Free Photography
How many photos have been sent to you from a friend that you couldn’t resist passing on to someone else? Perhaps a picture captured something funny, or seemed to be the right image at the right time to express a feeling. Perhaps it was a memorialization of a happy or tragic event that occurred in your community, and by posting that photograph you felt you were sharing in that moment.
That image
could have been sent a thousand or a million times. It happens to music, videos
and photographs that go viral, circling the electronic earth many times over. The
person who created that work may or may not be thrilled that other people liked
it enough to want to share it. It depends on why the person created what you
are listening to or looking at. It may simply have been a desire to share that
put it up on the web, or it might have been placed there as a way to make a
living. In any case, once it is uploaded, many people feel that it becomes fair
game to do with it what they like.
The Web has
changed the way we perceive creative content, and how we view its ownership and
its usage. I am using the term “creative content” to describe anything that is
a unique creation: a drawing, photograph, video, piece of music, etc. Whatever
the end product, the issue is that someone exerted time and energy to make it.
As a person who makes their living in the creative world, I have to say that
it’s not an easy task. I enjoy it when people respond to my work, and I also
enjoy it when I’m paid for my work.
Everyone has
different reasons why they create something and then post it online. In the
analog days, those reasons were more transparent. There was a formality to having
work in a gallery, to having a film or play in a theater, to having your writing
published. These formal acts came with legal protections. If you copied one of
the analog creations, by way of the © insignia, you knew you were stealing
someone’s work. Those rights insured people’s ability to support themselves through
their creative acts. And by default turned those creative acts into a strange
consumable, something someone paid to use but ultimately didn’t own.
Although the
same copyright laws protect digital media, it is much more difficult to keep
people from owning and using protected creations. How do you send a cease and
desist letter to a million people? By creating the Web, which is a free and
open marketplace, we have knocked loose the protections for the people who make
creative content. The Web has placed the non-corporate creator in the difficult
position of wanting to make something, get it in a much more egalitarian
market, but then lose complete control over their labors.
Should the
concept of copyright be allowed to slip away? Has the Internet forever changed
the rules of ownership? Has it turned the marketplace of ideas into a swap meet
of pilfered goods?
Tell me what you think.
Frame 5A
Addendum:
The Photographs
coming out of my avatar’s computer are all from the web site Stockvault.net. Starting from the computer to the wall: Surprised Boy by 2happy; Angel
by Didi Surpardi; Clown by Rander
Pederson; Cute Devil by Julia
Osypova.
