It's not a matter of the photographer wanting to license a low res under the CC, it's them being able to. A publicist is not going to sign a waver to that effect, because it will mean that anyone down the line can do what ever they want with the picture. And a publicist is not going to let the photographer off without signing an exclusive license.
In this case It's the publicist that wants the picture on Wikipedia
From TFA:
"Representatives or publicists will contact us" horrified at the photographs on the site, said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia encyclopedias in more than 200 languages. "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."
"In general," he added, "we need them to know that giving us a photograph from Annie Leibovitz wonâ(TM)t work unless Annie Leibovitz is O.K. with it."
It seems to me that this is a simple case of needing two parties (photographer and publicist) to talk to each other, and for some money to change hands. That is, call Annie Leibovitz and ask her how much she wants to be paid, to make the photo CC. Simple market forces will decide whether it happens, it doesn't happen, or a cheaper photograph is found.
I get the feeling that everyone on/. hasn't a clue about photography laws in their country, and just wants someone to blame for not liking Creative Commons. It's never going to be that bloody simple.
Photographs are no different from any other IP, and you'll find that/. has a LOT of IP law geeks (for which you can thank Richard Stallman).
End of the day, I expect to get paid for this work. And what I expect to get paid depends on what the celebrity and their company want to do with the picture.
TFA is talking about a situation in which a star's publicists want the Wikipedia page to contain a flattering picture. In that case it seems like common sense that they should pay the photographer whatever the rate is for full rights to an image.
On something of a tangent:
You've given us two examples:
Client gets exclusive rights to the photo, photographer retains copyright. Price $x
Photographer is a worker for hire. Client holds copyright on all photos taken. Price > 15 * $x
One might propose a third price:
Photographer retains copyright, photos released under a free license. Price somewhere between the two.
This way the publicist gets what they want: lots of flattering photos of their celebrity being widely distributed. The photographer retains copyright on the images and can use them in their portfolio.
This is very similar to how many open source developers get paid. The people paying Apache developers just want Apache to exist. They don't want exclusive rights to Apache once it does exist.
What I'll say to that is, there's no reason libre content has to be second-class.
Indeed, and in the software world, often it's quite the opposite.
But having a system where there's a non-free image and a 'fallback' free image, would implicitly send the message "non-free good, free not as good".... unless you introduced some kind of rating system whereby a good free image could bury a non-free image... at which point I'd suggest we're designing an elaborate technical solution for a problem that just doesn't warrant the effort.
Why shouldn't I be able to contribute a photo to Wiki without also granting people permission to sell it as a poster?
Because the whole point of Wikipedia is that it is a free resource which can be recycled and reused in all sorts of ways the original contributors might not have imagined.
No. Copyright refers to your right to specify who may copy something, and under what terms.
You can give up that right, by putting a work into the public domain, or by transferring the copyright to someone else. But if you let Wikipedia use an image under a CC license, you are still the copyright holder.
But even if you're giving the work away, being the copyright holder has advantages. For example, you get to specify what kind of copies are allowed (e.g. attribution must be retained).
For example: Suppose I give you the right to distribute one of my photos. A publisher then comes to me, wanting to license the photo for a book, and I quote them a couple of grand for the rights. You can then step in and quote them one grand.
That depends entirely on the license you granted me. Your license may forbid me from charging anything for a copy. Your license may dictate that I may only duplicate the image under the same license terms as you gave me.
One common approach is dual licensing for software. Say I've release SlimWidget under the GPL. You want to use SlimWidget but you don't like the GPL. I can sell you the right to use it under any license I choose, while continuing to let other people use it for free under the GPL. As copyright holder, I am the only one allowed to do that, even though plenty of people are freely copying my work under the other license.
If photogaphers are concerned about copyright why not just created a reduced size and quality version and release that. Its too small to be used for commercial uses in most cases
Go to http://www.nyt.com/ and count the 75x75 px and 151x151 px non-free photographs.
The web creates a commercial demand for low-res photographic images.
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
It really would compromise the core free-ness thing in a practical way though.
Currently Wikipedia works like "We're collaborating on this work, which you can take a copy of, to do whatever you like".
With your modification it would be, "We're collaborating on this work. You can browse the premium edition here, or you can take a copy of the second class edition to do whatever you like".
To me that's a massive difference, and a slippery slope.
I would happily grant Wiki a free license to use the photo but no, they want a complete surrender of copyright or they don't want the picture, so they don't get the picture:-(
You might consider this to be splitting semantic hairs, but actually you would retain copyright. You would just offer the image under a license which allows free distribution.
But you summed it up. Wikipedia's aim is to create a freely distributable encyclopedia. They don't want any material that they can't distribute freely.
You're not contributing because you don't share Wikipedia's aims.
Or am I mistaken and there's actually a huge market for low resolution photos of celebrities?
Possibly.
From TFA, I think the photographer has a business model where web-quality images are licensed to (for example) news sites.
Let's say the NYT wants to illustrate a minor story about George Clooney on their web site. As long as there's no free image of reasonable quality, the NYT is going to go to a stock photo archive, pick a photo at a price that suits them, and the copyright holder will take a cut.
His argument is that as long as there is *just one* adequate quality photo of George Clooney under a free license, then the NYT and everyone else will use that for evermore, destroying any market for other photos.
I think it might be true to an extent. A lot of publishers will use the free photo.
But I also suspect that 'premium' publishers will want to feed their customers' demand for different shots. A typical reader will soon notice that every time George Clooney is mentioned, the same photo is used.
PNG also supports internal textual metadata. Example: Adobe Fireworks "... by default also stores meta data for layers, animation, vector data, text and effects [in PNG]."
All true, but the hid.im scheme doesn't use any of this. It just puts a single image in the PNG, that's not supposed to look like anything more than a bunch of pixels, and can be decoded into a torrent file.
I don't think the content will be affected by tag modifications.
These are pretty small images (one of the samples is 380x32) so rescaling isn't going to happen unless it's a deliberate attack on this technique. But there are far easier attacks if you're explicitly trying to block this exact technique.
What does the code do except from change the filetype extension from.torrent to.png and back and what is stopping me from doing that manually?
It turns it into a valid PNG: something a PNG viewer can load.
The result looks like a horizontal strip of random pixels, size nx32 pixels (where n varies), with a block on the left that looks like "hid.im" in white on black.
Probably the forum owners are not motivated to filter these.
Maybe their hosting company would. But probably only at the behest of some law enforcement power.
So what this is really doing is setting up a situation where if the governments tries to legislate, there's a response that goes, "wait a minute, you want us to scan and block *pictures*?
All sites hosting images will just be required to filter for those images which have torrents inside (it shouldn't be hard, just try to decode the torrent, and if you succeed, reject the image).
Which just makes for an arms race, and one where the pirates can be more reactive than the authorities. Create new encoding methods, encode into different formats (MP3, JPEG, HTML, whatever).
It's not steganography. It's an explicit PNG encoding of a torrent file. It's not a PNG of a kitten with a torrent hidden within so a casual viewer wouldn't realise.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a matter of the photographer wanting to license a low res under the CC, it's them being able to. A publicist is not going to sign a waver to that effect, because it will mean that anyone down the line can do what ever they want with the picture. And a publicist is not going to let the photographer off without signing an exclusive license.
In this case It's the publicist that wants the picture on Wikipedia
From TFA:
"Representatives or publicists will contact us" horrified at the photographs on the site, said Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia encyclopedias in more than 200 languages. "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."
"In general," he added, "we need them to know that giving us a photograph from Annie Leibovitz wonâ(TM)t work unless Annie Leibovitz is O.K. with it."
It seems to me that this is a simple case of needing two parties (photographer and publicist) to talk to each other, and for some money to change hands. That is, call Annie Leibovitz and ask her how much she wants to be paid, to make the photo CC. Simple market forces will decide whether it happens, it doesn't happen, or a cheaper photograph is found.
I get the feeling that everyone on /. hasn't a clue about photography laws in their country, and just wants someone to blame for not liking Creative Commons. It's never going to be that bloody simple.
Photographs are no different from any other IP, and you'll find that /. has a LOT of IP law geeks (for which you can thank Richard Stallman).
Unfortunately I think it has to be this hard.
If you don't understand the license, you're in no position to be adding material to WikiMedia.
End of the day, I expect to get paid for this work. And what I expect to get paid depends on what the celebrity and their company want to do with the picture.
TFA is talking about a situation in which a star's publicists want the Wikipedia page to contain a flattering picture. In that case it seems like common sense that they should pay the photographer whatever the rate is for full rights to an image.
On something of a tangent:
You've given us two examples:
One might propose a third price:
This way the publicist gets what they want: lots of flattering photos of their celebrity being widely distributed. The photographer retains copyright on the images and can use them in their portfolio.
This is very similar to how many open source developers get paid. The people paying Apache developers just want Apache to exist. They don't want exclusive rights to Apache once it does exist.
so yes, effectively you are giving up copyright
Too bad he didn't use the word "effectively" in the article. Because literally, you are not giving up copyright.
What I'll say to that is, there's no reason libre content has to be second-class.
Indeed, and in the software world, often it's quite the opposite.
But having a system where there's a non-free image and a 'fallback' free image, would implicitly send the message "non-free good, free not as good". ... unless you introduced some kind of rating system whereby a good free image could bury a non-free image... at which point I'd suggest we're designing an elaborate technical solution for a problem that just doesn't warrant the effort.
Why shouldn't I be able to contribute a photo to Wiki without also granting people permission to sell it as a poster?
Because the whole point of Wikipedia is that it is a free resource which can be recycled and reused in all sorts of ways the original contributors might not have imagined.
Including, yes, making posters.
No. Copyright refers to your right to specify who may copy something, and under what terms.
You can give up that right, by putting a work into the public domain, or by transferring the copyright to someone else. But if you let Wikipedia use an image under a CC license, you are still the copyright holder.
But even if you're giving the work away, being the copyright holder has advantages. For example, you get to specify what kind of copies are allowed (e.g. attribution must be retained).
For example: Suppose I give you the right to distribute one of my photos. A publisher then comes to me, wanting to license the photo for a book, and I quote them a couple of grand for the rights. You can then step in and quote them one grand.
That depends entirely on the license you granted me. Your license may forbid me from charging anything for a copy. Your license may dictate that I may only duplicate the image under the same license terms as you gave me.
One common approach is dual licensing for software. Say I've release SlimWidget under the GPL. You want to use SlimWidget but you don't like the GPL. I can sell you the right to use it under any license I choose, while continuing to let other people use it for free under the GPL. As copyright holder, I am the only one allowed to do that, even though plenty of people are freely copying my work under the other license.
If photogaphers are concerned about copyright why not just created a reduced size and quality version and release that. Its too small to be used for commercial uses in most cases
Go to http://www.nyt.com/ and count the 75x75 px and 151x151 px non-free photographs.
The web creates a commercial demand for low-res photographic images.
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
It really would compromise the core free-ness thing in a practical way though.
Currently Wikipedia works like "We're collaborating on this work, which you can take a copy of, to do whatever you like".
With your modification it would be, "We're collaborating on this work. You can browse the premium edition here, or you can take a copy of the second class edition to do whatever you like".
To me that's a massive difference, and a slippery slope.
I would happily grant Wiki a free license to use the photo but no, they want a complete surrender of copyright or they don't want the picture, so they don't get the picture :-(
You might consider this to be splitting semantic hairs, but actually you would retain copyright. You would just offer the image under a license which allows free distribution.
But you summed it up. Wikipedia's aim is to create a freely distributable encyclopedia. They don't want any material that they can't distribute freely.
You're not contributing because you don't share Wikipedia's aims.
From common usage (rather than one pedant), it's a verb, a noun, and an adjective.
Verb: You should backup your data
Noun: All my data is on a backup
Adjective: You need a backup disk
Or am I mistaken and there's actually a huge market for low resolution photos of celebrities?
Possibly.
From TFA, I think the photographer has a business model where web-quality images are licensed to (for example) news sites.
Let's say the NYT wants to illustrate a minor story about George Clooney on their web site. As long as there's no free image of reasonable quality, the NYT is going to go to a stock photo archive, pick a photo at a price that suits them, and the copyright holder will take a cut.
His argument is that as long as there is *just one* adequate quality photo of George Clooney under a free license, then the NYT and everyone else will use that for evermore, destroying any market for other photos.
I think it might be true to an extent. A lot of publishers will use the free photo.
But I also suspect that 'premium' publishers will want to feed their customers' demand for different shots. A typical reader will soon notice that every time George Clooney is mentioned, the same photo is used.
I doubt we're getting the truth from either side.
You don't hire a marquee and a generator for a gathering of 15 people.
There was a moral panic in the late 80s, mostly because of perceived drug usage at unlicensed raves.
To be fair, there was also a public safety issue - large crowds gathering with no fire precautions, marshalling, etc.
Anyhow, the govt. response was the ridiculous wording in the Criminal Justice Act.
It's not encoded in the picture,
Yes it is.
it's encoded in the header of the png.
No it isn't.
http://hid.im/about/format
PNG also supports internal textual metadata. Example: Adobe Fireworks "... by default also stores meta data for layers, animation, vector data, text and effects [in PNG]."
All true, but the hid.im scheme doesn't use any of this. It just puts a single image in the PNG, that's not supposed to look like anything more than a bunch of pixels, and can be decoded into a torrent file.
I think the purpose of this is that you can put up a torrent, go to your favourite forum, and say "Hey, here's the .torrent for (some content)".
Forums generally provide a means to embed pictures, but not other filetypes, such as torrents.
This is for encoding the .torrent file. Not whatever it points to.
For example, I just found a torrent file for Terminator Salvation - 14kB
I don't think the content will be affected by tag modifications.
These are pretty small images (one of the samples is 380x32) so rescaling isn't going to happen unless it's a deliberate attack on this technique. But there are far easier attacks if you're explicitly trying to block this exact technique.
What does the code do except from change the filetype extension from .torrent to .png and back and what is stopping me from doing that manually?
It turns it into a valid PNG: something a PNG viewer can load.
The result looks like a horizontal strip of random pixels, size nx32 pixels (where n varies), with a block on the left that looks like "hid.im" in white on black.
http://www.hid.im/system/pngs/6/original/torrent.png?1246950724
Probably the forum owners are not motivated to filter these.
Maybe their hosting company would. But probably only at the behest of some law enforcement power.
So what this is really doing is setting up a situation where if the governments tries to legislate, there's a response that goes, "wait a minute, you want us to scan and block *pictures*?
Because that technique is for hiding a payload.
This technique is not a hiding technique. It's just a technique for getting past content-type based filters.
You misunderstand. It *is* a PNG. Load it with a PNG viewer and you'll see a fuzz of random looking pixels.
But it can be translated into a .torrent.
It's a bit like a barcode, only with more capacity since it's 2D and colour.
All sites hosting images will just be required to filter for those images which have torrents inside (it shouldn't be hard, just try to decode the torrent, and if you succeed, reject the image).
Which just makes for an arms race, and one where the pirates can be more reactive than the authorities. Create new encoding methods, encode into different formats (MP3, JPEG, HTML, whatever).
It's not steganography. It's an explicit PNG encoding of a torrent file. It's not a PNG of a kitten with a torrent hidden within so a casual viewer wouldn't realise.