Tuesday, January 13, 2009

While You're Waiting

While you await my pontification, here are a couple of interesting articles on recent developments in the professional photography world.

David Harrington over at Photo Business News and Forum has this on Lawrence Lessig's new book, "Remix," which is a screed endorsing the wholesale theft of intellectual property:

http://photobusinessforum.blogspot.com/2009/01/copyright-lawrence-lessig-v-stephen.html

There is a link to a very funny interview with Mr. Lessig on The Colbert Report which is worth watching.

And A Photo Editor has this to say about the copymaker photographer Richard Prince being sued by Patrick Cariou, whose photographs were appropriated by Mr. Prince for his latest kindergarten art project photomanipulation work.

http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2009/01/12/richard-prince-sued-by-photographer-patrick-cariou/

Sadly, here's what I think about the situation:

I have come to one inescapable conclusion.

Copyright in the future will belong to those with the money to enforce it. It will be enforced against those with the money to make reparation.

I would not be at all surprised if, at the end of many days, we end up with a system like Canada has where there is a tax on blank recording media, which is redistributed to copyright holders under some regime I won't pretend to understand. This will be like that, but bigger - all ISP's, all broadcast/cable/satellite bandwidth providers, etc, will pay, and it will get divided up so Disney et al can limp along in perpetuity. Anybody who wants to will be able to steal my photographs and do whatever they want with them, end of story. In other words, it'll be just like now, but I won't have the forlorn hope that some intern at a company with actual money will steal something from me and I'll be able to get some kind of recovery.


M

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