Photographer gets $12million....

A good item to keep handy for the next time someone rips off one of your images. :)
 
Awesome stuff

GRR at you copy right infringement (?) :lol:
 
Cool, I'll be remembering that one next time 'Bath Life' Have it away with some of our images for their front cover!
 
That's bloody stupid...

Copyright is pretty antiquated idea as it is... I fully expect that it will change beyond all recognition in my lifetime.

Authorship is dead!
 
just show how bad the legal system in the usa is
in the UK there would be a reality check - were the photos really that good? - i think not...
 
sportysnaps said:
just show how bad the legal system in the usa is
in the UK there would be a reality check - were the photos really that good? - i think not...
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Or, it was done as a message to people not to thieve other peoples work.

Fair enough I'd say, you steal & get caught, you pay the price.
 
She only got that much because the defendants didn't do anything to stop the courts from upholding the plaintiffs case. And because the US legal system is completely random compared to the UK system :lol:
 
well, that is a scarily large amount of money
 
TheKrikkitWars said:
Copyright is pretty antiquated idea as it is...
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Absolutely, in the same way that theft is a pretty antiquated idea. Anyone who is in anyway creative and is against copyright truely doesn't understand why they need copyright.

So, if you're happy with the communist philosophy of 'all property is theft' give up all your worldly goods to the commune (including your camera gear) and go the whole hog. If you're not happy with the thought of a stranger coming into your house and taking your tv, your microwave, your DSLR, without your permission then thank the stars that we have copyright protection.
 
Copyright was written before mass availability of creative content and the methods of creation... it was written when information was scarce, and thus valuble... we now have more information than we can handle, devaluing information.

Welcome to the twenty first century... I take it that you, along with Mark Getty ("intellectual property is the oil of the 21's century" - terse transliteration War) will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
 
Addition: I'm not going to change your mind... but eventually it will be impossible to put information on the internet and consider the copyright valid!
 
TheKrikkitWars said:
Copyright was written before mass availability of creative content and the methods of creation... it was written when information was scarce, and thus valuble... we now have more information than we can handle, devaluing information.

Welcome to the twenty first century... I take it that you, along with Mark Getty ("intellectual property is the oil of the 21's century" - terse transliteration War) will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
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All you've done there is show a remarkable lack of understanding of intellectual property law and the reasons why in the 21st century it is even more of a neccesity.

If your futre has no intellectual property protection then it's a very bleak future indeed. At first it will hit the big budget items, movies and computer games will cease to be produced anywhere bar garden sheds as the big production compaies will no longer invest in them as they have no way of proteting their revenue, will lose profits and therefore will have no money to invest anyway. Then, it will hit other types of creative arts. If artists can't protect their work then they won't be able to make the money from it to justify investing their time and effort. Why work for it when some company will simply steal it from you?

People who want to abolition of intellectual property rights are like locusts, more than happy enough to take what they can but all they'll leave is a wasteland where nothing else is growing to replace what they've taken.
 
TheKrikkitWars said:
Copyright was written before mass availability of creative content and the methods of creation... it was written when information was scarce, and thus valuble... we now have more information than we can handle, devaluing information.
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While I agree with the statement, what would you have replace copyright in this future we're going to be dragged into?
 
yourapocalypse said:
While I agree with the statement, what would you have replace copyright in this future we're going to be dragged into?
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Copyright doesn't need to be replaced, it's a fundamentally sounds concept, you create something, the copyright is automatically yours. It's the protection of copyright which needs to be developed to make it easier for the creator to protect their rights.
 
I agree, I just want to know what Krikkit's solution is.
 
Copyright dates back to the mass-availability of Dickens' work. Social norms would stop the majority of peeps nicking from shops (as now) but not "piracy" by publishers.

Copyright is a right up to the minute idea. The idea that you can own something "intellectual" and that it has value and that your right to exploit it should be defended. Unfortunately, the English legal system isn't providing a low-cost mechanism to enforce this, now that it's considered too complex for the Small Claims track.

Property rights provided an impetus to medieval England. For the first time the majority could own land and not have it taken by force by their "betters". Just think if you could Web-publish all of your work, secure in the knowledge that you would be rewarded for any of its commercial use.

Apart from secondary infringement, English law doesn't make provision for exemplary/punitive damages, so we are lucky to be awarded any more than a modest uplift on published rates.
 
thats a pretty large sum of money from copyright infringement, lucky lucky photographer
 
The solution is a move away from masses of commercial content... The strictest capitalist model no longer holds when it becomes impossible to encapsulate and sell things that aren't available free elsewhere.

In the end people will still pay for a real photo in a real frame, or a real dvd, people will buy a physical object but only if it's deserving... as more and more enthusiastic and capable amateurs move into the market with things that they produced for the love of it, the more regular people get involved in the authorship process, the more accessible the production of media is, the less room commercialism has.

We are surrounded by images that aren't ours, huge portions of our lives are made up of things that aren't our intellectual property... humans are designed to copy, to repeat things, to communicate ideas which may not be our own. making communication this easy was only ever going to lead to a point where we came into conflict between our own desire for ownership of the intangible and our desire to share the self-same things. In the end sharing will win out, my generation, the generation before mine and certainly the one proceeding mine doesn't think twice about it, if i make something good, I give my friends a copy, if they make something good they do the same, and it gets disseminated along flexible networks of people... It's gift culture, we offer freely, and take freely, our position in society is based not on what we have, but what we give.

But maybe I'm wrong, After all its not like Linux has supplanted the two "proper" OS's for many of the most demanding applications is it, oh wait! IT IS LIKE THAT!

Side note:
NorthernNikon said:
If your future has no intellectual property protection then it's a very bleak future indeed. At first it will hit the big budget items, movies and computer games will cease to be produced anywhere bar garden sheds
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Not really.

I play "indie" games, they're up to par with "Big Budget" games. Likewise to make a decent movie you just need a decent script and director...

Money doesn't make things good. Creativity makes things good. Love and Passion makes things good.
 
Love and passion can be bought.

/pointless inflammatory cynical comment
 
TheKrikkitWars said:
In the end sharing will win out, my generation, the generation before mine and certainly the one proceeding mine doesn't think twice about it, if i make something good, I give my friends a copy, if they make something good they do the same, and it gets disseminated along flexible networks of people... It's gift culture, we offer freely, and take freely, our position in society is based not on what we have, but what we give.
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It's not a gift culture if it's not yours to give it's a theft culture, which you might be quite happy with, but just as with locusts, if you keep on taking eventually there will be nothing left to take. Your position in society, therefore, is based upon what you take.

Money doesn't make things good. Creativity makes things good. Love and Passion makes things good.
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No, but money helps make good things happen. True, it can stifle creativity, so the balance of power for creative control has to be with the artist
but it is naivity in the extreme to believe that artists of whatever genre can continue to create high calibre work for free for any length of time.
 
These derogatory comments about copyright could only come from people who are ignorant of the need to protect artistic work from petty thieves. Obviously their livelihood does not depend on their creative output.
 
TheKrikkitWars said:
The solution is a move away from masses of commercial content... The strictest capitalist model no longer holds when it becomes impossible to encapsulate and sell things that aren't available free elsewhere.

In the end people will still pay for a real photo in a real frame, or a real dvd, people will buy a physical object but only if it's deserving... as more and more enthusiastic and capable amateurs move into the market with things that they produced for the love of it, the more regular people get involved in the authorship process, the more accessible the production of media is, the less room commercialism has.

We are surrounded by images that aren't ours, huge portions of our lives are made up of things that aren't our intellectual property... humans are designed to copy, to repeat things, to communicate ideas which may not be our own. making communication this easy was only ever going to lead to a point where we came into conflict between our own desire for ownership of the intangible and our desire to share the self-same things. In the end sharing will win out, my generation, the generation before mine and certainly the one proceeding mine doesn't think twice about it, if i make something good, I give my friends a copy, if they make something good they do the same, and it gets disseminated along flexible networks of people... It's gift culture, we offer freely, and take freely, our position in society is based not on what we have, but what we give.

But maybe I'm wrong, After all its not like Linux has supplanted the two "proper" OS's for many of the most demanding applications is it, oh wait! IT IS LIKE THAT!

Money doesn't make things good. Creativity makes things good. Love and Passion makes things good.
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Hear, hear!
Eloquent delivery, sir.

Now if only someone intelligent and talented could translate that into a funny comic cartoon strip á la the Marvel Comics for Joe Blow, Jane Doe, and Aunt Meredith...!

Bob Dylan already said it 40 years ago: "The times they are a'changin'". But that concept still needs to sink in with a lot of people.
 
awp said:
These derogatory comments about copyright could only come from people who are ignorant of the need to protect artistic work from petty thieves. Obviously their livelihood does not depend on their creative output.
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Maybe you should re-read my long post, and think about what I'm saying in it...

But feel free to call me a thief if you like.
 
Copyright for private, non-commercial use is de-facto dead. Meanwhile, Hollywood is thriving and the video game industry is even bigger than Hollywood. Music is far better now than before file-sharing.

Copyright is going to survive in some form, at least while we have age of scarcity economics, but modelling control over an infinite resource after possesion of property may turn out not to be the best idea.
 
TheKrikkitWars said:
Maybe you should re-read my long post, and think about what I'm saying in it...
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It's very hard to respond to your post without coming across patronising, but you simply show no understanding of simple economics. It's all very well having idealistic notions of "no copyright" but the hard economic facts dictate that without intellectual property protection the world would have far less art, music, film, television and literature and what would remain would be of vastly inferior quality. The dream that everyone would create and share is a nonsense, human nature simply isn't like that and while it might work in a commune, in the real anonymous world it simply isn't feasible.
 
Jamougha said:
Copyright for private, non-commercial use is de-facto dead.
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??? I'm not sure what you mean by this. Copyright law will only pay out what the copyright owner would have lost commercially.

Jamougha said:
Meanwhile, Hollywood is thriving and the video game industry is even bigger than Hollywood. Music is far better now than before file-sharing.
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Because of intellectual property law and despite of piracy. Not sure how you can assert that music is better now than before file sharing, that's a nonsense statement unless you qualify it.

Jamougha said:
Copyright is going to survive in some form, at least while we have age of scarcity economics, but modelling control over an infinite resource after possesion of property may turn out not to be the best idea.
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I've no idea what you're trying to say here. For someone to be able to hold the copyright of something, that thing has to be original and by its very nature anything original cannot be infinite.
 
NorthernNikon said:
??? I'm not sure what you mean by this. Copyright law will only pay out what the copyright owner would have lost commercially.
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Enforcement of the prohobition on unlicenced sharing of copyrighted digital data is currently impractical. 4G p2p networks will make it even more so. You can like it or loath it but you're going to have to live with it.

Because of intellectual property law and despite of piracy. Not sure how you can assert that music is better now than before file sharing, that's a nonsense statement unless you qualify it.
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Music is better in terms of the generally agreed subjective quality of the current output relative to the '90s. The bands have developed revenue streams that don't depend on the recording studios, making them more independent, and they're still raking in the megabucks.

Hollywood will survive because they generate revenue from cinema takings and merchandising. Games will survive because of the technical difficulties associated with copying games for consoles and because people will pay for safe, virus free software, but more importantly because people will pay for access to extras like online multiplayer servers and so on. World of Warcraft is a great example.

I've no idea what you're trying to say here. For someone to be able to hold the copyright of something, that thing has to be original and by its very nature anything original cannot be infinite.
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Once you have created the original and put it into digital format it can be copied endlessly at virtually no cost. Hence it becomes an infinite resource. This distinguishes it from physical property. The best way to design the law may not involve treating it as if it were physical property.
 
The rise of the file sharing culture has sadly diminished the value of intellectual property, at least in the digital domain, but that doesn't mean that the law shouldn't be enforced when a person, or organisation has been caught. The photographer's pictures were used to help the company that used them make multi million $'s, so he deserved a share. Maybe not that much, but his input contributed to the profits.

I think only someone who doesn't make a living from their art/intellectual property can be so nonchalant about possibly someone's possible livelihood being taken illegally for no reward.(I include myself in that btw) Just because something is digital does not make it worthless, it may make it easier to copy, but if someone wants an item, then it has value. And if if someone has made something original, then that has value also.

Jamougha said:
Music is better in terms of the generally agreed subjective quality of the current output relative to the '90s. The bands have developed revenue streams that don't depend on the recording studios, making them more independent, and they're still raking in the megabucks.
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Every generation thinks that their generation has the best music. There may indeed be some artists making a lot of money, but there is a lot of people not making that much, and while there may be more people making music, the subjective quality is in the ear of the beholder. ;) There were a lot more groups signed to record labels and making/releasing music in Liverpool in the 80's at least, whether they were making a living from it considering the power of the record companies at the time is another matter. ;) If you make music now, and there are people that wish to buy it, while you may make more money from the individual item of music you happen to sell (if selling direct), once people can copy it easily and illegally, that revenue may not be as much as it should be in the long term.

From a technical level, the current generation may be the 1st to actively embrace a worse music product (MP3 v CD for example) than the previous generation. :shrug: Progress eh!
 
Your in the right place at the right time and you shoot the picture of a lifetime (maybe someone famous being assassinated for example). You have the only picture of the event and every media outlet in the world wants to feature it.

Are you happy giving, or letting them take it for free or do you want to hold copyright and get a few quid?
 
NorthernNikon said:
human nature simply isn't like that and while it might work in a commune, in the real anonymous world it simply isn't feasible.
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Humans were built to copy, and share and communicate.

What would have happened if someone had put copyright on the first spoken language, or patented the wheel?

Culture is too important to be owned, Its yours and it's mine, and the guy down the streets... You can try to own it, but you cant encapsulate it, once its released into the wild it belongs to everyone.

You recording it doesn't make it yours any more than the person being recorded can claim it to be theirs.

If you continue to think "what about the money" you'll continue to miss the point... with modern technology the high end recording techniques are available to make professional standard media content anywhere. You dont need 50 million dollars and a contract with industrial light and magic to make brilliant SFX, you need 200 clapped out pc's, a mile of 2nd hand cat5e wire, and a working knowledge of C++.

The worm sas turned and we're all creators... I'm creating content right now, you are every time you upload... we've removed the scarcity that makes our content valuable in monetary terms.

Information wants to be free!

In the end if you can make a scarce commodity you'll still make money... good photographs aren't scarce anymore, good programmes aren't scarce anymore, good videos, and good acting aren't.

Your market is falling away from you all the time, and all you can say is "but people won't share" they are sharing.... your work, and my work, and everybody else's bloody work. they amount of creators will always be less than the amount of creative collaborators which will be less than the amount of consumers. But the ratio and the mechanics of accessing the consumer has changed forever...

I'm not saying this will happen over night... I'm not saying this will happen in ten years... I'm saying that in another 60 years... when I'm old and decrepit. the changes will slowly have crept over us without the world really noticing.



cowboy said:
Your in the right place at the right time and you shoot the picture of a lifetime (maybe someone famous being assassinated for example). You have the only picture of the event and every media outlet in the world wants to feature it.

Are you happy giving, or letting them take it for free or do you want to hold copyright and get a few quid?
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You don't reveal the image, you sell the image to the highest bidder, if the image is so rare, you won't need copyright, and you won't need royaties, just the fee to release it into the "wild" via the highest paying conduit.

And for the record I copyleft my works.
 
TheKrikkitWars said:
If you continue to think "what about the money" you'll continue to miss the point... with modern technology the high end recording techniques are available to make professional standard media content anywhere. You dont need 50 million dollars and a contract with industrial light and magic to make brilliant SFX, you need 200 clapped out pc's, a mile of 2nd hand cat5e wire, and a working knowledge of C++.
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How are these 200 clapped out PC's paid for? Artists produce art for its own sake, but without the money to continue to produce, there will be a point where real life will either make them stop, or limit them to not produce their best because of the need to make a living.


TheKrikkitWars said:
You don't reveal the image, you sell the image to the highest bidder, if the image is so rare, you won't need copyright, and you won't need royaties, just the fee to release it into the "wild" via the highest paying conduit.

And for the record I copyleft my works.
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I was speaking to an ex press photographer a few weeks ago, and he said he got a picture of Paul McCartney and the Queen which no other photographer at the same event got. A national newspaper offered to buy the image outright. He declined, but offered them a limited licence, or however he phrased it, but the point is, he sold the image around the world for a one off usage licence, and he made 10-20 times the money from the highest bidder. Without copyright he would have to take the highest bid and then lose control of the image. If you only have one chance to make money on an image, would the price for the image go up or down? Obviously it depends on the image, but a photographer could hold out for the best price, but for most press pics at least, time affects how much each party will pay, hold out for too long and you get no money, the media can say take or leave this offer knowing that as long as nobody else gets the image in a certain time frame, its value will be much less, if not worthless.

Would a newspaper pay for an image outright if as soon as it is revealed the image apart from initially getting them sales/hits, that image can no longer generate any more money?


Information will spread around the world, but original thought, ideas and content (for want of a better word) needs to be protected for the original thinkers/producers to carry producing to the best of their ability imho. :)
 
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