I hope everyone understands, including the authors themselves, that each author in this back-and-forth is correct. The right to give and the right to charge are inherently personal decisions that only the owner of the photo can make.
This was the main frustration that I had with the "this photograph is not free" comments, as well as the tone the author of this article takes. It doesn't matter what the commentators claim the various photos are 'worth' -- it's not their right to speculate, and just because you released your material CCL, you don't have the right to feel more privileged than someone who chose to exercise their right to be compensated.
Not to digress too much from your original comment (which I completely agree with) but I think there's a certain "smugness" that I see associated with people who release anything as free--as if somehow the act of benevolence has put them on a plane above those who choose not to. I think that's unfortunate for multiple reasons; not the least of which is that people should be commended for sharing things under free / open licenses and I'm far less inclined to do so if they get all smug about it (this applies whether the "things" in question are software, photographs, writings, music, film, etc).
I agree with both authors; but I find this particular article far more obnoxious than the one to which its responding--again, because it comes across quite smug.
I feel that any sense of smugness in this article is more than outshone by the sense of entitlement in the original. The second post acknowledges reality (that many good quality photos are available for free) while the first post seems to whine about the consequences of that reality (when free photos are so widely available, why should you be surprised/angry when someone asks you for your photos for free?)
Why shouldn’t the first photographer have a “sense of entitlement”? He’s entitled! He has the right to set prices for his work, and the rest of us have the right to pay, negotiate a better price, or walk away from the deal.
But going up to someone and saying “you should give this away” is not negotiating for a better price; it’s practically an insult. It’s like walking into a car dealership, seeing that the sticker price is $10,000, and telling the salespeople that they really should let it go for $3,000.
Also note the difference between “I want to give my work away” and “you ought to give your work away”.
It largely depends on the context the "you should give this away" is said in.
If say a well known media organization says, "You should let me use this photo for free, because I will give you credit and that might help you get business later" that is negotiating. The creator of the photo may or may not like the terms, but it is an offer of something of value for something of value. At worst, if the photographer is already well known, it is a bad offer that is wasting his time, but it is never insulting.
If someone who studies economics says to a new photographer, "You should stop selling photos and sell the service of creating new photos on order due to the marginal prices involved and current market situation. Give your old ones away to build up reputation." This is not an insult, but advice (whether or not it is good advice is a different question).
He is entitled to set the asking price for his work, but that is all.
If say a well known media organization says, "You should let me use this photo for free, because I will give you credit and that might help you get business later"
Why won't the "well-known media organization" pay what the photo is worth? Almost by definition they can afford to. If they still negotiate in this manner, that is an insult. No?
No. The whole point here is that the worth of the photo is not determined by the photographer - it is determined by the market. If an alternative photo exists for free, as is often the case, then the well known media organization is not being insulting when it offers the going rate, even if the going rate is "free".
Contrary to your claim, lowball bids are often considered insulting.
Smart negotiators don't use them unless they're willing to accept the fallout that results from this; such as hurt feelings, and the potential loss of all negotiation power because the other individual was insulted by what they felt was bad-faith negotiation.
It's a great strategy if you don't care about relationships and if you don't care about your reputation. It's a terrible strategy in the real world.
I think the crux of this whole issue is whether or not "free for credit" is really a lowball bid. Let's say I've narrowed my search for sunset pictures down to 3 choices. One is CC licensed. One is public domain. One is priced at $6,000. When 2 out of my 3 options cost $0, then $0 should not be considered a lowball bid. It is a realistic bid based on market conditions.
If dealerships up and down the street are all selling cars for $3,000 then the guys who are trying to get the $10000 sticker price should not be too insulted or even surprised when someone offers them $3,000.
Please don't make car analogies when speaking about copyright. Copyright and selling cars are unrelated concepts, and this analogy has been beaten to death.
I feel the same as you. Giving (music, money, software), is extremely personal, and one that shouldn't be done lightly, or out of pressure from others.
Personally, I'd love to be able to release a beneficial OSS software tool or commit a valuable patch to a project, but I'm not a good enough developer. Yet, I feel like a second class citizen in the development community because I haven't
It is your own feeling of inadequacy that prevents you from contributing. That's also likely a major contributing factor to why you feel the author is being smug.
The only thing preventing you from excellence is your fear. You don't have to be "worthy" to make something good; you just need the ambition to set high goals, the drive and tenacity to meet those goals, and the thick skin to shrug off the inevitable judgments of others. All great men are called crazy at one point or another, and all great men have doubted themselves. Why should you be any different?
Or contribute how it is hard to contribute. If contributing to OSS is hard, then OSS communities may be able to make it easier.
For instance, I'm involved in Wikipedia heavily and have always thought that it would be worth contributing to MediaWiki: at the very least being willing to beta test new stuff and write tests and so on. It's a big legacy hairball type project, but the community have made it easier to contribute by documenting the process of getting a working environment setup, by better documenting the process of submitting bugs and patches to bugzilla, by marking a bunch of bugs as suitable for newbies, by the new maintenance/dev scripts and by having a newbie developers liaison person.
If you want to get involved in an open source project but feel inadequate, try and politely work with them to nudge them into making it easier for new developers to contribute. Document the process of getting a working environment setup, including getting things like Vagrant setup if needed. Most projects will welcome attempts to try and make it easier for new developers. And, well, if they don't, then find a better project. ;-)
(If you think your coding really does suck, we've got an encyclopedia with lots of loose ends that need tying up. Just sayin'.)
The right to give and the right to charge are inherently personal decisions that only the owner of the photo can make.
It's not that simple. There are two "rights" here: 1) the right to publish a photo, and 2) the ability to restrict other people's freedom to copy the photo.
The first one is simple -- you can choose to publish your photos, or you can choose to keep them for yourself and never publish.
The second one -- the ability to restrict other people's actions on further distribution -- is a personal decision only for a limited amount of time, and only in certain circumstances and for certain works. Even if your personal decision is not to let me publish photos shot by you in my "Silly photographs" magazine, I will be able to do so once you die + 70 years (according to my country laws). Why is this? Because every author's work belongs to public once author publishes it. The author is just given a temporary monopoly on it. This was intended to make authors produce more such works; for example, here's what US Constitution says:
[Congress shall have the power] to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
This is not entirely accurate. The original "this photograph is not free" article wasn't an attempt to prevent his own images from being copied. It was an attempt to influence OTHER photographers not to give away their photos for free.
I've worked for a long time in the photography industry. In my experience there are two things that justifiably piss photographers off in a very major way:
1. Getting their photo ripped off without permission, because it loses them money.
2. Seeing a publication use another photographer's photo for free (even with permission), because it loses EVERYBODY money.
If good photographers are constantly giving photos away and not charging, professional photography prices and value naturally goes down. It's kind of a tragedy of the commons - photographers who DO give away work get more recognition, but they lower the overall value of their industry.
I would like help understanding this since it runs very counter to my understanding.
As I understand the economics of the photography market, there are several factors at work.
1) Equipment - this affects the source quality of a picture and thus how it will look when reproduced. Early on a limiting factor was very 'slow' film requiring long exposures, and also limits of grain size which required larger surface area to achieve line density that made it still look OK when enlarged for publication or posters.
Technology has really worked on this constraint, the latest tweak being large format digital sensors that can take 3 pictures of exceptional clarity in low light. This hugely reduced the 'cost' of quality both from an overall light capture sense, and in the opportunity sense where you can take 15 exposures where you might used to take exactly one and thus have a higher probability of getting the picture you like at the lighting opportunity rather than 'missing it' and having to go back the next day/year/whatever (sorry and that relates mostly to outdoor photography)
2) Population of quality photographers. This has been perhaps the most amazing impact of digital photography for me. Generally you get 'good' at taking pictures by taking a lot of pictures and seeing which are good and which aren't. In the film days there was a financial burden due to film developing and printing images which was a prerequisite to getting 'good' at photography.
Today you can take a thousand pictures a week in a variety of settings and environments, you can display them instantly 'poster' sized on a 55" 1080p television you can print ones you like at home on an ink jet printer up to 13 x 19. The change I see there is that for only an investment of time, one can practice photography. This has hugely expanded the number of people who have taken thousands of photographs. Combined with the internet (more on that shortly) and the community groups which provide feedback the number of quality photographers who are taking pictures is higher now than it has ever been.
3) Distribution and Discovery - prior to the Internet photographers had gallery showings, or they did freelance work for periodicals, or they were hired by advertising or modelling agencies. Finding them was 'hard' in the sense you needed a hook into the community and for photographers 'being found' was hard. Thus the 'known' good photographer pool was always smaller than the 'actual' good photographer pool. People who were 'known' reaped the benefit of that as there was an opportunity cost of trying to find another photographer once you had already found one.
The Internet changed all of that, you can find galleries 'online' in Flickr albums, G+ feeds, Facebook pages, blogs, etc etc. So in the past when someone found a photographer and they were thrilled to have found one, they were not in a very strong bargaining position if they thought the price being charged was high, since the cost of finding another photographer was higher still. But now that the cost of finding a photographer is much much lower, and the number of quality photographers is much much higher. The availability of good quality photographs has exploded.
The impact of that explosion is that it is impossible to sustain a price point that was established in a time of scarcity during a time of plenty.
So ripping off a photo is now 'easy' in the sense that people copy an image from a web site or off a flickr feed etc and don't pay the photographer. Of the cases I've read about on the web they have always been one of two situations:
1) The person doing the copying didn't realize what they were doing was illegal and once informed either:
a) Licensed the photograph
b) Used a different photograph because they felt the asking
price exceeded their internal notion of 'value' with
respect to using the photo.
2) The person doing the copying knew they were ripping it off and if they are caught they just move to a different picture. In every case I've read about if the photographer has to resort to suing the infringer they have always won.
The important point for me has been that 'getting photos ripped off' has not been a money losing proposition unless the photographer did nothing, and I do recognize that having to be your own police with respect to people stealing your work is a pain.
The second issue of people giving away their work losing 'everybody' money seems even more perplexing. That the price you can charge for a photo has gone down as more people have entered the market can in fact grow the overall market. On a per transaction basis the market value of a photograph may be lower, but those lower prices cause more people to buy photographs, thus increasing the total economic value. To the extent that photographers are good at educating consumers of photographs that licenses are involved and they should seek out a license that is good for everyone.
I don't see this as a 'tragedy of the commons' rather as a an increase in efficiency of the market to match up good photographs with consumers of same. To the extent that it causes people to 'go out of business' and thus reduce the supply is the counter to an infinite supply of free photos.
I appreciate your in-depth analysis, looks pretty accurate to me. I think the tone of my original post falsely suggested that I thought no one should give their photos away for free. This isn't true - I firmly believe that if people stopped complaining about factors outside their control (like other photographers giving away photos) and instead spent the time honing their craft, maybe there wouldn't be so much to complain about. However, I do understand where photographers are coming from.
> On a per transaction basis the market value of a photograph may be lower, but those lower prices cause more people to buy photographs, thus increasing the total economic value.
The problem here is that the market for these photos is fairly inelastic. The people who are taking photos aren't the ones buying them. At the lowest end of the spectrum, free photos don't generate any increase in demand. For instance, the fact that a magazine can get a photo for free doesn't mean that they're going to want to buy more stock photos. It's just going to make them want more photos for free.
Consider how a web developer would feel if there was suddenly a huge influx of high-quality web developers who would develop entire projects for free. Obviously this is economically infeasible in this industry, but that's basically why photographers are mad when it happens to them.
Kind of, but not really. By talented individuals charging less-nothing for some of their photos (likely already taken photos) instead of consuming and annihilating the shared resource of "money available to be spent on photography" they just move that around. This "don't give your photo away, or charge lower prices" argument is the same as all of the other NO!SPEC, anti-open-source/public domain/CC arguments, in that it's a bad argument.
Free and open source software is pretty well understood. For example, by having all of these quality web browsers for free, it allows a larger market for more companies to make more money selling their wares and services online. I believe the original argument against free browsers was something like, "free web browsers will cost jobs and lower the quality of the browser."
Whenever I read the articles or come across an individual that trashes students and amateurs for giving their work away I think a few things.
- Does this person really not understand that by Timmy the undergrad giving the bake sale a good, but not astounding, photo of a cupcake that it frees them, the professional, up to take photos of tiger sharks?
- Is this person actually just incapable of competing on quality or subject matter with amateurs and therefor unable to differentiate themselves?
I can understand why this would piss photographers off, but I can't agree with the "justifiably" part. When I ride my bike home from a bar instead of taking a cab, the cab driver might be pissed. Should he pissed at bike manufacturers? I'm sure horse whip makers were pissed at Ford for selling cars, and lowering the overall value of their industry. Why should photographers get special protection from market forces?
Yes, but I think you are missing an essential point in your examples:
a) A bike is not really a replacement for a cab (say you want to carry some goods)
b) Cars are a different technology from horse-carriages
The thing is that the photos produced by all kinds of photographers are almost the same ( of course, the better ones produce photographs of better quality, but they are still photographs).
I think that the analogy that you used was perhaps not accurate..
It doesn't matter if the service is exactly the same or not, it just matters whether it meets the need of the consumer. In my example, consumers needed a way to get from point A to point B. Both a cab or a bike could do that. If you prefer, I could have asked if Ferrari should get pissed that Kia is offering cars for a super cheap price. Then we are comparing cars to cars.
Being upset at the first is perfectly reasonable. The second is cartel behavior, and should be opposed.
<i>If good photographers are constantly giving photos away and not charging, professional photography prices and value naturally goes down. It's kind of a tragedy of the commons - photographers who DO give away work get more recognition, but they lower the overall value of their industry.</i>
It doesn't drive value down, it drives prices down for the same photographs. The same photos at a lower price means the value actually goes up. This is actually the opposite of the tragedy of the commons--instead of the commons being destroyed because no one has incentive to care for it, the commons grows over time because people contribute to it directly.
What it does do is force photographers to find new business models. They need to sell valuable hard copies of their work (Have you seen how much a quality wedding album costs?), or they need to charge for their time prior to taking the photographs. For some types of photography this is quite difficult (travel photography, various types of stock photography), for others relatively easy (fashion and event photography).
Personally, I agree with you 100%, especially since I run BD for a firm that does a lot of client work.
The only conciliation that I can offer is that I've never had a good experience with anyone who hard balls price, rather than quality -- in any industry, at any price. There will always be a point where the amateurs can't deliver like a professional can, particularly with photography -- that stuffs tough.
2. Seeing a publication use another photographer's photo for free (even with permission), because it loses EVERYBODY money.
I think you are mistaken here. For one thing, there is a chance that free photo will get the photographer noticed and get him hired to create a photo on-demand. That photographer ends up making money (although indirectly) by allowing free use of existing work.
And for another, there is a good chance that if the photo wasn't available for free the publication would have instead used no photo or hand an intern already on staff take a mediocre photo for filler. In this case, no one has lost money.
I am currently a developer by profession and make my money by creating software (on salary). But I do not get mad when others give away software, I use a fair bit of OSS myself (Python, Firefox, etc). I do not think when I see OSS that everybody has lost money. (I also try to contribute, but my contributions are currently tiny).
Because while the analogy isn't perfect there are obvious similarities between programmers releasing their software free (by both meanings) and open and photographers distributing their own photos via Creative Commons or whatever.
> It was an attempt to influence OTHER photographers not to give away their photos for free.
At some point, photographers will need to understand that their work is not that unique and that the wealth created by the community through sharing is much greater than that derived by a single artist through the licensing and sale of their work.
I think most of us in tech do. There are people who rail against how open-source software is "stealing their livelihood", but I think most people realize that there is nothing immoral about people choosing to write open-source software. If the only way you could earn a living is to wish for the non-existence of free software, then you just need to find a new line of work, because you can't wish it out of existence...
At risk of putting words into your mouth, what you're saying here is "some software is open source and that's ok". I couldn't agree more - I've even made a few small contributions to open source projects myself. But the way I read the parent post, it seemed to be saying (the equivalent of) "all software should be open source", which is something quite different and which I disagree with quite strongly.
When the price of copying and disseminating work is lower than the price of the royalty, a royalty is what people will not pay, never mind full price for the original. It's a simple as that.
"""At some point, photographers will need to understand that their work is not that unique and that the wealth created by the community through sharing is much greater than that derived by a single artist through the licensing and sale of their work."""
Spoken like a true I-want-your-stuff-for-free person...
> The right to give and the right to charge are inherently personal decisions
Actually, in the U.S.A. the right to restrict others from "using" "your" "intellectual property" is granted by the government and only for limited times (in theory). The default natural state is that everyone has the right to share, reuse, etc everyone's intangible creative works.
The right is not the same thing as the ability. Since rights are enforced by a civil authority, it would suggest to me the only "natural" rights are the ones granted by said authority.
What you are saying is true, however for products for which supply exceeds demand and which can be easily copied, then charging for such products does not work so well.
For example, in the early days of our industry, many people buying licensed software were doing so because copying on floppy disks was error prone and packaged software was getting distributed on storage of higher quality. Licensed software also worked as expected, while software copied from friends had all sorts of "surprises". Plus it came with a useful manual, which was great prior to the Internet.
Our economy is based on scarcity. If scarcity is only artificial, then the model breaks down. You simply can't appeal to people's feelings, not after decades of teaching people to embrace individualism.
This isn't going to be popular on this board, but::
Your statement is why the writers of the US constitution mandated creative protection[0]. To prevent instances of piracy because users don't feel like they should pay for something made that could be duplicated.
Your argument goes back to mine-- by pirating works, you're making the decision for the owner/creator whether to release that work freely or to charge. That's not your right, no matter what economic model you believe.
I'm an author and I'd like to agree with you, however there's constitutional rights and then there's human nature.
If your constitution disallowed unlicensed sex, take a guess on which one would prevail - human nature or your constitution.
Also, read again why that clause is in the constitution - "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". They clearly didn't have Disney in mind or the ever expanding "limited Times" that makes the public domain a legally obsolete concept.
I respectfully suspect you are misunderstanding history. First, the Copyright Clause permits, but does not mandate, certain forms of creative protection for a limited time.
Second, the clause itself states its goal. It was to encourage more creation, "preventing piracy" was a means to an end, not an end in itself.
And finally, there is good reason to think that regarding copyright in particular the target was never meant to be users at all, but other commercial grade publishers and competing authors. (It was prohibitively difficult in that era for an end user to make a copy of any substantial creative work so it likely wasn't even considered. I suspect, given some of Jefferson's comments in particular, that many of the Framers would have been against trying to apply copyright laws to end users had they realized it would eventually be an issue).
I don't think this is a fair comparison. From what I've understood by reading both posts is that each writer comes from a different background(I can't think of a better word right now) and that's what's causing this difference of opinion.
The first writer is making a living from photography as stated at the bottom of his post: "John B. Mueller is a photographer based in Ventura County, California."
The second writer seems to be doing this as a hobby. At least I'm assuming so since he's been taking photos for 27 years and claims that he has not made any money from it. So I really don't think that this is a fair comparison.
Unfortunately, the "right to charge" is something that is almost unenforceable in the day of the internet. If you base your business model on this idea, you will spend a lot of time fighting a losing battle against the fact that information is freely exchangeable around the whole world.
Photographers don't sell copies of the photograph to the general public. I don't think most photographers are actively trying to fight, say, you printing out the photo and hanging it up on your wall.
The original blog post was about licensing works - major magazines and publications wanting to use the photo. This is entirely enforceable - these magazines and publications are headed by companies that one can actually discover and sue.
The "right to charge" is alive and well, in the same way the GPL is enforceable.
"I give my work away for free because it makes other people smile and I like that" is not a rebuttal to "people shouldn't be taking other people's work for free if the author doesn't want them to". If anything it's just a smug attempt at being holier-than-thou.
Of course you're also misrepresenting the other guy's argument: he wasn't arguing against "intellectual property theft" (what a loaded term!); rather, he was arguing against people's asking for the photograph for free. Moreover, his particular argument (ignoring the larger issue) was fairly obviously flawed and overbearing.
If we put on our blinders and ignore the larger issue, asking an artist for free stuff is rather condescending. As Mueller says, why should magazines, advertisers, websites or corporations expect or ask for free work? (Let's not pretend it's anything other than this) If the artist didn't already put it on a Creative Commens license or similar (or has indicated that he is willing to give non-commercial licenses to people who ask), then flat out asking artists for free stuff to further your own company is tantamount to asking for a free lunch.
In this narrow sense, Tristan's "giving things away for free makes me and people all over the world happy" post is not an argument against that either. It's just a feel-good argument for using a CC-type license in the first place, which was never the issue.
It might just be a difference in cultures, but in my experience if you, for example, ask a sys-admin for Linux help, they are more than happy to spend time on it. There is no stigma about asking for this sort of help even though you're basically asking a professional to work for free (at least in the Linux communities I'm familiar with). I've seen people spend hours helping others debug some issues.
Also, most programmers I know (admittedly all are at least open source enthusiasts) are all more than happy to provide you with little scripts. They are not only willing to allow you to use their code, but also usually happy to support that code for free to some extent (people are usually happy to help you get it set up, at the very least). I've mostly seen this on smaller programs and scripts, but those are not much different in scope from a single photograph.
On the latter point, sometimes people are downright ecstatic to do so; if someone wrote up a little piece of software and stuck it online, and then never heard from anyone, they're often really pleased if you write in with a question, because it means someone actually is using the software for something.
There is just one thing that I would point out: the sys admins and programmers are most likely already making money through their employment. In the case of a photographer, (s)he is selling the photographs for a living. I'm sure that if you ask a professional photographer for help in taking better photographs, he will gladly help you.
This author is partially refuting the original, though. It's not just saying "I give away my photos", it's also saying that it is unrealistic to expect to make money from photography because so many people have a camera and the tools to publish their photographs.
I don't really agree with this because the skill and artistic inclination of the photographer is still a critical factor in how the photo turns out. But it is an argument against the original article, make no mistake there.
That's true, but I think part of the problem that's happened over the last 10 years is that a lot of people have realized that they don't really need the top-quality work, and now have an option not to buy it.
A simplified view: 30 years ago, there were amateur photographers who, for small amounts of money or free, could get you a snapshot of 0/10 through 3/10 quality; and there were professional photographers, who for a large fee would take 9/10 or 10/10 quality photographs. You went with them because the free/amateur photography was just not good enough. But you didn't really need 9/10 quality; maybe 6/10 would be perfectly adequate for your needs. Now, you can buy low-cost or sometimes even free 6/10 photography. This causes lost work for the 10/10-quality photographers, but it's work that in some sense never really valued their product fully in the first place, but previously bought it because there was no "good enough" lower-quality/cost alternative. Now they only get the work of people who really, absolutely want 10/10 quality work and are willing to pay for it, which is a much smaller market.
That's a really good analysis. I will add just one thing : what you said is precisely the reason why there is so much complaining. The photographers who can take a 10/10 photograph probably put in an extraordinary amount of time and money to learn their skills, and since the market is (greatly) reduced, they feel it is unfair that they are not being sufficiently compensated for all the work that they put in.
This was the main frustration that I had with the "this photograph is not free" comments, as well as the tone the author of this article takes. It doesn't matter what the commentators claim the various photos are 'worth' -- it's not their right to speculate, and just because you released your material CCL, you don't have the right to feel more privileged than someone who chose to exercise their right to be compensated.