DVPhoto

Many commentators have suggested that anything more than a thumbnail cannot be considered fair use. Mikes response was an image made up mostly of a freak copyright message.

Earlier this week Mike from TOP wrote a brief rant about copyright; or more accurately, a rant about essentially unknown photographers actively making it known they don’t want anyone using their work without prior approval, without giving people any way to contact them in the first place.

What seemed to me to be a reasonable request has turned into what Mike called a Copyright Brouhaha, and now a third post, Keep Your Freakin’ Hands Off My Picture, is causing even more arguments in the comments section.

While the articles are worth the read, the comments are where the meat is. There are two sides; the one, seemingly made up of some professional photographers and lawyers, claims that what Mike is doing (especially in his Random Excellence posts) is, if not legally wrong, at the very least morally questionable. The other side is made up of the rest of us, and seems to belief that posting images of other photographers to showcase their work (including linking back to their sites if possible) should easily fall within the provisions of fair use and is most certainly a good thing.

Now I can understand where the Pro photographers and lawyers are coming from. The pro photographer is out there to make money, as much of it as they can.^aa A lawyer’s job is to twist the law to his clients benefit, if a law has some leeway in its interpretation, then all the better. Obviously when asked whether something is fair use, the default answer is “probably not”, since avoiding possible litigation is considered more important than the original intent of the law^aa.

To my mind, the idea of fair use is there to allow others to comment on, learn from, and praise existing works. All of these are impractical unless you have the entire image to look at, and while you definitely do not need a full size image, a thumbnail will definitely not do.

While I do not dispute that the lawyers are correct when they say Mike could find himself in court for his current use of copyrighted images, I do think this shows that copyright law, and especially the concept of fair use, is currently broken.a

1. yes yes, I know not all pro photogs are like that, but many areaaa
2. Something that itself could fill several volumes in argumentsaaa

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Tags: News, Philosophy

This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 10:46 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.