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Image Lifted From Twitter Leads to $1.2M Payout For Haitian Photog
magic maverick writes "A U.S. federal jury has ordered Agence France-Presse and Getty Images to pay $1.2 million to a Daniel Morel, Haitian photographer, for their unauthorized use of photographs, from the 2010 Haiti earthquake. The images, posted to Twitter, were taken by an editor at AFP and then provided to Getty. A number of other organizations had already settled out of court with the photographer."
What's the problem with Hollywood Accounting? Do you have any actual complaint here? The way writers are paid for work is completely regular and legal, and all people outside the business ever hear are the stories, heavily promoted, of certain individuals who thought they could get a better deal by taking their case to the press. They always lose, but behold, a new "evil" has been created, completely out of whole cloth. I have many writer friends and I can tell you the entire critique of "Hollywood Accounting" profoundly ignorant. In the specific case of Art Buchwald, he wasn't screwed by Hollywood Accounting, he was screwed by Eddie Murphy stealing his story.
Tell me this: by what right does a screenwriter deserve more than the wages of "Hollywood Accounting"? How is Hollywood Accounting more fair than, say, the common dot-com tactic of paying an employee with stock options and then diluting them? Or the technology company policy of paying a patent filer with a flat bonus? The difference is moral opprobrium and marketing, nothing more.
The entire concept is fatuous; and the name "Hollywood Accounting" is meant to appeal to naive, parochial prejudices of Americans who assume that LA is filled with effeminate phonies, sin, whores and exploiters. I could call the GPL "Berkeley Dope-Smoker Copyright" by the same turn and be just as right.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Well, speaking as a photographer, the thing about selling photographs on the internet is that you generally have to show people what they're about to buy. So right click and save image is always a possibility. (There are coding ways around this, most of which are trivial to break. That's why the solutions are legal instead of technical.)
WTF? WTFF? Haven't you heard of watermarking? I have recently had to look through a great deal of stock photos to get for a website and virtually every site selling those have watermarked previews or sometimes low-resolution photos are free to use and if you want the high-res, you have to buy it. What idiot would waste time on any other technical solution than that when imagemagick can watermark and/or reduce resolution faster than you've set your camera shutter to.