Friday, April 26, 2013

Frame 5


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.