Slashdot Mirror
Photographers Want Their Cut From Google's Ebooks
It's not just the writers anymore: carluva writes "The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and several other visual artist groups are suing Google over its digitization of of millions of books, claiming copyright infringement related to images within the books. The photographers initially wanted to be included in the authors' and publishers' class action suit, but filed their own suit after that request was denied. Google and others assert that images are only included in the digital copies when permission has been obtained from the copyright holder."
The typographers are gonna want a cut too.
So will the company that made the font the book was printed with.
So will the company that manufactured the paper the book was scanned from.
So will the company that manufactured the scanner.
The company that manufactured the USB cable the scanner was plugged in with would like a cut too.
And the company that manufactured the USB port on the computer.
The musicians are gonna want a cut when Google scans a music book.
The coders are gonna want a cut when Google scans a programming book.
When a book contains maps, the cartographers and explorers will want a cut also.
The author of the typesetting software's gonna want a cut too.
By the time this is all done, it's going to cost Google more to make a book available, than the price people will be able to pay to see it.
If Google wants to assert copyrights to the books they scan so they will have to negotiate with the actual copyright holders to all contents of the book they scan. Boohoo.
Bad pun is bad.
But I am sure some arrangement will come of it. But personally, I think there should be a far different class and set of rules for photography and photographers. They are out of control and their expectations are unreasonable. Photography is NOT hard. I know people can go on and on about skill and knowledge and blah blah blah. It's taking pictures. There's just not as much work involved as there is with ANY other type of "creative work." My wife is no professional photographer. She has a background in publishing and design, so perhaps that does better enable her "eye" as it were, but the real secret as far as I'm concerned is her Canon Rebel camera. Where she used to use lesser cameras, pictures taken with her Canon are quite often very dramatic and interesting. Same person. Different camera. Here's what I find even more interesting. We have been to several weddings and she took pictures at all of them. Some of them had professional wedding photographers there. Her pictures were quite often better than these professionals who actually had even more expensive cameras to the point where it actually made the customers angry asking "what did I pay all this money for?!"
I hate photographers and their over-blown, baseless egos. They capture events... sometimes expressly for you, then they hold each print for ransom and get very huffy about your wanting to use pictures of yourself in your own way for your own use. Worse still, these photography guilds and the like have managed to harm consumers who might actually take good pictures by themselves. How? Simple. Take some good quality pictures to be printed somewhere. If they even suspect they are professional images, they will refuse to print them out of fear of being sued. If I recall, there was even a story or two about this very topic here on Slashdot some 5 or 6 years ago. It's nonsense and should be reigned in.
I have to say, if I ever run into that problem in the future myself, I'll probably sue the photographer's guild or whatever has caused this fear to harm the consumer. It has to be stopped. (That goodness I live in a country where you can sue for just about anything... right or wrong.)