FocalPower…the blog

A few days ago I came across the Washington Post article Hey, Isn’t That… which talked about the all too familiar issue of late: finding your photography used by a commercial entity without proper authority or compensation. The examples given in this story are a bit old news to anyone who follows the Photo Attorney blog. But analyzing this situation can quickly become a slipper slope of blaming social photography sharing sites of not providing enough protection for their user’s images and/or blaming the Creative Commons licensing platform for creating this huge grey area of legal use.

The whole point of social sharing sites is to allow you to share photos…make them accessible to your friends and the world. If they started to lock down access to your photos, their whole value proposition goes away; and that’s not even taking into consideration the technical cost and challenge needed to add those controls (see Flickr’s latest outage). Meanwhile, Creative Commons was created to fill a void in the current copyright law to enable and protect the authors in this evolving publishing world…the new world of the self-publishers, mixes, and remixes. One of the best descriptions of this new world is given by Larry Lessig, the creator of Creative Commons, during his TED talk How creativity is being strangled by the law (A must watch video!).

Photographer’s today have to understand the legal issues and options that are available and use the ones that they are most comfortable with. Some prefer creative commons, while others prefer the tighter copyright. It is up to each photographer to decide what makes the most sense for themselves.

Regardless of the path that a photographer follows, one thing is clear: to protect yourself you should place a watermark on your images. This allows everyone to clearly see the protection limits you place on your work. And if you choose the tighter copyright, it provides a higher cost to any potential infringer of your rights.

San Francisco Photographer Jim Goldstein has a wonderful posting out today titled Creative Commons: A Great Concept, I’ll Never Employ. Photographers today need to understand the legal landscape involved with their craft. While Creative Commons is fairly well known in certain circles, many photographers don’t really understand the details of the creative common licenses. Nor do they think about the long term ramifications of their choices. These are just some of the items that are discussed in the article.

It is also surprising how few tools photographers have that help us deal with these legal issues. We have numerous tools that allow us to be more productive working with our photography (i.e., Photoshop, Aperture, Lightroom) but why don’t we have tools that help us automate the other critical areas of our craft? The areas that are, in many ways, more critical to our long term success. The areas that we either waste time with today or don’t spend the time with that we should?

Speak up fellow photographers…