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

241–250 of 257 posts

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#241

Post by gurkendoktor »

mibbitor wrote: post #130
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…

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…

> With the music industry, artists can move from selling CDs to doing more live tours. Not sure that's something photographers can really do.

And even that is not a good solution. It is a workaround for those bands that happen to be good live bands. It is like moving from singleplayer (easy to copy) to hosted multiplayer games. It is good for the industry, but it still killed off whole genres just for the sake of not being copyable.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#242

Post by gurkendoktor »

smokeyj wrote: post #161
Confusion wrote: post #152

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. 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 wi…

The belief that morality and practicability are the same thing just scares me, really. Individual humans become more powerful all the time. We need to respect arbitrary, consentual rules to keep the world going instead of going back to "strong eats weak, bad luck".

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#243

Post by eurleif »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #241
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…

> With the music industry, artists can move from selling CDs to doing more live tours. Not sure that's something photographers can really do. And even that is not a good solution. It is a workaround for those bands that happen to be good live bands. It is like moving from singleplayer (easy to copy) to hosted multiplayer games. It is good for the industry, but it still killed off whole genres just for the sake of not…

I don't think that's just about preventing copying. Recurring billing is profitable.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#244

Post by gurkendoktor »

Suncho wrote: post #77
slavak wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because while I'm not sure what kind of world you live in, in mine I need money to put a roof over my head and food on the table - things that according to your world-view definitely do have monetary value. If creating anything digital makes it basically a free-for-all on who can grab it for free faster, then I'm not going to bother as it's not paying my bills. And, in case you haven't noticed, most of our world is p…

I live in a world where, due to the continuous advancement of technological efficiency and the resulting elimintation of jobs, it's becoming increasingly ridiculous to expect people to work for a living. Society no longer needs contributions from everyone. When you get to the point where what you do on a day-to-day basis is no longer directly tied to your livelihood, what will you do? As the number of ways in which a…

So let's say say we have essential work for 50% of all available manhours. Why, then, is it not a great thing that the other 50% can be paid even when they are just producing digital, intangible goods? I think rising productivity is actually a great argument in favor of copyright laws.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#246

Post by mibbitor »

firebones wrote: post #234
mibbitor wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ridiculous. By that logic, we will soon all stop writing (let alone write for any sort of direct or indirect compensation) because "no massive amount of skill is involved". Instead, we can just brute force it and simply pick the best novels, technical documentation (or HN comments, for that matter) from the many choices of million-character sequences presented to us.

It's an orders of magnitude different problem.

Taking photos is just recording light that exists. You can change the position, lighting, a few options on the camera, but it's easy enough to say that for a given location, probably a few thousand photos would cover most of the possibles.

Writing involves thought. After you've typed even a few characters you're past a few thousand possible combinations. Brute forcing writing isn't feasible.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#247

Post by dextorious »

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…

"""his 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."""

Actually, almost all nations have standard international agreements on this matters. Also, tons of common abuses are from the US and EU themselves, that very much agree on common terms.

I'm sure some people are complaining because a web outlet in Kazakstan used their pictures, but those are not many...

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#248

Post by rivo »

I don't understand this. Upload your image to a (micro)stock agency to sell it, then see how much it is really worth, i.e. how much people will pay for it in the free market. (Value and production cost are two very different things.) But making it available like this while claiming it's worth $6,612 seems naive to me at best.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#249

Post by gurkendoktor »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #244
Suncho wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a world where, due to the continuous advancement of technological efficiency and the resulting elimintation of jobs, it's becoming increasingly ridiculous to expect people to work for a living. Society no longer needs contributions from everyone. When you get to the point where what you do on a day-to-day basis is no longer directly tied to your livelihood, what will you do? As the number of ways in which a…

So let's say say we have essential work for 50% of all available manhours. Why, then, is it not a great thing that the other 50% can be paid even when they are just producing digital, intangible goods? I think rising productivity is actually a great argument in favor of copyright laws.

I should probably point out that 50% was just a random, badly chosen constant. It's not a zero-sum game anyway.

But fact is that thanks to copyright laws, one can save some money from copyright-unrelated work, take a break to invest in a game, album or movie; and if people like it, one can make money with it, for which others agree to do a little more copyright-unrelated work on their part.

The alternative is that everyone does copyright-unrelated work and creates goods in their free time, outside of all market mechanics. But I'd rather let the (democratically) good artists have more free time to do their work, and I don't see anything wrong with it.

Re: This Photograph Is Not Free

#250

Post by Suncho »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #249
gurkendoktor wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let's say say we have essential work for 50% of all available manhours. Why, then, is it not a great thing that the other 50% can be paid even when they are just producing digital, intangible goods? I think rising productivity is actually a great argument in favor of copyright laws.

I should probably point out that 50% was just a random, badly chosen constant. It's not a zero-sum game anyway. But fact is that thanks to copyright laws, one can save some money from copyright-unrelated work, take a break to invest in a game, album or movie; and if people like it, one can make money with it, for which others agree to do a little more copyright-unrelated work on their part. The alternative is that ev…

You bring up an interesting point. I think it is indeed a great thing that people can be paid even when they are just producing digital, intangible goods. What I don't think is great is when they are paid for having produced intangible goods. The difference is between "when" and "for." People should be paid simply for being human, and then on top of that, they should be paid for anything they sell that has value, whether it be their time or a physical object. As you say, it's not a zero-sum game. The net weath of humanity is increasing. The pie isn't actually getting smaller. It's getting bigger. The problem is, it's becoming increasingly difficult to divide up that pie using capitalism alone.

Markets will rise and markets will fall. It's natural. It's supply and demand. It's capitalism. There are laws that artificially protect certain specific markets at the expense of the more general free market. The copyright laws fall into this category. But why do we need to protect markets from natural economic forces? I don't think we do. These protections are causing some nasty side effects.

The alternative is that the government takes a big chunk of the pie and divides it up evenly among its citizens. This will allow us to unchain the economy from unneccessary regulation. Minimum wages? No longer any need. Copyright exclusivity? No longer any need.

I'd rather let anyone -- good artists, bad artists, scientists, atheletes -- have more time to do whatever they want. I'd rather automate away as many jobs as possible. We're approaching the point when the unemployment rate will positively correlate with prosperity.

Post reply on HN