Emily writes: : Bingo. : : <rant> : : Karl just will never get it. He must be a computer geek first and : photographer second and I think he's not self-employed. Karl has run a landscaping company, sells images, rarely exhibits images on the net (put 'em up and they get stolen instantly!) - and currently it seems some of Karl's *stolen* images are being used by the biggest gardening TV program in Australia on their web pages *right at the top* .. in banner form no less! Karl has had a few exhibitions, his images have sold at auction for some rather substantial amounts (for Perth ;) and Karl is consulted by photographers at the WA Art Museum, our two largest hospitals and a few other places. Karl has also lectured in photography and, in the film industry trained DOP's, Directors and even has his name appearing in the credits of a few small films. Karl learned wet process photography to the point that he could work explaining the technologies to other photographers and offer support to these same people when they *did not* want to understand the underlying wossits, and since the advent of Digital imaging, Karl has spent a lot of time and learned heaps about computing, trained with Canon and now offers the same level of tech support to digital photographers as he once did to wet process photographers. Why just last week (I shot an elephant in my pyjamas..) no wait, I was consulted by a web firm to help them understand how they could hack chunks of their bandwidth .. which I did by demonstrating exactly how much superfluous data they are hosting in the form of non-image parts of images. People pay me to save them money.. bandwidth costs money. People pay me to protect their images, exif data and thumbnails do NOT protect images. If a person were serious about protecting their images they would pay a security expert big dollars to find out how to do it. Or a cheaper way would be to accept gracefully advice when it falls in front of them.. much as wet process photographers did when a technician (geek) told them how they could cut costs, save money AND offer greater protection to their prints by recovering fixer cheaply and quickly. People would possibly even listen when someone who recovers data for other photographers offers against striped raid or other methods of 'backing up' which have proven to be less than safe. He's : apparently never had to think about who owns his property so he : thinks there's no problem with stripping out the metadata. A false sense of security is no security at all. : Boy, I'd almost be willing to give up my copyright, at least for my : more mundane work, in exchange for a regular paycheck of around : $2,000/week. Especially if my employer paid for all my equipment and : kept it up-to-date and sent me to conferences and workshops, and gave : me 4 weeks paid vacation and sick leave and health insurance. And if : I didn't have to drum up customers?! Boy would that be great. I : might even be willing to do that for $1500/week. you own the copyright but it isn't protected by metadata, it's only protected by courts and lawyers :( : Instead, a recent customer wants a 5x7.5 print in 8x10 mat for $45 + : shipping. A reasonable, competitive price. : : But the Toyota people want $90 to replace the spring that releases : the latch on the trunk lid of my 10 year old car. : : Something is wrong with this picture. One thing that's wrong is that : people don't recognize the value of creative, artistic work. They : think it should all be free. Especially in academia where the : parents are paying the bills or they get a salary. : : </rant> hey we should get together sometime - you and I could do some good rants! ;) k
