The AMSP (The American Society of Media Photographers, Inc) has started a campaign on copyright with a web site ‘Don’t Screw Us‘ which has what they call a ‘Manifesto‘ with ten points in plain American vernacular about intellectual property rights and why it pays to use and pay a professional rather than steal work from the Internet. All good stuff.
There is also a link ‘Propaganda‘ which goes to a video on YouTube set on a New York street where a photographer sets up an easel puts some pictures on it and just leaves it on the street. Several people then come up, look at the pictures and then pick them up and carry them away. At which point the photographer comes and starts arguing with them about stealing his work.
I think it’s cleverly made down to the standards of YouTube, and does more or less come over as a fairly amateur report on a real event rather than (as I’m sure it was) a carefully conceived piece of film. But I’m not too sure it really makes its point – and certainly if you just leave stuff around on the street in NY you would surely expect it to disappear.
And of course even on the Internet it isn’t sensible to leave your work entirely unprotected. On Saturday I was talking to a curator from a major museum and was shocked to find that they put images on the web without metadata – and that until very recently it was something they hadn’t even thought about.
I wondered exactly where people like this had been; its something I’ve written about many times over the past ten years, and only a few of my older images on line are without metadata. When I press the shutter release, my copyright message gets written into the file; when I import it to my computer using Lightroom, it gets associated with more metadata, including my contact details and another copyright message, written into every file I output. Pictures I add to these pages usually have a copyright message in the alternative text, and work I upload to other sites keeps its metadata too, and most pages also have a copyright message.
It may actually be down to me that they are thinking now having to think about metadata. One photographer whose work they want to use has insisted that they must include it in any files they put on the web. I know I’ve talked to him a number of times about the importance of having copyright metadata present in files that you put on the web, and he will have read some of the things I’ve written here and elsewhere about it. But of course it is the same advice he would get from any sensible and informed photographer.
It doesn’t make sense to just leave your work lying around – whether on the street on on the web.