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Police Restrict Public Photography
An anonymous reader writes "News.com is reporting that in Australia, recent attempts by a photo club to take pictures of industrial installations was met with police resistance. From the article: 'Club member Hans Kawitski was told not to photograph industrial installations and was ordered to inform members of the camera club to follow his lead. Liberty Victoria said its advice to photographers would be to ignore the directive. "The police have got no place making such warnings," president Brian Walters SC said.'"
When I was photographing the beautiful old federal buildings in downtown Denver (probably about 3 years ago), a federal officer pulled up and told me to stop taking pictures. When I asked him what law I was breaking, he refused to answer, but demanded my ID and told me I was now going to have a "record with the FBI." When I then asked him for his name and/or badge number, he got back in his car and drove away.
Luckily, mine had a happier ending then this guy.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Speaking as a freelance photographer, things are worse than people think. Not only can you not sell, but nobody will help you to publish such photos. It wasn't too many years ago that any photo except those that were truly "private" could be taken and used, if for nothing else than at least for documentary purposes.
...and any representation of anything or anyone, anywhere, is subject to lawsuit unless you have their name, signature, and fingerprints signing off on it. No wonder the news media never gets into real issues anymore. The list of things they can't discuss/photograph without permission of "the owners" under penalty of endless lawsuits and liability is virtually endless. And thus, they're left photographing/describing those people that WANT to be publicized (i.e. endless human interest and movie-star footage and news).
Now, however, the list of things that nobody will buy and nobody will publish (printers even refuse to handle these if you try to self-publish books or similar works) includes:
- Any person (unless model contract is present, even if it's YOU!)
- Any item (unless property contract is present, even if it's YOURS!)
- Any building, patch of land, or piece of water (see previous item.)
- Any manufactured item (because industrial design = intellectual property.)
So, a partial list of things that can't be photographed without a contract on file includes: all people, all property (if it's not owned by the government, it's private and needs a signed release; if it's owned by the government, it's too dangerous to shoot or use anyway), all places (nearly all land and half the water in the world is owned by individuals or nations), all manufactured items (because all of them had to be designed by someone, and such design is intellectual property -- even things like soap bars with logos washed off them or empty containers without labels), all logos, text, phrases on signs, etc. (because thanks to copyright law, any piece of writing created by anyone is copyright by them, even if only three or four words long and done in graffiti in a public place).
I think stock and editorial photographers are probably more aware than most of just how much intellectual property now affects our culture/society. Take a picture of a graffiti-covered shed in the middle of nowhere? You need a signed release from the shed manufacturer (for the industrial design), the owner of the land (for property release), and the graffiti "artist" (for text release). You basically need 2-3 signed contracts for EVERY PICTURE YOU TAKE, even of a ping-pong ball from the back floating in your own bathtub in the dark, because of all the intellectual and real property (and thus potential liability) involved in every photograph of everything.
Basically:
- Take a world in which ALL things are owned by SOMEBODY
- and add intellectual property on top of physical property
- and add a culture of litigation
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Unfortunately this is all too common these days. Everyone with a camera is automatically a paedophile or a terrorist (more even more.
However they still ask the public for photographs when it suits them.
A few weeks ago I was on vacation and visiting one of the more beautiful suspension bridges in the states. I was using a consumer style digital camera to hopefully get a decent shot for home use. After shooting the bridge and other good angles for maybe 30 minutes from a nearby park area, the local police arrived. They told me that photographing the bridge is "strongly discouraged." I looked at them like they were on crack, and they added, "for national security reasons." To their credit, they were very polite and seemed somewhat uncomfortable with their new job of keeping the world safe from photos.
The bridge had a new lighting system specifically made for aesthetic purposes, funded by donations from the public over the last couple decades, and this is the fruit of those efforts.
I'm too young to feel this damn old. I remember when this kind of bullshit was for those countries that didn't have freedom like the US. When I was in elementary school (in the 1980s), this would have been a scary story about the USSR or Nazi-era Germany, but unthinkable for the "land of the free." I hope to hell that the warning klaxons were louder than this for the Germans 70 or so years back. I'd rather be overly paranoid and bent about the issue than just plain correctly worried. Planet-wide and synchronized, this shit is making me ill.
"Railfans" i.e.e people who love Trains and Railroads and take a lot of pictures have had this problem since Sept. 11. I wish I wasn't at work (for a lot of reasons) because at home I have an article from Trains Magazine about how some railfans have had their photo equipment confiscated. Some have even been arrested (but later had charges dropped). These arrested railfans were photographing from public places, and not trespassing.
Police need to use common sense- if people are wearing dark clothing, and hiding in the woods taking long range telephoto lens pics of stuff, then maybe they are suspicious. But my friends who are railfans are at least as non threatening and gee geeky as my tech friends, and when asked by police they always tell them that what they are doing.
What's next- banning tourists from taking pictures in Washington D.C.?
And by the way, what about maps.google.com????
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
Last summer, I was harassed for taking pictures of city buses in Ottawa (federal capital of Canada). Here's my account of the... incident:
I was being hassled by OC transpo security types for taking pictures of buses in the street.
One of them, a woman, was practically in tears about "don't you know what happenned in London", just as if photographing buses would make them blow-up. Poor little creature. I almost wanted to hug her to calm her fears (but she looked too much like whe queen of England and I didn't want to smear myself)...
The whole thing got ugly when they demanded to see some identification; I refused flatly, on matters of principle. Nothing illegal was done; then we went through the usual "if you don't have nothing to hide, why don't you give us some ID" bullshit arguments we always hear.
They then said that they would have to call the police on me.
-- Are you arresting me? I asked.
-- No, you're free to leave.
**BINGO!**
This was a dead giveaway that they are security types, not constables. They cannot arrest and detain somebody for nothing...
So I left at once; but less than a block away, I was intercepted by a fuming policewoman whose demeanor was quite arrogant and disgusting. She neatly parked her car blocking the reserved bus lane on Albert, between Bronson and Commissionners street, a most inconvenient place for buses, right as rush-hour was beginning.
As I was walking calmly, she started to yell at me:
-- "Hey, buddy"!!!
Well, I'm sorry, but that's not a very polite way to introduce yourself. So I ignore her and keep walking slowly up the hill. That girl has to be taught a lesson in respect.
She caught up on me right when I was about to arrive to where I was staying. Never before I have seen such a tremenduous display of fury and nastyness. 120 pounds and 120 decibels of pure, hot and tanned unadulterated flaming bitch. She would be perfect on ALT.FLAME.
She was yelling at me, demanding to see identification.
-- Are you arresting me? I asked again.
-- No, I am detaining you.
Not to take chances (what the fuck "detaining" legally means???), I started to dole out information on a piecemeal basis; like a Québec birth certificate, a perfectly legal, yet totally unknown document.
-- You don't have anything with your address? she hysterically blurted, expecting the standard, run-of-the-mill sacrosanct driver's license, which I don't have...
-- This is all I have (heavily implying "this is all you'll get").
As we argued, three transit security types came about (including the slimy one who said that "I can leave", but the sad girl was gone, though), as well as two city cops came to watch the fun go by.
The two cops (guys) were much nicer (which is easy to do, given the terminal nastyness of the first - I guess even Genghis Khan would seem nice compared to her).
She then asks me for my address. Just as I finish saying the number and the street, before I say "Montréal", she disgustingly blurts out "is this in Gatineau???", like if I was living in a toilet bowl.
As I said "No, Montréal", she demanded my address in Ottawa. So I gave her my friend's address, not wanting to be arrested on charges of homelessness (you never know what slimy dirty trick the pigs will pull on you - during all that time, I carefully stayed on the sidewalk alignment so I would not be charged for trespassing), some 20 feet away - because of this, my friend got in trouble; he was told by his condo administrators that he was "put on probation for bringing-in people who cause trouble", as the whole scene was witnessed by about 30 construction workers working on the condo... But this is a matter for his lawyer, though, and not on topic here.
-- "It's right there, pointing at the condo main door"
-- "I don't believe you, you just made that up!!!!" then blared out of the high-pitched decibel emitter. I suppose I could have borrowed some earplugs from nearb