In an idealized, through a soft-focus-filter world, the brilliant and
creative photographer, Joe Snap, creates an image of a flower and it's
so marvellous that nobody ever saw anything like that flower before and
the most accomplished studio-commercial die-hards, try as they might,
could never reproduce the waves of nostalgic love/sorrow/nausea that
this compelling image inspires. Not in any stock library is there an
image that is so compelling.
Copyright laws love this artists work and they protect him from the
masses that want to own this image. He keeps selling it and when he
dies, his family sells it and his grand-children, bless their inspired
cotton socks, continue to benefit.
In reality what copyright does is it makes the big boys, like AP and
Reuters and Bill Gates' own huge "Intellectual" collections. They have
the legal staff to ensure that Joe's grandchildren don't steal old Joe's
images back from them and that nobody gets to see this pic unless they
pay, pay, pay.
Copyright lawyers and copyright law protect corporations against
artists. Not artists against corporations.
Photography has paid for my children's food, clothing, housing,
education and bad habits. (Including university)
One of them is even a photographer himself. Enough already. They can
inherit my negs, my slides, my hard drives.. I hope they don't take on
the terrible task of trying to curate it. They'll probably do better out
of my equipment, houses and cars (All of which were paid for by
photography without ever having a copyright dispute in 35 years.
And if Sam's grocery store finds and uses your apple pictures without
paying you or even asking you... The best way to deal with it is to
approach Sam in a pleasant way and negotiate something.
If you think the copyright laws will help... fugiddaboudit.
What you gonna do? Sue Sam? He'll just take your pics down and throw
them in the trash. And then you'd better move out of the fruit
photography business.
The idea that we need such a thing is sold on the shoulders of the
starving artists but that's BS. It's BS in photography and it's BS in
music too. For the same reasons.
Our egos may not like it but digital photographs are plentiful....
abundant is an understatement... and 4 year olds can make them.
Photographs are no longer a dime a dozen... they're mostly free.
If there were no copyright laws to protect them, those great rapists and
plunderers of art (Too strong wording?) the picture agencies and
recording industries would lose the power they currently have over
photographers and musicians.
The client would have to come to a photographer to buy an image. Now
wouldn't that be nice?
And in the end, probably, that filing cabinet with over a million slides
in it will be put to better use once I'm gone.
I reckon, and this isn't data just hunch, that you wouldn't take forever
to list all the individual people that have made money out of inherited
pictures because of the copyright laws.
Herschel
