Slashdot Mirror
Why the Photos On Wikipedia Are So Bad
Reservoir Hill writes "The NY Times has an article investigating why, unlike the articles on Wikipedia which in theory are improved, fact checked, footnoted, and generally enhanced over time, the photos that go with Wikipedia articles are so bad and in many cases there is no photo at all for even well known public figures. Few high-quality photographs, particularly of celebrities, make it onto on Wikipedia because Wikipedia runs only pictures with the most permissive Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use an image, for commercial purposes or not, as long as the photographer is credited. 'Representatives or publicists will contact us' horrified at the photographs on the site, says Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation. 'They will say: "I have this image. I want you to use this image." But it is not as simple as uploading a picture that is e-mailed to us.' Recent photographs on Wikipedia are almost exclusively the work of amateurs who don't mind giving away their work. 'Amateur may be too kind a word; their photos tend to be the work of fans who happen to have a camera,' opines the Times's author. Ultimately the issue for professional photographers who might want to donate their work is copyright. 'To me the problem is the Wikipedia rule of public use,' says Jerry Avenaim, a celebrity photographer. 'If they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright.'"
Creative commons attribution is the only copyright and patent law we need. I look forward to the day when music is free to copy and musicians make their money from live performance, when images are free to copy and the original has value because it's, well, the original. When the written word may be copied and recopied, when patent law is no longer needed because people invent and discover for prestige.
I have other theories:
- Knowledge in words flows unhindered, images can only come to stay in our heads from RL, TV, Magazines, ...
We can not reproduce images and forward it to other peoples brains. We only can with words.
- Photos can not be improved incrementally
- (tongue-in-cheek) You have to go outside for photos
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
For every thing that Photoshop does well and GIMP doesn't do or does badly, there are things that GIMP does well and Photoshop doesn't do or does badly.
Most commercial offerings are more error prone code than free code. The selection of closed code is, of course, less available, but there has been instrumentation of such code done and FOSS code is of higher quality.
the museum in question says that low res versions would be ok, but high res infringes on their copyright (note, the items in question are in the public domain in the US, but the laws regarding reproductions of items are a bit wonky in the UK)
Actually, my understanding is that the laws regarding reproductions are actually very similar. Corel v Bridgeman, for instance, was heard by a US court but the decision was based on UK law. The only problem is no UK court has ever heard an equivalent case, and UK courts don't generally recognise US court decisions as precedent, so it could theoretically go the other way. In all truth, a UK court would be likely to make the same decision (that reproductions of public domain works which were produced with nothing other than mechanical effort to improve the quality of the reproduction are not protected by copyright), but it is impossible to be certain, and nobody really wants to take the chance.
IANAL, but I have read extensively on copyright law and the common law system.
I do agree that the process for uploading photos needs to be improved (anyone with MediaWiki experience want to write us a better mousetrap?) But it does work, kludgey, but it works.
People Talking in Movie shows.. people smoking in bed.. people voting republican.. GIVE THEM A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
The combination of the NYT's editing and Slashdot's summarizing has been rather unkind to that "they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright" quote, imho.
> If a professional photographer wanted to increase his exposure (no pun intended), he could contribute to wikipedia under a free license.
That's exactly what the guy who the quote was attributed to has done.
The story quoted Jerry Avenaim, who has contributed his photos to Wikipedia, for example here. He says that photographers get paid very little for celebrity shots and make most of their money on resales of their photos (presumably print and online). If a freely licensed version on Wikipedia exists, then many publishers would simply take the wikipedia photo.
Given that Avenaim himself has contributed photos, he's obviously aware of the upsides and the downsides of doing so - he even notes that he gets free publicity out of it. But re his "they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright" quote, it sounds like he meant Wikipedia should have a license that allows photographers to contribute _only to Wikipedia_ (presumably *.wikipedia.org) and still retain rights for usage of that photo anywhere else.
I can see how this could be made to work. Have a 'better' photo for use on wikipedia.org, and point to an alternate free copy for use e.g. when other sites re-use wikipedia. That way photographers can contribute high-quality photos AND get paid, wikipedia gains, AND freedom to reuse is not lost.
However, given that wikipedians are pretty hard-core about free (libre) content, it's unlikely anyone will take him seriously. Which is a pity. Good illustrations really enhance the value of an encyclopedia, but I'm guessing wikipedia won't compromise on its core 'free-ness' thing to get them.
Go somewhere random
I've heard of needing to get -permission- to do something out of the ordinary at a workplace. But to 'shell out hundreds of dollars for a permit'? What the fuck? Is your 'workplace' Myanmar or something?
Really, don't sweat it. I don't think Wikipedia needs pictures of your workplace that badly.
The trouble is that the post use copyright to mean restrictively licensed as there is no simple catchy term for it. Perhaps we should start calling restrictive licenses "copywrong".
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
Also, Wikipedia cares more about accuracy (not just freedom). The primary example cited by that NYT article is not the primary picture shown on Halle Berry's Wikipedia page, it's only the second picture shown on that page, and that picture is only one of seven pictures designed to show the progression of her career.
In 1987, Halle Berry was a no-name first-time television actor and a failed Miss USA contestant (can anyone find her as one of the 50 finalists? I personally couldn't), it's actually very likely no good professional photograph had even been taken of her at that time (or may be it was, but it's just not findable). And perhaps, Halle Berry could have supplied a decent family picture of herself around that time period, but I doubt she'd want to highlight that initial part of her career. Hollywood is all about maintaining a sense of mystery and glamor, it's not about exposing what lies behind the curtain.
this is (slowly) changing, as more and more people can afford high quality cameras and lenses; while most of them will be just as crappy a photographer as before, some are bound to out-talent (and eventually outnumber) the so-called "pros"
and some of those who are really good are bound to do it as a means of expressing themselves (giving the results away for fame - getting laid being the ultimate purpose :P) rather than as a means to make a$$loads of money (which only happens to a handful of high end photographers, anyway, the rest are left simmering in their own mediocrity and decrying the state of the industry being ruined by those pesky amateurs)
I am sure Betacommand alone has turned hundreds (if not thousands) of photographers off Wikipedia with his automated deletion rampages based on "insufficiently explicit copyright tags" and such (doing it on images that were correctly tagged years before he and his ilk even joined to arbitrarily rewrite tagging policies)... He was banned, but there are still dozens of admins like him around.
Next time you just tell him that your performance is choreographed, as such his photographs are a derivative work and he may not redistribute them without your permission.
Do you know Fotopedia? It's a photo encyclopedia you can take part in with photos licensed as you wish. It's been working our pretty well for me!
A lot of photographers are very awkward with that kind of thing because they make a significant amount of money from people coming to them later for reprints.
I think some of it is cultural - when I got married there were plenty of photographers in Ireland prepared to release the rights to the photos to me for reprinting, but in the UK that's very rare.
We're ok with people coming and taking pictures and using them wherever they want but trying to sell them
I'm not sure about your situation, but the Netherlands has a law against this sort of thing; it's called portrait law ("portretrecht"). Basically, it means that a photograph (or video) that features any person in a recognizable manner may not be distributed at all without that person's consent. Of course the details are more intricate than that but ianal...
Like you, I'm okay with things like gig photos being taken by the audience. But in a case like this, if a photographer would take a picture of me and then try to sell me that picture, I would have him destroy the data on the spot.
We're not all douches. Personally, I like to retain copyright, but issue an unrestricted license to the client, that way I can use my own work in my portfolio, and reuse it for future endeavors, sometimes, though, larger clients make me an offer I can't refuse, and the inverse happens, they buy my copyright, and I get an unrestricted license (to use my own work in my portfolio, and reuse for future endeavors).
We've all got to make a living, after all.
Honestly, though, if you don't fancy dealing with photographers and their copyrights, consider hiring a company photographer - the author does not retain copyright in the event of a work for hire (the copyright is automatically assigned to the patron), freelancers, however, always retain their copyrights. Finding a photographer whose willing to do works for hire, rather than freelance, howevwer, is a different matter altogether.
Wikipedia does have a big free online rival: Search engines. It can be just as fast to find specialist info straight through a search engine than to go through wikipedia (especially if the info you're after is in a maze of disambiguation and split articles).
Speaking as a photographer, you have to keep in mind that they may well be limited as to what they can do.
The photo of Halle Berry was clearly taken by a professional who may very well not be at liberty to CC the image even if they wanted to. They may have been given permission to take photos for a certain use only, and Wikipedia might fall outside that. At worst, they may even have been forced to give away their copyright and line themselves up for damages by letting you use it (Jane's Addiction, I'm looking at you... http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2009/07/17/concert-photographers-asked-to-transfer-copyright-to-janes-addiction/). I didn't shoot Steven Segal, but I believe his contract bought all your photos for $1 and then exposed you to $1,000,000 of damages if you broke the contract. Here's the PDF of the release the photographers had to sign to shoot him - http://www.blackshadow.com.au/releases/seagal.pdf
Personally, I've been in a position where I'd like to donate better images of bands which I've taken professionally to Wikipedia, but at the end of the day, I may not have the right to do so as it falls outside the remit I was given when I took the photo, and I'm not prepared to potentially expose myself to any liability to help out.
In my opinion your best bet genuinely is a talented amateur who wasn't tied to any contract when they took the shot, and can CC license the shot with impunity.
If you're a professional photographer (which you state that you are not) it is, in my opinion, quite important that you already know the CC licenses before you snap your camera around. To me it is as important as it is for you (as a computer programmer) to know what the GPL or the MPL are.
In your case however I understand the frustration about the procedure. However in wikipedias defence uploading pictures and placing them properly is well documented on the site itself. Of course you have to spend some time understanding the procedure, this applies to anything new you do in life. Perhaps it can be made easier, perhaps it's made a bit "difficult" to maintain a level of seriousness leaving goatse pictures off the site. Whatever it is I'm sure you'll be able to do it faster the second time around, much like anything in life.
I am the lawn!
Sometime you should try clicking on an image on Wikipedia. The results might surprise you.
I'm aware of this. If you'd bothered to read the post I was replying to you would see that the comment was made that printing a Wikipedia article results in something that has no attribution for photos since the attribution isn't captioned. And the poster is absolutely right, which is why I suggested that it would make sense for the templates to automatically add an attribution caption to the embedded image.
Sadly, like most Slashdotters you seem more interested in flaming than actually reading the discussion.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Indeed - and conversely, photographers care more about being able to retain restrictive licences, rather than high quality pictures.
As well as fully agreeing with Wikipedia's stance, to be honest I don't see the problem anyway: if a celebrity is bothered that there's an awful picture of them, then that's all the more encouragement for them to donate a free image :) Similarly with fans, if they're annoyed at a poor quality picture of their favourite celebrity.
The fundamental problem here is not Wikipedia, but that almost all celebrity pictures are copyrighted and released under non-free licences. I've wondered if there's a different attitude among photographers and programmers - even among non-professionals (i.e., "amateurs" in the literal sense of the term, but where they treat it as a serious hobby and do produce good quality work), in my experience I've come across the attitude that even though they work for free, they do not want to release even a single picture under a licence that allows commercial use. Compare that with programming, where many are happy to produce open source software that is high quality, and allows commercial use (indeed, you get arguments about GPL vs BSD, about whether even the GPL is too restrictive...)
Similarly for professional work. If I do work as a programmer, even under contract, it goes without saying that the person paying me money gets the copyright of the work I produce. But try hiring a photographer for an event such as a wedding - AIUI, typically the photographer retains the copyright (and so strictly speaking, a married couple would be breaking the law to photocopy their own wedding photos).
I did think it was interesting that they bothered to make a thumbnail showing the Halle Berry photo on the Wikipedia page but even that wasn't a link. The irony is that if Wikipedia DID accept restricted rights photos, they would have had to get legal to sign off on their thumbnail image just to be sure. They probably would have skipped it.
Good ! Excellent !
I'm so sick and tired of people who're not -thinking-, and this goes for both sides of the table. People hire a wedding-photographer, and then they're shocked when they discover that despite paying for the work, the end-result (i.e. the high-quality digital files) don't belong to them, and that they need to pay exorbitant fees for each additional copy.
Or worse, "professional" photographers who look at you as if they don't understand the question when you request a certain job -- WITH a copy of the digital files and sufficient rights to be allowed to use them as I see fit.
I don't have a problem paying for the job. Infact I gladly pay a few hundred extra for a photographer with a clue. But when I pay for the creation of a file, at whichever hourly rate you demand (obviously, if you demand TOO much, I'll pick another photographer, but hi, that's business!), then the end-result is mine for me to do what I want with, when I spesifically ask for this, I *do* expect a photographer that calls himself a "professional" to be able to deal with it.
Ah, I see, I didn't pick up the gist of the OP. As an employee I guess they have a hold over him, but if a member of the public legally gained access and took a photo for personal use, I wonder how the building's owners could enforce that if he were to, for instance, release the picture into the public domain later on. Can a third party insist that I retain my copyright and use it to prevent anyone from profiting? Or, do they claim to own the copyright as it was produced on their premises (under a notional contract if such a thing exists), but are kindly allowing the photographer a personal use licence?
Not to mention that the photographers do maintain their copyright. Only a permissive license to use the image is required, and then only for the image uploaded to Wikipedia, not the original work.
The world is filled with control freaks, it seems.
Well, it's the permissive aspect that is problematic - they are no doubt afraid that the image will become the image of choice of the celebrity; for which they will get no money.
Not that I agree with that, but most photographers are very protective of their copyright protections around usage; simply because that's how they make their money.
Of course, most of them aren't going to create the iconic image; more likely the real reason a Wiki photo would be used a lot is it is free. In the photographer's mind however, each use translates to ost money, never mind that the demand curve for the image approaches zero as teh price becomes non-zero.
What most people don't realize is for a professional photographer, if they are luck 1 out of 10 photos are useable for sale. Why don't they sell the 1st rate photos to the tabloids, and then release a 2nd rate photo with minimal or no resale value (which is probably much better than an amateur photo)to Wikipedia. They can have their cake and eat it too.
Wikipedians as a culture have a habitual weakness of assuming that everyone who contributes is Joe-Schmoe-from-Iowa-in-his-bathrobe. A year ago Jerry Avenaim came to the attention of Wikipedia's featured picture program with this nomination.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_picture_candidates/Mark_Harmon It was nearly speedily closed until I realized the photographer was an active editor and wrote to request a larger version, and even afterward some editors refused to support because they wanted to change the size requirements. They weren't seeing the significance of getting material from a leading Hollywood portrait photographer. Last week I was talking to Noam Cohen and mentioned Jerry Avenaim's contributions. Showed him Jerry's Wikipedia volunteer work. Noam loved the idea and apparently Noam's editors did too. Thank you, Slashdot, for also 'getting it'. Let's hope this story encourages more photographers to donate their work.
You could write a blog post called 'Why are the articles on NYT so bad?' That being said, you'd need to mix-in google, Microsoft, or Wikipedia in your title, otherwise you'd never get it accepted as a submission on Slashdot. And then, you'd get your answer, NYT is so bad because it's limited to the topics it can write about. We think of NYT as a trend-setter, but it's really just a trend-follower, just like Slashdot, always trying to get new readers by recycling the same old keywords and the same old news every day.
Depends on the country you reside in. In germany, there is something called "Recht am eigenen Bild". It is forbidden to publish pictures of people without their explicit permission. There are exceptions of course for public figures and situations where the individual person is just a minor aspect of the picture taken.
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
Photoshop lowers the quality of the Photo. It is degredation of the worst kind. You may improve the IMAGE in the photo, but the photograph itself is harmed.
But that is my opinion.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Good photographers are manic about making sure that every single piece of work they produce is as close to perfect as possible. You, the general public, my potential future clients, may only see one picture I've taken in your whole life. In that case, it had better be perfect if I'm going to stand any chance of getting any of your future business. That one photo is my representative to the world. The same thing is true of every photo I release.
Here's a dirty secret: we already know that most of your pictures are discardable. We also know that da Vinci jotted out thousands of half-baked ideas, van Gogh painted lots of non-famous pictures, the Beatles had some crappy songs, and there is scary stuff in any software project's CVS/SVN/git repositories.
Unless photography is somehow magically different than every other profession in the history of the world and no one told me, I'd say that your ideas of what would happen if people saw your sub-stellar works are not based in reality.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Ah, see, that's why I found a photographer that would assign me all of the copyrights for the photos shot at the wedding (save for permission for them to use the photos in their own portfolio), because that was how they did business. My wife was pretty frustrated at how I kept walking out of photographer meetings in disgust over the copyright issue.
Now, the best part of the whole thing? I can barely get them printed. Most places see me walk in with my disc of digital images of my wedding and start telling me they can't reproduce them. I then proceed to point out that I have the legal rights to the work, and even produce the contract. I've had at least two printers refuse to print them despite the legal proof, because they just didn't seem to understand what the hell was going on.
Thus, releasing anything that's substandard is self-defeating.
You could license it "free to redistribute as long as you don't attribute it to me". Or even "free to redistribute as long as you attribute it to that other guy" :-)
You defended WP's policy, by saying, it is better to have a single license, because then it is easier for everyone to know, what it is. This is just as easily applied to nearly anything else — there being only one passenger car, for example, will make it much easier to find parts and all mechanics will need to know just one model.
Wrong. Only the first part is the founding premise: "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit." The second one — reuse of the content elsewhere — is not a founding premise... The term "free encyclopedia" means free (as in beer) to use...
Nope, they aren't. The permissiveness of the license is nowhere near as important as the "anyone can edit" part. In fact, up until a couple of years ago, it used to be possible to upload images under a choice of licenses... The "very permissive" license demanded of media-owners now is a fairly recent development. Wikipedia reached millions of articles without such demands — and then somebody decided to use the project's weight to wrestle rights from the image-owners. Automatic bots began deleting stuff, that was not sufficiently permissive — including, hysterically, my own logo, a silly image I wanted displayed on my own user-page without giving the rest of the world permission to add it to their clip-art compilations.
That was a miscalculations, which lead to an overall lower quality of images by now...
Of course they are! In 2006 you could see an image, and in 2007 it was replaced by one inferior in every respect except license. For somebody just reading the articles — the vastly overwhelming majority of visitors — that's a disadvantage imposed on them by the site's maintainers.
Is it any clearer, who was complaining before? Certainly, not the users... And if anybody were to ask them, it is a fairly obvious bet, that, when shown two freely readable pages with the same text, any reader would prefer one with higher quality illustrations.
And there is nothing wrong with it, as long as their contributions are on-topic. Gratuitously pissing these people off — by demanding, they give up all rights to the posted pictures — is what resulted in the lower-quality of images, that TFA is discussing... And all of the Wikipedia readers are the worse of for it...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Short of waiting to be blessed by some rich benefactor, how do YOU suggest a photographer make money at their trade?
It doesn't matter. The world is moving toward free content whether we think that's good or bad. The *AA has been fighting that tooth and nail with little effect. Even if you can convince Americans to comply with the law, the other 95% of the world might not particularly care. So, given the new economic realities, content producers have to decide whether it's better to come up with some new way of selling their services, or to kick and scream and insist that they deserve to keep the status quo.
Again, our opinions on how the market should work simply don't matter. Insisting that the old ways are good is not a viable business model.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
It's also somewhat amusing that few seem to realize the difference between the highly personal and instantaneous creative act of composing and capturing a good photo, versus the group iterative process which generates software and music. And unlike textual and illustrative compositions, where anyone can try their hand as an editor or writer on the best or worst of starting materials and plausibly make an improved version, it's blatantly obvious from the starting materials provided that most people with cameras don't know much about lighting or composition or exposure.
I suppose we could de-professionalize that art also by waiting for the global expectation of photographic quality to decrease as thumbnails on twitter and random cell phone images on Facebook become the acceptable standard of quality.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.