Carolyn Wright DMCA’d
I’m very pro-creator’s rights, but copyright law in the US is amazingly broken. Case in point: due to a single DMCA takedown notice, photographer Carolyn Wright’s entire website vividwildlife.com was just shut down by Go Daddy.
You might recognize Carolyn Wright’s name from her other website: photoattorney.com, i.e., the best resource on the internet for photographers looking to understand copyright law. She’s not only a professional photographer, but a practicing lawyer who specializes in the legal needs of photographers. I’m gonna go ahead and give her the benefit of the doubt here. Details on the takedown are on the site.
Yes, absolutely content creators need legal tools to defend their content. And of course there have been cases of wanna-be photographers who steal the work of others to pad out their website and stock agency portfolios — we need a sane copyright enforcement policy in the US, that’s not in question. But imagine being able to send a single letter to a property owner claiming that you believe one of the businesses they lease space to is infringing on your copyright and expecting them to shut down every one of that business’s storefronts until they’ve proved you wrong, in court if necessary. The DMCA absolutely requires an ISP, who is in effect a digital landlord, to do exactly that. There are smart, sane ways to manage copyright and fair use on the internet: the DMCA’s takedown provisions do not provide them.
Anyway, best of luck to whoever’s behind that DMCA request. I suspect it’s not going to get very far.
Keeping photos on Flickr safe
I noticed something a little odd while poking around in my Flickr settings. The recommended setting for “Who can download your stuff” is “anyone”. Personally, I don’t think is wise. Promoting this sort of image sharing is basically promoting image theft, since any Corporate Joe Schmoe can just click the ‘download this image’ link without even having a Flickr account. I’ve read a few discussions on the Flickr boards about it, and people say things like “well, what do you think photo sharing means”, and “people like to let others download their pictures”. That’s fine for some people, but I’d argue that the majority of Flickr users aren’t aware of just how much commercial image theft goes on — it’s an image sharing site, but the default settings turn it into a file sharing site.
I doubt many people would be offended by some random web surfer using their images as a wallpaper or screensaver, but that’s really not what I’m concerned about. It’s not uncommon to hear of people finding their work used, without permission, for commercial purposes — _rebekka, one of Flickr’s big success stories, famously found her photos for sale on microstock sites, including some self-portraits, as one example. Many other artists have seen their work used in magazines, newspapers, web sites, and other media without their knowledge or permission; their are too many ‘copyright infringement’, ‘stolen images’, and related groups and tags on Flickr to link to just one. Not only is this a problem for the individual users who find their work misused in this way, it’s a problem for the photo industry at large, since even an dirt cheap royalty-free download on a microstock site is more expensive than a free download from Flickr. Those of us who rely on our photography as a source of income, even if it’s not a very large portion, are competing with thousands of talented artists who don’t realize it and won’t see credit or compensation for their work.
It’s basically impossible to avoid this if you’re putting images online. If it can be seen in a browser, it can be downloaded and used inappropriately. But there are basic things you can do on Flickr to avoid it. Go to your privacy settings and review everything there. Each of these settings can generally be set to allow access to ‘anyone’, ‘any Flickr user’, ‘contacts’, ‘friends and family’, or ‘only you’; which is safest for you would depend on how you want to share your images, and how you organize your contacts. Personally, any contact marked ‘friend’ or ‘family’ is someone I know and trust, and implicitly grant permission to use an image privately, but I want the general public to be able to see my work, so my privacy settings reflect this.
Under Global settings, there are three settings that allow access to the original URL of the image — not the web page where the photo is displayed, which looks like ‘http://www.flickr.com/photos/mehampson/3634916839/’, but the address of the actual JPG, which begins something like ‘http://farm3.static.flickr.com’ and ends in ‘.jpg’. This is all that’s needed to download an image from Flickr.
Who can download your stuff: Flickr can place a transparent GIF over your image to hinder (though not completely prevent) downloading your images, and this setting controls who can view your images without it. It also controls who can see the ‘all sizes’ button, which allows views to choose larger or smaller images. The default is ‘anyone’, which as I said above, I think is a bad idea. I set mine to ‘only you’, though I wouldn’t have a problem sending someone I know a full-sized JPG.
Who can share your photos or video and Who can blog your stuff: I set these to ‘friends or family’, since there is a roundabout way of getting the original image’s URL through these options.
Under Defaults for new uploads, there is another setting to think about.
Set a default license: If you don’t mind people downloading your work, you should consider using a Creative Commons license, which allows you to keep your copyright while still letting others use your work in various ways, or you can put your images directly into the public domain.
Outside of Flickr, there are other things you can do. Some people watermark their images; I don’t do this myself, since I haven’t seen many that are both hard to clone or crop out of an image and minimally disruptive to the composition. I did see one the other day that I thought looked pretty classy, so I’m considering it, but we’ll see.
Another thing I do is to restrict the size of my uploads. I no longer upload anything larger than 1280 pixels on the long edge; I’ve seen other people restrict it to 800 pixels. This isn’t foolproof either, since there are some pretty amazing upscaling techniques out there, but I don’t see any reason to offer a full 10 MP image. (I do upload full resolution images to my Smugmug gallery though, since I sell prints there, and restrict the largest viewable size.)
I don’t have a problem with people choosing a CC license or public domain, by the way. I don’t choose it for my own work, but I totally respect the choice of artists who do; my beef is with the exploitation of artists’ copyrighted work, not with artists who grant permission for their work to be used broadly. Flickr isn’t the only site where images can be stolen, and it’s not to blame for the practice — the people who actually download and use images marked ‘All rights reserved’ are. I just wish Flickr made it a little harder for them to do it by default.