Traveling the Journey of Light | Photoblog Thoughts, feelings, and techniques behind the photography of Derrald Farnsworth-Livingston

Freedom of Expression May Come With a Cost: Copyright Infringement Issues and Social MediaPosted by drfl on August 12th, 2009

This post deals directly with a question from Amber from my previous series “When a Photograph is Not Worth 1,000 Words: SEO for Photographers”. Within that series I dealt with various tips in Search Engine Optimization in regards specifically to photography websites. One of the topics I briefly touched on was leveraging social networking for increasing sites in search engine rankings. Her question, “How do you feel about social networking like Flickr?”

Flickr has been a great site for many photographers to share photos, receive feedback, and to learn new techniques. For many, it has become the photographic community of choice when it comes to online forums and for many people the way that they have gained exposure. Unfortunately, it is not without its own issues and problems. Referencing an article by Guy Kawasaki, “Will Anyone Pay for Anything” it is quite evident that our society has developed the perception is that anything on the Internet is free. In a more specific illustration of this point, Jim Goldstein’s article, “If It’s On The Internet It’s Free! Didn’t You Get The Memo”Jim speaks specifically to the issue of Flickr and Facebook images showing up around the world without the permission of the photographers. In fact, Jim dedicates many articles to these infringement issues. Here are a few worth mentioning:

How Every Flickr Photo Ended Up on Sale This Weekend

This article references projects in which Flickr uses submitted photographs without getting additional permission. In fact, a screensaver named “FlickrFan” was using any images with the designated tags pulled from Flickr for the screensaver.

Watermarks: Evolution of a Watermark

In this article Jim Goldstein references his experience with watermarking images and how with even those precautions how images are still lifted for use.

Facebook’s Right’s Grab: How Far Does It Go?

This article studies the specific terms of use outlined by Facebook. Specifically, Facebook’s terms of use are written in such a way that they could be potentially acquiring rights to all uploaded photographs. The thought of this is scary in the least and legally precedent setting in the extreme.

Copyrights: Protecting My Photography

Jim’s article dedicated to the process of protecting the copyrights of photographs.

Flickr + _Rebekka + Availability of High Resolution Images = Nightmare

Lastly, probably one of the most dismal stories about a photographer who had a large collection of work stolen from her Flickr site and then sold to a stock photography company who was themselves conned.  I encourage everyone to read her post as well: Freedom of expression?? Telling the truth??

With different laws in different countries and with no followed copyright standards on the Internet the perception of free use for everything will continue to prevail. The hope is that decent companies will continue to realize that they wouldn’t want give away their products so they should pay for use of someone else’s work. Of course in the end decency often fails for the goal of money making.