FocalPower…the blog

A recent post by Jim Goldstein about Facebook’s rights grab raises some timely issues for photographers regarding protecting their rights. I wanted to share an alternative view of this situation along with some things that FocalPower is working on that helps to address this recurring problem.

First, photographers need to be extra aware of their legal rights around their work and how those rights can be impacted when ever they put a photo anywhere (digitally or physically), consider it Photo Business 101. However, in today’s world you can’t afford to not place your photos online; there is too much potential for missed exposure and revenue. Some photographers are rightfully cautious and place a small resolution set of images online. The thinking goes that if someone were to steal the image and try to make a print, they can’t make that big of one. The reality is that if someone takes your image from a website and tries to make a print, there are limitations to the quality just by the nature of the photo being online. Photos online are resized to 72pdi and converted to the sRGB color space because that is the optimal settings for online viewing; these are also not optimal or even that great for printing an image.

I would rather go in the other direction. I want to place a large image online. I want my viewers to be able to view as large of an image of my work as possible so they can appreciate the detail and push them over the emotial edge of buying my work. This is exactly what FocalPower is working on providing (we already have it in an early alpha release).

Beyond that, I also want to (no, make that need to) be able to share my images in the multitude of places online where there are huge audiences and the potential to increase the visibility of my work. And this goes well beyond the typical having samples of my images on Flickr. For most photographers, Flickr will not drive new business to you as most people on Flickr are other photographers and, as I have said before, the quality of the reviews you can get on Flickr are not worth the effort. FocalPower is also working on this issue as well. Being able mange photos centrally but yet share them anywhere you need to in order to increase awareness or spread your brand.

An Alternative View of FaceBook’s Terms

With recent experience in building apps for Facebook, I know that in order to provide the fastest possible viewing experience for their users, they do a lot of work to keep content close to their servers. Most of the popular applications on Facebook are actually running in the same data centers as Facebook. This means that when users access a page that contains that application, the application will run as fast as the page.

I have a hunch that most of the legalize in the Facebook Terms was placed there by lawyers trying to protect Facebook from what the engineers had come up with to ensure a fast responding site. By caching some of the smaller images, those that get displayed the most based on how Facebook works, Facebook can guarantee that their site will perform fast for their users even if the site where the content is originally published is not performing fast.

Does this make it right for Facebook to do this? No!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think this is the right thing for Facebook to be doing behind the scense without being completely transparent about it. When they were dealing with a primary audience of College students, the user’s didn’t really care. Now that they are trying to grow and expand beyond that audience, the users are much more savvy and care about these facts. Something that I think Facebook is slowly starting to realized considering they just hired a new COO who understands these type of issues. Unfortunately, even with a new COO on board, the company might not actually change their ways until their customer base raises enough of a noise about the issue.

So, where does this leave photographers with sharing their photos on Facebook’s ever growing audience base? That is a decision that each photographer must make on their own. Personally, I would never upload a photo to a site that took my rights away, I can’t think of a short term gain that would be big enough for that long term loss. The good news is that this is getting awareness amongst photographers. Is it now time to raise that awareness officially to Facebook?

I came across a post over at Photoprenuer today that talks about how Facebook Claims Right to Create Derivative Works from Members’ Photos. Essentially by clicking on that “I accept the Terms and Conditions” check box on Facebook, you are agreeing to give Facebook a perpetual license to use (or sublicense) the photos you upload to their site.

The liberal attitude and actions that more and more organizations are taking to infringe on your rights over your work can be scary. And most of the time you don’t even know that your rights are being taken way form you…when was the last time that you actually read through a Terms and Conditions document? I came across another example of this last year when I picked up a flyer at a botanical garden for their photo contest; if you submitted any photo to their contents you granted them a license to use your work for what ever they wanted…including making prints of it and selling it in their gift shop!

This just shows that you have to be careful and read the fine print. As a photographer, this is especially true on any site where you plan to upload any of your photos. This is one of the reasons why we are building the FocalPower platform to manage and share your photos online using widget technology. The ability to include you photos on other web properties without actually placing them on the servers of those properties. You remain in control of your photos even after sharing them!

Using Facebook as an example (we do not support Facebook yet), you paste the widget code that allows you share your photo on your Facebook profile, but you don’t actually upload your photo to Facebook. When someone views your Facebook profile, that viewer’s browser actually downloads the photo(s) from FocalPower, not Facebook. Two of the main advantages of this are the control and statistics that can be provided to our users.  Another powerful advantage is when you share a portfolio using a widget you can change the contents of the portfolio after you share the portfolio and all new viewers will see the latest changes, regardless of where the portfolio was shared. Alpha Users are now starting to explore the multiple advantages of widgets based photo sharing, so stay tuned.

(Full Disclosure: FocalPower has it’s own set of Terms and Conditions–someone has to feed the lawyers. We do have a clause in there that grants FocalPower rights to use our subscriber’s photos but only for the purpose of marketing the FocalPower services and full credit will be given to all photographers when their work is used in that fashion. {See Section License Granted by Subscriber to FocalPower} The reason we have that clause is to allow us to help expand visibility of our subscribers work.)