Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

This Photograph Is Not Free

petapixel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 257 posts

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#161

Post by smokeyj »

Confusion wrote: post #152
mibbitor wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A webapp is run as a service. You're charging people for a service you provide. That makes it very hard to copy. A photo isn't a service. It's a collection of bytes that is trivial to copy. If you want to make money as a photographer, you need to structure it in a way that means it's hard to copy. But these days, anyone can take pro quality photos with minimal talent. If he's an exceptional photographer, he should be…

You know, it is pretty easy to kill someone. That doesn't mean it's morally acceptable, let alone legal. It doesn't matter how easy it is to copy the photograph. It's still not morally acceptable or legal. As to your second argument, that 'anyone can take pro quality photos with minimal talent': image quality isn't all that counts. In fact, it's substantially less important than composing a good photograph in the fir…

If I'm a programmer, and I let my customers download my program for free and include a crack -- who's fault is it if someone doesn't pay up for the program? This is the internet. I had to download a copy the photograph just to view the image. It's stored in my cache right now. You have an unlicensed copy as well. Do I feel like a murdering thief? No, I don't.

If you run a bike-shop, don't leave the bikes out front without locks. They're going to get stolen. Don't bitch about society when they go missing. If you're putting art out on the internet, don't bitch when everyone has a copy. At least watermark that sucker.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#162

Post by hammock »

smackfu wrote: post #126
parfe wrote: post #121

Well the comments here terribly disappoint me. Clearly the photographer wants to be paid as a professional, just like anyone else here. The author should not have included any monetary figure in the article as doing so brings down the wrath of a thousand pedants with pocket calculators proving he overcharges and overvalues his work. So many people here seem to think they somehow "got him" on some straw-man price-poin…

I think the comments are fine, because the entire premise of the blog post is wrong. He should be paid because his skill as a photographer is worth money, not because he paid for a lot of expensive equipment.

Yes, a thousand times yes. "The principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his work," said Joseph Stalin. Which is backwards.

What many people with only a superficial understanding of economics don't seem to grasp is that the "perfect competition" ecosystem that is described in Econ 101 - in which goods are priced at cost - is an EMERGENT property of free trade.

Key word is emergent. The cost of a good is not enough justification for judgment of what someone out to pay for that good. When that good, labor, and all inputs of that good, and inputs of those inputs are priced fairly and freely, then such pricing tends to emerge. But saying "I paid $XX for a plane ticket and this equipment to produce this good so I deserve to be paid $XX for it" is Begging The Question. The inventive camera maker, or the bankrupt airline that sold you the plane ticket below cost, could be make the same argument of you. And the cheated, suicidal Foxconn employee who made the camera components could make the same argument. And so on.

The point is you can't force the pricing you want. Allow people to trade freely, and order emerges.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#163

Post by dchest »

jonknee wrote: post #151
dchest wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He should be paid because he demands payment. This is a valid thing to do according to current laws, which allow authors to control the distribution of their "intellectual work" on author's terms (with some exceptions). Both author's skills and the cost of equipment are irrelevant . If the author decides that the cost of equipment is the pricing factor, it's his or her right. The comments here mostly point out that t…

He was also complaining about people asking for his photos for free. That has nothing to do with the law.

Asking to license photos for free is also a valid and common way to acquire licenses. This particular author is annoyed by such requests, because he wants to license the right to copy the result of his work for a fee. Other authors are okay with this, and some even explicitly allow such use (see Creative Commons licenses).

This has everything to do with the law, because if not for copyright laws, he wouldn't be able to demand payments for copying of his published photos.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#164

Post by mibbitor »

Confusion wrote: post #152
mibbitor wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A webapp is run as a service. You're charging people for a service you provide. That makes it very hard to copy. A photo isn't a service. It's a collection of bytes that is trivial to copy. If you want to make money as a photographer, you need to structure it in a way that means it's hard to copy. But these days, anyone can take pro quality photos with minimal talent. If he's an exceptional photographer, he should be…

You know, it is pretty easy to kill someone. That doesn't mean it's morally acceptable, let alone legal. It doesn't matter how easy it is to copy the photograph. It's still not morally acceptable or legal. As to your second argument, that 'anyone can take pro quality photos with minimal talent': image quality isn't all that counts. In fact, it's substantially less important than composing a good photograph in the fir…

> Taking good photographs is as hard as it always was.

Untrue. With digital, you can take 1,000 photos and chances are one will be fantastic. You can brute force brilliance. That wasn't true before digital.

Photos are simply recording something that exists. It's not creating art as such (IMHO). So unlike painting / writing books / writing code, you could just sit a monkey there with a good camera, variety of lenses, filters, etc and have him take a fantastic photo sooner or later.

Don't get me wrong, I love taking photos, and try to make my photos better each time, try to learn what settings, composure etc will make the best photo etc. But at the same time, pretty soon you'll have cameras that take a billion photos all at the same time with every available setting, then allow you to navigate through and select the best. Taking photos then just comes down to judging what makes a good photo, which most people can do (And can also be automated by surveying people or doing A/B testing etc).

> You know, it is pretty easy to kill someone. That doesn't mean it's morally acceptable, let alone legal. It doesn't matter how easy it is to copy the photograph. It's still not morally acceptable or legal.

If you kill me, it affects me. If you copy a photo of mine, I haven't lost anything. It's a bad analogy.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#165

Post by mibbitor »

esonderegger wrote: post #147
mibbitor wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A webapp is run as a service. You're charging people for a service you provide. That makes it very hard to copy. A photo isn't a service. It's a collection of bytes that is trivial to copy. If you want to make money as a photographer, you need to structure it in a way that means it's hard to copy. But these days, anyone can take pro quality photos with minimal talent. If he's an exceptional photographer, he should be…

Some content is inherently easy to copy. That doesn't mean it is without value. Copying a poem is easy, but copying a novel requires slightly more effort. Does that mean all poets should become novelists in order to make a living? When the Beatles were making some of their best work (in my opinion), they weren't touring. Who are we to say that the recordings are without value, just because they are easily copied, and…

I wasn't stating an opinion. I was stating the facts.

As technology has progressed, it has meant that instead of very few producers and millions of consumers of 'content', now everyone produces content. That means the value of 'content' has drastically reduced to the point that it's almost worthless for some areas.

This is progress, and you can't stop it.

Of course art is valuable, as it has always been. But as stated elsewhere, there are a billion pictures of a sunset online... supply far outstrips demand.

And yes, as a programmer, you can either work to keep your source code secret, or you can provide software as a service, charge for support, or any number of other monetization options. But you can't really sell open source software without some reason for people to buy it.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#166

Post by JoeAltmaier »

josefresco wrote: post #59
slavak wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of... Tapping with a hammer ......................... $ 10.00 Knowing where to tap .......................... $990.00

The story is much longer... it involved a creaky wooden floor and two contractors. One quotes say $1000 and 7 days to fix, tears the whole thing up and fixes it. The other quotes $1000 pulls out his hammer and fixes the creaky floor with one nail in a few seconds. Both fixed the problem, but the expert isn't worth any less than the guy who put in tons of man-hours.

Actually you fix a creaky floor with a screw, not a nail. It creaks because somebody used a nail in the first place. Just sayin.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#167

Post by nekojima »

lysol wrote: post #140
parfe wrote: post #121

Well the comments here terribly disappoint me. Clearly the photographer wants to be paid as a professional, just like anyone else here. The author should not have included any monetary figure in the article as doing so brings down the wrath of a thousand pedants with pocket calculators proving he overcharges and overvalues his work. So many people here seem to think they somehow "got him" on some straw-man price-poin…

People will come up with cash for things they thing are worth paying for. A picture of a sunset has little commercial value, but custom photography (weddings, etc) do. The customer doesn't care about his overhead, especially if he doesn't know how to calculate it. Why should they? If you want them to pony up, selling something worth buying. Musicians have figured it out, why shouldn't he?

I license photos for publication. One of the best photos in terms of revenue is of a sunset. The cost of licensing is not very high, and varies on publication type & volume.

This photo alone has paid for the camera I took the photo with & the location costs several times over now. It may well surprise you, but there is a huge market for sunset pictures, as well as other even more mundane everyday items and scenes.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#168

Post by randomdata »

parfe wrote: post #121

Well the comments here terribly disappoint me. Clearly the photographer wants to be paid as a professional, just like anyone else here. The author should not have included any monetary figure in the article as doing so brings down the wrath of a thousand pedants with pocket calculators proving he overcharges and overvalues his work. So many people here seem to think they somehow "got him" on some straw-man price-poin…

> The fact the comments here seem to lack the professional empathy to jump from "How do you make money? Charge for your webapp!" To "How do you make money? Charge for your photos!" really shows how myopic the community can be.

I will point out that there is a reason HN advocates making money by developing web apps over creating binaries that are posted online for all to copy, with a shareware note attached. We have the exact same problem with copying. We just have learned to deal with the problem as best we can. Is there really nothing photographers can do on their own to mitigate the problem?

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#169

Post by joebadmo »

smackfu wrote: post #126
parfe wrote: post #121

Well the comments here terribly disappoint me. Clearly the photographer wants to be paid as a professional, just like anyone else here. The author should not have included any monetary figure in the article as doing so brings down the wrath of a thousand pedants with pocket calculators proving he overcharges and overvalues his work. So many people here seem to think they somehow "got him" on some straw-man price-poin…

I think the comments are fine, because the entire premise of the blog post is wrong. He should be paid because his skill as a photographer is worth money, not because he paid for a lot of expensive equipment.

This is parallel to a recent HN thread on copyright: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3303796

I think photographers (like musicians) face two problems: the amateurization of photography, and the lack of marginal cost of distribution.

Photographers need to figure out how to get paid. You can try to charge me the cost of production if you want, but I'm not going to pay it, esp. when there's a large and growing base of amateurs who will give me their work for free. This is why there is a culture of asking for a free license in exchange for exposure: because market dynamics have driven the price down that far. Someone who approaches you for free work isn't going to pay you what you want no matter what. You need to find the people who will pay you.

The freemium model is the only one that really makes sense to me. You give away your past work for free, as a marketing cost, and charge a service fee for those premium customers who have the budget. You charge for the actual production, not for the distribution.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#170

Post by nsxwolf »

hammock wrote: post #162
smackfu wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the comments are fine, because the entire premise of the blog post is wrong. He should be paid because his skill as a photographer is worth money, not because he paid for a lot of expensive equipment.

Yes, a thousand times yes. "The principle applied in the U.S.S.R. is that of socialism: From each according to his ability, to each according to his work," said Joseph Stalin. Which is backwards. What many people with only a superficial understanding of economics don't seem to grasp is that the "perfect competition" ecosystem that is described in Econ 101 - in which goods are priced at cost - is an EMERGENT property…

I don't see what's wrong with his pricing model. He's basing his price on what it would cost someone, starting from nothing, to go out and create a picture like that.

It's actually a discount in that regard since most people would have to spend considerable time learning how to take that photo.

It's a perfectly good starting place for a price. And nowhere did he say that price wasn't negotiable.

Post reply on HN