Posts by Copyright Action

Re: Conspiracy to steal?

Removal of metadata is a criminal offence under the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003. The trouble is that you have to prove it was done with the intent of infringing copyright. They always say "it;s the software". No case has ever been brought, yet the IPO insists this rubbish law is perfectly adequate protection for photographers

Re: This could work, but it wont.

You are right to draw attention to the implementation, but it is worse than you think.

Current proposals indicate that each entity that operates ECL will need to run a searchable database. We don't know how many of those will ultmately exist, but the IPO said during Digital Economy Bill consultations that 20 separate organisations had expressed an interest in operating ECL.

In order for any photographer anywhere to check whether any of their work has been used they will either have to:

- visually browse each entire collection. Perhaps possible if it is a few dozen images. Not possible if it is a few hundreds or thousands

- search the database, but how? Their name is useless, by definition. Visual match is the only way, a slow and resource intensive method. Since you can have no idea which of your images may have been orphaned and licensed, you have to upload all of your images in order to see whether any have been used.

So in order to find out whether someone somewhere has licensed themselves to use your work at the price they deem reasonable, every photographer in the world will have to upload everything they've ever published to maybe 1, maybe 20+ different sites, and then they'll have to do it again and again every 6m or so.

All this in the name of efficiency for publishers and cultural organisations who whinge about the difficulty of clearing rights. It simply throws the problem back at the creators who make and own the stuff they want to use. Yet those very publishers and cultural organisations have bitterly resisted any duty of care to record and publish the bylines of creators so that work does not get orphaned in the first place..

The IPO and Government have been told loudly and repeatedly that this is insane, unworkable, wrong and just plain illegal under international treaties, in numerous submissions and discussions over the past 5 years since Gowers, by every photographers organisation.

What we have here is an impenetrable wall of hubris surrounding the clueless scheming mendacity of the IPO.The very things this US creators letter state were put by me to Quilty in a 2010 meeting prior to DEB. I am not allowed to quote or attribute his response under Chatham House rules that were imposed on the meeting, but some blithering IPO clod responded airily "Well, we'll just wait for the court cases then".. They don't care. it's all underwritten by the taxpayer anyway.

Re: Wishing into existence

"Nothing has been taken".

Sanctimonious exploitative bilge.

You could equally say we should not pay the man who digs a ditch, because he still has his arms and his shovel. What is stolen is the value that the photographer should have had for his work to make the photo, and needed to have in order to eat and make more photos.

I am sure you will say "what work? It only takes me a second to take a photo". Then you don't need other peoples' do you?

In one small respect I agree with you. Copyright should not be a property right for individual creators, it should be an inalienable civil right on the European model.

After 35 years as a pro photographer, on the web since 1996, I have closed my public website. All I ever get from it is people and companies stealing from it, and mostly using photos in ways I would never agree to at any price. Invariably they strip my details. Usually they claim it as their own copyright. I was happy to share whilst people were fair, but it's now like trying to live in a neighbourhood of rapacious muggers.

This idiot law just seeks to make theft legal. "Free" is what the voting public wants, and ibeing able to help themselves is certainly what the big publishers and aggregators want to fatten up their profit margins. The radical ant-copyright lobby and the monopolist corporates are the flip sides of the same coin. Both carelessly emasculate individual creators, as if there is an endless supply. We treat fish better than that.

Make your own photos, music, art, movies, books, software, news articles, Try living at the other end of your "nothing is taken" proposition. Tell us how you get on.

Perhaps you need to get out more.

Try Google Images. Pick any subject. I've done this and on my sample about half were orphans - no metadata, no contactable real person to pursue.

Even Flickr is pretty good. Mpst people there use pseudonyms you'll never deconstruct and many are unresponsive. Perfect.

Alternatively, just go to the BBC site and watch one of the most efficient orphan generators known to man. Crowdsourced images in one end by the thousand, anonymised out the other. By the time they've been nicked, blogged, tweeted a few times nobody will ever know who stole what from whom. and nobody gives a flying f*ck who the copyright owner was.

I've audited a sample of my own work. Google Search by Image is good for this. Stolen versions outnumbered legit 14:1. All of the stolen versions had metadata stripped, about 20% were passed off as someone else's copyright, just 4% had links to me or mentioned my name. Most of the thieves were insulated by pseudonyms and nicknames that I'd need a court order to get ID's. About a third were in jurisdictions that are out of reach.

The web is one vast photo orphaning machine.

Re: Contract fine, PAYG broken

Nah, the fuckup is equal ops. and apparently extensive to judge by the howls of annoyance on Facebook. We have 3x O2 contract phones here (W7 London). All show good signal on O2 but connect to nothing. There's a tri-tone beep when dialling other mobiles. Oddly one attempt to call landline worked, once, then didn';t.