Wednesday, November 11, 2009

that old thorny topic - Copyright

The episode of Fair Go screened on 11 November dealt with the issue of who owns copyright in photos. The clip is viewable here but to summarize: one side of it involved a woman who said she had taken a photo of a rainbow over a rural road, took it into a photo retailer for developing and later found it all over the internet. The other involved parents who didn't realise that the contract they signed with a photographic studio to take pictures of their kids gave the studio the copyright, allowing them to enter the photo in competitions, put them in galleries, sell them to advertising agencies etc.

One important fact that Facebook users are unaware of is that usage rights to all photos uploaded there becomes those of Facebook.

Up until 1994 NZ had a law which while not exactly all-encompassing, was at least easy to understand. The 1994 Act which replaced it, based obviously on the UK Act of 1988, is inconsistent, confusing and frankly stupid. Why for example, should the term of copyright for moving pictures be 50 years but for still pictures 75 years (where a person as opposed to a legal entity can be identified as the author under section 94). What then about stills from a movie? There are lots more examples. It also requires the author etc "must assert his moral right" - like how, shout it out from the top of the Beehive? In books some publishers have since been saying things like "[the author] asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in terms of the Copyright Act..." In fact the word "copyright" and "all rights reserved" is all you need to say.

Section 3 of the NZ Act contains a raft of "acts permitted in relation to copyright works", for example including other people's photos in a blog like this "for the purpose of reporting current events" is permitted.

Needless to say it is a goldmine for lawyers (as if they need another one to get rich from) and given the impunity with which the web exploits anything, a lawyer is last thing you want to waste money on. When it came to photos, in the old days you could reasonably prove you owned the copyright by being able to produce the original slide or negative. Nowadays with digital photography you can't do that.

Have other people lifted our text without asking?  Oh yes, a number of times.  For example the text on this webpage is a straight unacknowledged lift from our book On the Trans-Alpine Trail - and they didn't bother to ask us first.  But we haven't bothered to pursue it.

Ultimately the issue becomes one of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." People primarily like to be acknowledged for their work, those who take a mercenary attitude to things are in a small minority, so take the trouble to give credit where it is due.

Update
After 6 years of this blog with about 25,000 pictures on here we have had in that time 7 complaints from people who complained that we hadn't acknowledged authorship of their photo, which we then added (in one case the authorship credit wanted was a login code of letters and numerals), and 4 who very rudely demanded that their photos be deleted, which we did. Quite why they put them on public photo sharing sites in the first place is beyond us, and they seemed unaware that huge volumes of pictures are disseminated every day on newsgroups, probably including most if not all of theirs.  Newsgroups over the last 19 years have been a source for quite a few of the photos on here, but if we don't know who took them, then we can't state that. Obvious?

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