Please don’t steal my pic
I took this photo with my phone back in 2004. It’s one of my favorite and want to share it online. But I don’t want others to use it on their sites.
It’s not a masterpiece but I like it.The light works well, it has a oil painting-like quality (and there is a painting in the background to remind me that). It’s about the love a father has for his kid.
This photo is particularly relevant as I am newbie-ish father myself and have experienced the same #instalove my cousin expressed in the pic. Also, it’s truly vintage in thepre-Instagram sense of the word. The phone camera I was using couldn’t do better than that.
There is a chance that someone will come across it, like it too, and share it on Tumblr or Pinterest. If it were an awesome photo by a serious photographer it would end up re-posted ad infinitum.
We now live in an era of extreme digital regurgitation where authors see their words, photos and videos re-proposed on blogs and social networks without anyone asking their permission. Some people’s businesses have taken a hit because of this.
Sure, it’s the nature of the beast. The tools are there to for sharing easy. Some people acknowledge their source (which I don’t think is OK), but this is soon lost as content is re-blogged many times.
Here is an example: http://museumuesum.tumblr.com
The guy who publish this tells us it’s all original content (and I think there is a hashtag for that too on Tumblr). If you look at this content you’ll see that it’s for the most photos of other people’s artwork. Not his own. He claims it is original because he isn’t re-blogging but posting his own pics. This dilutes even further the idea of intellectual property.
Here are some arguments in favour of this practice that I have come across:
“If people don’t want their work to be then they shouldn’t post it online”
“It’s how the web works — live with it”
“I post other people’s stuff but always acknowledge them”
“If we try to control it then it will be impossible to have websites like YouTube, Pinterest and Tumblr”
I take a different view.
Unless we all agree by way of legislation that IP regulations have changed then companies and people shoule be liable. As they have always been. Anonymity doesn’t grant us the right to break the rules.
Also, publishers have responsibilies too. I don’t buy YouTube’s argument that they can’t control what their users upload. They could review every minute of it, of course, but it would be an expensive exercise. The viability of YouTube’s business model should not supercede the rights of those who own IP.
My hope is that Medium doesn’t become a portal for regurgitated content. It will be interesting to see what happens when they open registrations to all.
