Freetard or visionary?
Jonathan Worth took this photograph of Diane Smyth, deputy editor of BJP, and made it freely available using a Creative Commons CC BY-SA licence - which means it can be freely copied, distributed, transmitted and adapted, but it must be attributed to the photographer.
Jonathan Worth says abandoning traditional copyright in favour of Creative Commons sharing has saved his portrait business
Author: Diane Smyth
09 Sep 2011
Sharing your images for free is a surefire way to lose money, right? Wrong, according to Jonathan Worth. A successful portrait photographer, he says that ditching strict copyright in favour of a Creative Commons licence that allows free non-commercial use has actually saved his business.
"Previously, I would track down every use of my image everywhere, on every blog and send out vitriolic take-down notices," he says. "Then I'd find it being run by some weeping 14-year-old girl in middle America who's a Heath Ledger fan and just loved the picture. I'd feel really bad and say they could keep it as long as they linked the image back to me, and then I'd feel so bad I'd send them an exclusive out-take print. I was wasting a lot of time and stress, but then I did always notice a flurry of interest in my work afterwards coming from that blog.
"Then I met Cory Doctorow, a writer who is giving his work away for free and expecting to receive $50,000 back. He said the publicity he gains from it adds value to his work, and that publishing a free ebook online doesn't mean he doesn't sell hardback copies - in fact he sells more of them. He suggested I try it out so I put a hi-res picture online for free, and made 111 signed prints of the image. I ended up with a fight over the last ones and made a net profit of £800."
Worth is now a dedicated Creative Commons fan, usually using the CC BY-NC - which requires that commercial users pay for it, and that he is always credited. Non commercial users are free to use it as they choose. Creative Commons has six separate licences that allow photographers to retain copyright but share their work plus two licences stating that the copyright holder has waived his or her rights altogether. The organisation recently launched a publication, The Power of Open, which sets out the terms of each licence, and included several case studies, including Worth's experience.
"It's not a silver bullet but it was ground-breaking for me," he says. "By making fans part of the process, they effectively do my publicity. I'm represented by Google now, and because I'm not paying for an agent I can sell for less and still make a profit."
To Worth, copyright laws are part of a 20th century legal framework that doesn't fit 21st century technology or practices, and like Fred Ritchin, author of After Photography, he believes digital capture and distribution have fundamentally changed photography so much that we're now living in a "post-photographic" society. Worth has written two experimental classes with input from Ritchin, Photography and Narrative (#PHONAR) and Picturing the Body (#PICBOD), which were written for Coventry University but are freely available online and address the radical changes in photography.
As the course catalog reads: "The role of photographer (mode of information) as supplier to old media (mode of distribution) no longer exists - that link has been broken. We recognise [sic] instead the need to redefine the role of the contemporary photographer as publisher."
"Stephen Mayes [managing director of VII Photo] has been very helpful - he helped me write a BA class," says Worth. "He says VII had to rethink their product, and maybe that isn't photography - VII makes images and stories, but its product is integrity. It's a trusted source. I've tried to apply that to my own practice. The technical barriers to photography have been removed, anyone can make an image now, so what separates me and my work? Trust - a contract to photograph Heath Ledger is all about trust."
Jonathan Worth is currently taking part in Aperture's What Matters Now series of events.
Comments
I'm the same, only different, because I have no objection at all to people downloading free copies of my work, for themselves, but have not ever fallen for the Creative Commons bit as IF you , for example licence all your websites images for non-commercial use, ior stick them on Flickr or anywhere like it on the same basis, you just cannot control Getty, Microsoft, The Guardian, the BBC, Apple and everyone else from taking your work. Of course not.
So I stopped doing it because they were doing it anyway regardless, and took everything off my online hard drives of value as that is just giving them away to all and sundry who knows where you are.
Years ago, when things were much less sophisticated than they are now, my machines were hacked by a joker who gleefully sprayed photoshop graffitti on several files.
I took the hint. Contacted several agencies, one run by an Englishman in Paris who runs a certain library.
He said that regardless, he had to employ someone to run his servers, and that the images were on hard drives behind another firewalled bank of servers, and that only a previewed reduced image once sold was let through to a specific address once payment was received, and then moved manually by the IT man back again out of harms way.
The internet is great for somethings, but not for you as a creative artist.
In a pefect world this would work well but personally I think the main problem with this is the combination of people who dont understand CC and the chain of use resulting from a legitimate fan blog use is a major concern to me.
The majority of my work is currently related to entertainment coverage ( mostly live music). Sites like Tumbr that host thousands of fan blogs seem fine, but then concider the person who re-posts an image of rock god X performing and soon enough if reposted enough someone along the way will repost it with no credit.
Then someone might use it on a music website in a news article or feature about a band thinking its public domain ( I have experianced this first hand) and thats a sale lost. The standard responce to this sort of use if "sorry we will take it down", and bills for use are normally met with responces that; in short, amount to we cant/wont/dont have the budgit etc and takes a lot of back and forth for a ressolution.
While this isnt a problem in social photography areas it is a massive problem for anyone shooting high profile subjects ( particularly when the images might be subject to use restrictions etc).
I think while a good idea in theory CC is a LONG way from being widespread and isnt treated with the respect it should be.
Let's get this straight, the over-exposed, fuzzyphoto of someone few peole have heard of is available for free. Big wow.
To the point, the Creative Commons model MAY work for SOME photographers. Do the rest of us have to have it rammed down our throats even though it's not appropriate to the work we do? Some of us need to protect our work for perfectly valid reasons beyond just market value of the image and CC T&Cs are flawed in any event.
Thanks, but I will decide who gets to use my work. I don't write vitriolic letters and emails to copyright offenders because that tends to get you nowhere. There are other ways to enforce copyright than just being nasty about it, and they don't automatically involve giving your work away for free either.
Do I get this right? Diane Smyth allows an image of hers to be broadcast anywhere by anyone providing the user credits Jonathan Worth. So a 13 year old in Biloxi who knows nothing about copyright or Creative Commons drags and drops it into a Flickr page about teeth. Then a web designer in India finds the image on Flickr through Google Images and drops it into a commercial webpage in Hindi selling toothpaste. Then Diane decides she doesn't want to be laughed at every time she goes into her local Indian run corner shop because the Indian toothpaste co distribute her image on a showcard.
Who is going to hire a lawyer in India to sort out the mess? Diane, Jonathan or the 13 year old in Biloxi?
This is not a fanciful scenario. I have dozens, if not hundreds, of my images pirated on foreign language websites. The route they took there is very similar to the scenario I describe hypothetically here.
...so, Diane Smyth has, as far as I understand it, allowed her likeness to be used on the internet, for free, with a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license, which will allow the image to be used for, well, pretty much anything..."even for commercial purposes".
Well, I sure hope she signed a model release form, 'else she really has no come back if her image appears on the nastiest of nasty sites. As Bob Croxford has pointed out, things have a habit of coming back to haunt us.
As for Ms Smyth and the BJP, is there not a slight conflict of interest here...BJP supposedly represents working photographers, or did? In light of this article, frankly, I’m glad I stopped taking BJP 6 months back.
The business model for photography (any business) is really quite simple; as long as I have to pay for my equipment and associated expenses…if you want my products (i.e. pictures), then you pay for them.
Is that too difficult for these damned ‘freetards’ to comprehend? And, if they cannot understand the current copyright legislation, why should they understand (or abide by) anything else…?
I’m not against change and, if things need to change in the light of the ‘digital revolution’ (how I’ve come to loathe that phrase), then change things, but don’t change anything just because a bunch of ‘philanthropic’ fools can’t get their head around the rules and laws as they currently stand.
But, any changes should only be based on objective debate and, more importantly, come from those directly involved in the business, i.e. those who make a living and pay their bills from the business of photography.
How ironic that, in the light of all this the BJP also publishes this article:
http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/news/2122781/archant-pushes-rights-grabbing-contract
Well Ms Smyth and Mr Worth, you are directly condoning this sort of thing by the actions you’ve taken.
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