer is being unreasonable! She's simply trying to recoup her losses and earn a living... Oh, and if you don't think that photography is an expesnive business, allow me to demonstrate. A medium format camera (5 x 7 negative, which most professionals use for weddings) runs in the range of $1000-$3000 for the body(!!) alone! The lens, on top of that, will run somewhere from $100-$900, depending on what you need. Then, the film itself can cost up to $15 for a single negative! Oh yeah, there's also darkroom costs- chemicals, the enlarger, the processing time.... Oh, and don't forget that photographer might just want to earn some money for the hours that she's spent on site with your family...
Let's face it, photographers are not millionares (for the most part!
So, I'm sorry, but this isn't an issue of "open sourcing" the finals. By giving High-Res pictures to your entire family without paying for each one of those photos distributed, you have cheated and honest, hard-working, photographer out of a living. (I know a few who have been driven out of business because of this.) So, please, spare me the "I have rights to a picture" argument... Sure, you have the right to do what you want with that photo... But by the same tokein, the photographer has the right to not sell you the super high res photo you want.
As an aside, and unrelated, I think that "analog" photography is a much "truer" art form. If anything, you have a negative, which you can use to prove you took the shot- as opposed to a jpg, tiff, or what have you which could be the property of anyone.
-jokerghost
I can't help but think that photographer should simply leave the cameras at home and go out to weddings with scenery and LIGHTING... amateurs simply do not understand lighting... she could charge the same price for simply directing photographic situations. A full complement of lights, the right setting, and it's *tweet!* bring over all the amateur digicam people and have THEM do the photo taking. It'd come out much better than their usual stuff. She could have some prosumer digicam herself, but not consider for a moment that the resulting images were what she'd be charging for.
I've been fooling with studio building for a long time now- and currently my focus hasn't been on assembling a bunch of recorders and stuff- people can do that in their homes so easily that it's a tough sell even if I can trounce their quality levels. Instead, I've been getting TOYS. Guitars, basses, now an electronic drum trigger kit (eventually a real acoustic drumkit). People can have all sorts of (half the time warez) software for recording, but they will NOT typically have a mesh-head drum trigger kit to bash away at. I'm hoping to expand that out until I can get business as a studio- NOT for having recording equipment, maybe some people will even want to bring their PCs and use their own! Instead, it will be for having a killer SETTING and the environment that you just don't see in most pocket studios.
It's like that. I hope like hell I'm making the right call here but I honestly don't see how else to do it. The actual media is next to valueless, but making the environment for the media to be produced can be all the difference.
I once produced some totally pro-looking product shots for guitar boxes I make, on an old Connectix Color Quickcam (640x480 webcam). Did it by using the sun for lighting, using a big curtain for strong diffusion where needed, taking lots of identical (except for lighting variations) pictures and averaging them together in software... couldn't overcome the resolution issues but dynamic range ended up being phenomenal, easily pro level...
And of course, there was a time when I could've told you that in a book and probably sold lots of them because it's such a killer effective trick, but now in the digital age I've just replicated those words God knows how many times over the internet for basically nothing, and have to hope that (a) it'll benefit people to know about PTAverage and averaging near-identical digicam pics together for dynamic range, and (b) if I keep giving good ideas, people might figure out that I tend to have them, and record in my studio or something :)
It's really quite a braintwister figuring out what constitutes work and value in an age of digital replication. It's like, to go into the future we need to DESTROY the idea of value for individual collections of bits and somehow reformulate business around expertise and convenience. In that light, the whole 'piracy' thing is counterproductive because it's a concerted attempt to teach people that copying is morally wrong, when it's still effectively costless and effortless.
What would the world be like if ALL copying was completely permitted and there was no IP at all, but then people had to seek out the producers of any particular new thing they wanted produced? Would it be abundance? Would it be drowning in media all of which was worthless?
When I got married I simply wouldn't accept not getting the negatives. I told a few photographers to take a hike when they got uppity about 'artistic integrity' or some other bunk reason for not giving me the originals. (In this case, digital.)
After about five calls I found one who would shoot in digital (Canon 1D) and give me the originals. He was twice the price of anyone else, but cheaper (in the end) than it would have cost going with someone who expected to have a monopoly on producing my wedding prints.
One photographer in that group of five understood that business models could change and found a niche for himself. Will the rest of the industry go the way of the RIAA and MPAA, luddits keeping everyone in the dark ages?
It would be one thing if photographers kept partial copyright, the right to reproduce for a portfolio or something, but for them to claim full rights to a picture of you, that you paid for them to take? They're dreaming.
I paid extra for the original files because I wanted to support a better business model, and because I wanted higher quality than I could get by scanning them. But I'd have copied them without a moments thought if it were the only way I could get electronic copies. Copyright makes no sense in these circumstances and I refuse to play along.