RE: filmscanners: Importance of Copyright on Images

["LAURIE SOLOMON" <LAURIE@advancenet.net>]

While I understand your concerns, while I agree with your position on the
benefits of public education, and while I accept your point of view about
licensing as one of many legitimate positions on the subject of professional
fees, I do not see a copyright admonishment on a search engine or any third
party web site will legally help you get your money (i.e., serve as a legal
tool in your armory that you do not already possess under the law without
the copyright admonishment) any better than the tools you already have in
your arsenal or that you could implement on your own without any action by
the search engine.

It could be argued that you could put copyright notices on the images
themselves that you display on your site and in some of the more obvious
image areas of those images such that the copyright notice would
automatically appear in the thumbnail images which the search engine
appropriates from your site to use in their catalog.  It also additionally
could be argued that you could make the images on your web site
non-downloadable so that the search engine would not be able to access and
use those images on their engine without getting your permissions and
conditions including the presentation of copyright notices with the display
of your images. It could also be argued that you could request in a official
letter to the search engine company that the search engine put a copyright
notice on all the images of yours that they use but I doubt that you could
enforce that any more than you could collect licensing fees from the search
engine for using the images in the first place.  They will argue effectively
fair educational use in that they are providing an educational catalog and
index to images on the web  and are not commercially selling the images per
se for commercial use or profit.

However, more importantly for me - at any rate, is the fact that what you
have said has not really addressed my initial questions.

>Since we shoot mostly famous rock & roll personalities and sell a lot of
stock imagery, we find that our
>images have a relatively short shelf life, and a propensity to be lifted by
those who would rather not pay us
>our rightful fees.

Are you saying that you are actually selling or licensing this imagery to
people who are willing to pay for a thumbnail size file or an image at web
monitor resolutions of 72 to 100 dpi?  Or are you saying that potential
commercial clients are stealing those low resolution thumbnail size images
for use in publications or reproductions rather than paying for larger sized
image files at higher resolutions or actual photographic products like
prints and/or transparencies?

I doubt if those who are stealing the images via downloading thumbnail low
monitor resolution images are the people you are selling stuff to anyway or
the people who are using the images for reproduction or publication in
commercial enterprises.  I also doubt if any sort of notice will effectively
control or eliminate the ordinary internet users from lifting via downloads
of such low monitor resolution thumbnail images for personal use or even
from passing around among their friends and family, posting on their walls,
or displaying as wall paper on their monitors.  They will engage in lifting
said files rather than paying for them from your web site or another web
site upon which they might appear regardless of copyright notices or
admonitions and deliberately without caring about what is right or legal.
Indeed, you cannot stop it from happening nor can you collect from it if
they are not duplicating the image for profit or commercial use as long as
you put the image out in public by publishing it on the web and they are
only downloading those images that you have supplied on the web.

The only people that a copyright notice might help you with are those web
site owners and designers who appropriate you images for their sites for
commercial use on those sites or for selling from those sites.  Since those
who might fit into this category are already corrupt and shady to start with
and are playing the odds that you will not find them out or be willing to go
to the expense to take legal action, a notice will not be very effective
here either.  To protect yourself against these types you need to make your
thumbnail images on your site, which is which is the fountainhead for any
copies which might be produced on other sites as well as in print, you will
need to make it so that the thumbnails are not downloadable from your site,
are not all that presentable in their own right as products, and are
watermarked and registered so as to be obvious on screen to anyone who views
them on your site.

Thus, I come back to my original question.  Why are you concerned with the
theft of images that are low monitor resolution thumbnail samples of what
you are offering in larger file sizes and resolutions suitable for
reproduction and commercial use which you cannot prevent from happening in
the first place nor take action on in most cases in the second place?  And
why do you want the search engine to take steps to protect these sorts of
images which you have not taken yourself on your web site so as to keep
unauthorized images from being downloaded by the search engines for use as
thumbnails for their indexes or others who might be intent on lifting these
low resolution thumbnail images?

It looks sort of like you want your cake by having the search engines list
your images while eating it to by not protecting your own images on your own
site by putting copy right notices across an obvious part of the image area
or making those images non-downloadable from your site so as to make the
search engines come to you to acquire them for use even if you let them use
it for free but insist on certain conditions being met.  True they may
refuse you and you will not be on their search engine; but that is the
practical realities of the business world where there is not free lunch.
You want the free promotions and advertising, then you give you such things
as protections and the right to make demands and conditions.


-----Original Message-----
From: owner-filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
[mailto:owner-filmscanners@halftone.co.uk]On Behalf Of SKID Photography
Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2001 3:16 AM
To: filmscanners@halftone.co.uk
Subject: Re: filmscanners: Importance of Copyright on Images


Since we shoot mostly famous rock & roll personalities and sell a lot of
stock imagery, we find that our
images have a relatively short shelf life, and a propensity to be lifted by
those who would rather not pay us
our rightful fees.

However, whenever such unapproved usages are found out by us, and threatened
with legal action, we we tend to
get our regular fees plus an extra charge for their illegal actions.

So, again, a clear copyright admonishment will help us get our money more
easily.

We don't pretend to understand others businesses, but we feel that these
search engines do have a
responsibility to state in clear and certain terms that imagery cannot just
be lifted.  It makes public
education just that much easier.  We want our clients to understand that our
(and this is *all*, yours and
mine), images have a value and a clear ownership.  We feel its in every
professional photographer's best
interest to keep those ownership rights issues in front of the public
whenever possible.

I am old enough to remember when it was a new concept to base licensing fees
based on usage, rather than on a
flat day rate for commissioned work.  I, for one, do not think it's in our
best interest to revert to the old
way of doing business, with lower fees.

Harvey Ferdschneider
partner, SKID Photography, NYC

LAURIE SOLOMON wrote:

> I think the likelihood of someone wanting to buy a web resolution image is
> probably very low; but the likelihood of someone wanting to steal it (i.e.
> use it for free) is probably much higher.  Typically, those that do steal
> web resolution images are those who either do not use images for their
> livelihood and do don't understand anything about copyrights and licensing
> or those who are aware of such things but will steal what they can and do
> not really concern themselves with the quality or resolution of the image
> that they steal and use.  While it can be argued that making low
resolution
> images available on the web and easy to find entices people to download
and
> use the low resolution images rather than  view them as previews upon
which
> to base decisions as to what Images they would want to license high
> resolution versions of which in turn may narrow the market for higher
> resolution images, I do not think this really is as big a problem as one
> might think; and the existence of engines like Google probably do not have
> any major impact on the rates of image theft.  Thus, I concur with your
> first paragraph in both its literal articulation as well as in some of the
> associated implicit issues it suggests.
>
> As for the second paragraph, I do not think that the question being raised
> is so much people buying low resolution web images per se; but the issue
is
> more the effectiveness of selling or licensing high resolution versions of
> the images being cataloged and displayed on web sites based on those low
> resolution web displays.  I know some stock photographers who do find this
> as an effective way of marketing their images; however, I, like you, have
> not found the web to be an effective way to market high quality and
> resolution versions of images or commercial photographic services.  My
> experience like yours has been that the costs outweigh what those who use
> the web are willing to pay for services and use of images.  It tends to
> cater to the mass market mentality where those shopping tend to want high
> quality images ( if they are even concerned with or know quality) at
poster
> prices - if not for free - and cheap photographic services where quality
is
> not the concern but bottom line pricing is. In short the web market, in my
> experience, is the sort of market where the buyer regards all
photographers
> indiscriminately as if they were copy machines (with no differences in
style
> or skills being recognized) and all images as if they were off the shelf
> manufactured retail products like you find in a retail outlet.
>