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This Photograph Is Not Free

petapixel.com

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Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#201

Post by gergles »

dchest wrote: post #177
gergles wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He'd be able to 'demand' whatever he wants. Charities "demand" donations all the time and get them, and there's no protectionist law they have to deal with.

English is not my first language, but dictionary tells me that I used the term "demand" correctly: 5. (Law) (a) The asking or seeking for what is due or claimed as due. ... [1913 Webster]

The point was that you don't need any law to demand money for something. Copyright may legitimize your demand (in some people's eyes) but you can demand anything for anything.

I demand you pay me $20 for the privilege of reading my posts. See, it worked fine. I have the same legitimacy as anyone else that asks for money. You can choose to pay it or not. There's no law that suggests I can charge you, but I can certainly ask and you can choose to pay, if you want.

It's a tricky nuance but it's still a nuance.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#203

Post by jexe »

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.

That's exactly it. It's like telling someone that my software is worth $1700 because that's what my laptop cost.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#204

Post by synth »

gph wrote: post #195
dextorious wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"""True, but at the same time you shouldn't be hosting your pictures on the internet where anyone can copy it if you want to charge money for it. """ This is "blame the victim". Posting something on the internet does not make it public domain. """If I was to place some proprietary code on a public git, or just display it on my public webpage, should I get angry if people take it and don't pay me for it?""" Yeah, you…

"Posting something on the internet does not make it public domain." This is where I find your point to fall apart. The internet is NOT under the laws of any given nation and I doubt very much if some nations even have a sense of Public Domain or copyright. And even the ones that do can hardly agree on common terms. So really your statement should be "Posting something on the internet does not make it public domain in…

Just as stupid; to expect people not to sue you if you take someone else's intellectual property.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#205

Post by jdietrich »

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…

> Clearly the photographer wants to be paid as a professional

Then he has to work as a professional. "Professional landscape photographer" is an oxymoron. There is essentially no commercial market for landscape photography. For all practical purposes, there are an infinite number of sufficiently high-quality images available for free.

The only thing I'm formally qualified to do is sound engineering. The development of Digital Audio Workstation software and cheap microphones meant that by the time I left college, there weren't any recording studios left to hire me. I could say exactly the same thing as the OP about how much my studio equipment costs, about how long I spent learning my craft, but the simple fact is that there are too many studio engineers willing to work for free.

Landscape photography is a hobby, like sport or music. Some people are so exceptionally good at that they can make a living doing it, but everyone else has to suck it up, act like an adult and do something that people will actually pay for. John B. Mueller shoots weddings, I write software. He shoots landscapes for fun, I record music for fun, which is exactly why nobody will pay us to do it - thousands like us will do it for free.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#206

Post by synth »

mibbitor wrote: post #180
roc wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "With digital, you can take 1,000 photos and chances are one will be fantastic. You can brute force brilliance." This is simply untrue. It's true that at one point simply getting everything into focus at the right moment took a skilled photographer. But that was never the sum total of what a skilled photographer brought to the table. A sunset photo isn't good simply when it's the best of a million possible photos o…

And what about when your camera floats around automatically getting every available shot, every available composition, framing, leaving you to just select the best? There are only so many parameters that make up a recording of light. Sorry, but I do not see a massive amount of skill involved in it now that you can brute force most of it, or have it automatically done for you. We've also been fed so many fantastic pho…

"And what about when your camera floats around automatically getting every available shot, every available composition, framing, leaving you to just select the best?"

Haha yeah, I guess if you disregard the context of time, weather, effort, mobility, and all that non-idealized crap, you could probably systematically move around with your magic jetpack and a camera with infinite battery or whatever it is camera's have nowadays. Then you could simply brute-force every available composition like a computer would. Beep boop.

"There are only so many parameters that make up a recording of light. Sorry, but I do not see a massive amount of skill involved in it now that you can brute force most of it, or have it automatically done for you."

Fellow computer: sudo take a gorgeous photo of a snowy landscape, and fall back on the brute-force algorithm if necessary. Make it quick, I have to find my way back by noon and I don't trust my A* algorithm.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#207

Post by learc83 »

mibbitor wrote: post #180
roc wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "With digital, you can take 1,000 photos and chances are one will be fantastic. You can brute force brilliance." This is simply untrue. It's true that at one point simply getting everything into focus at the right moment took a skilled photographer. But that was never the sum total of what a skilled photographer brought to the table. A sunset photo isn't good simply when it's the best of a million possible photos o…

And what about when your camera floats around automatically getting every available shot, every available composition, framing, leaving you to just select the best? There are only so many parameters that make up a recording of light. Sorry, but I do not see a massive amount of skill involved in it now that you can brute force most of it, or have it automatically done for you. We've also been fed so many fantastic pho…

I've thought about this a bit. And my prediction is that a wedding photographer, for example, will set up several cameras around the room that will recored very high res video.

Later a computer will recreate the entire event and the photographer will fly around with a virtual camera and select the best shots.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#208

Post by gph »

synth wrote: post #204
gph wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Posting something on the internet does not make it public domain." This is where I find your point to fall apart. The internet is NOT under the laws of any given nation and I doubt very much if some nations even have a sense of Public Domain or copyright. And even the ones that do can hardly agree on common terms. So really your statement should be "Posting something on the internet does not make it public domain in…

Just as stupid; to expect people not to sue you if you take someone else's intellectual property.

Even more stupid; expecting the legal system of different countries to fairly and efficiently protect your IP, especially if you don't already have large stacks of money to buy lawyers with.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#209

Post by noonespecial »

All that equipment and and gas are not the valuable part of this photo. You pay the guy for knowing where this spot is and how to get a decent photo of it.

By insisting that the photo is "expensive" because it required all of that easily duplicate-able tech actually cheapens it.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#210

Post by alex_c »

Confusion wrote: post #196
alex_c wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. And yet, people still kill each other on a daily basis. At some point it may become practical to take precautions not to get killed, or to move into a line of work or a place where you're less likely to get killed.

We've got a system in place to ensure very few people kill each other. It would be nice if that same system could ensure people wouldn't just copy photographs (for commercial purposes). And it actually does a reasonable job of that. This guy wasn't arguing he has a hard time making a living, which is the argument that people seem to be replying to. He's arguing that people shouldn't copy photographs for commercial pu…

The question of what should be done in cases of copyright infringement is the only one that can really be usefully discussed, which is probably why most people are addressing that instead. Should people copy photographs for commercial purposes? Of course not. End of discussion, not much more to say.

This seems to come up fairly often - an article making a moral argument that copying is wrong, followed by comments saying "Yeah, but it still happens, so you should do X", followed by replies saying "no, but you don't understand, it's wrong!"

Strangely enough, this seems to come up mostly in the context of music (or, in this case, photography). I haven't seen many software blogs making a purely moral argument as opposed to a practical discussion of what to do about it.

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