New Ruling Makes Slides And Film Worth $7

http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2009/04/14/new-ruling-makes-slides-and-film-worth-7/

Chris Usher has lost his appeal after a seven year battle against Corbis and each of his 12,640 images lost will be compensated for a lousy $7.00 a piece.

This ruling means that from now on, any agency, any magazine, any publisher will never have to worry about losing your photographs, since it will cost them peanuts to pay you back. It will be cheaper for them to trash them then returning them to you.

Dan wrote:

Yeah its a sad case but I dont think its definitive in any sense (with regard to precedent) primarily because its unlikely to occur again in future.

No one under 30 is even remotely interested in shooting for a rights forfeiting agency (the business model is dead) and most of us have our own servers (mirrored) hosting our own archives delivering our content live to any photo editor we want anywhere in the world about 8 seconds after we get it in the can (if we so choose to work at breakneck speed).

Most of us under 30 have an IRON GRIP on our editorial content. If traditional publications go digital it plays beautifully into our hands. It means we can choke access to our content (serving it from our own servers to targeted client domains - exclusively - on rights managed terms and then blocking off the image at the end of the term). No editorial rights licencee will ever come within a bulls roar of our raw data again. They pay an upfront access usage fee and a bandwidth usage fee from our server.

If they dont want to play by my terms then they get the (polite) single finger solute. Its pretty simple.

We are standardising how copyright content should appear in digital format (standardisation in expressions of image copyright ownership on digital platforms is important). It helps protect against ’screen grabs’.

This particular legal case (as well as the more recent demise of digital railroad) are classic reminders as to why you would have to lazy, stupid or down right complacent to even consider going down the ‘livebooks’ or ‘photoshelter’ pathway (in terms of comprehensive archival hosting - they do offer a number of other benefits I do admit!!).

How to deal with digital magazines or commercial clients without handing over files is more problematic. The solution will involve some clever editing software that allows creatives to licence photographic content and work on it ‘live’ from the photographers server without actually downloading the file. So they can dodge/burn/crop/cut/straighten and add type to a ‘virtual copy’ without ever actually downloading pixels. So the original file is served from the photographers server and the adjustments to the file are performed (rendered) locally and overlaid on the file to deliver the final output from the clients domain. They just play with the file during the rights managed period and then we block access to the file once their rights expire for that particular digital publication (domain).

Its a beautiful platform for really tightening the screws on wayward clients extending the boundaries on their usage terms.

The way to protect intellectual property in the digital medium is to always serve the content direct from the source (originator) of the content. This lets us rule our content with an iron fist and helps expose stolen/rights expired content when/if we discover it appearing somewhere digitally that we know it has no right to be appearing.

Bottom line is I feel horrible for the guy involved in this legal case. But I can assure him that the new generation of professional digital visual artists coming through will laugh in the face of any commercial entity attempting to ‘own/control/exploit/abuse/disrespect’ our content on terms that we dont deem acceptable.

The game has shifted in our favour and we wont be looking back.

Oh and we now get paid upfront too or our content isn’t available digitally. That’s another one of the new rules we just invented. Whoops I wrote a bit more than I had intended.

Take it easy and see you out there! And keep up this awesome blog!


FROM:
http://www.aphotoeditor.com/2009/04/14/new-ruling-makes-slides-and-film-worth-7/