Sarah Killey has a blog post about an incident where someone submitted a photo she took to a local online newspaper. I thought I’d just comment on some aspects of this.
First of all, I’m glad to hear that she enjoys photography, and that she willingly shares her images in multiple places. That’s definitely a plus. It’s unfortunate that her picture was submitted by someone else without her knowledge or permission. It’s also not good that she was not credited.
The issues I have with her post is with the remarks about “stolen Intellectual Property” and that she says adding “(C) Sarah Killey” to the photos would have stopped this from happening. I also disagree with the “once it’s out there, it’s no longer yours” idea. While it is true that adding a watermark would make it easier to stop people passing off your images as their own, it also detracts from the picture. There are two ideas here that are tangled, and they should be considered separately:
- One issue is of copyright. Sarah does indeed have full control over how her photo is used. She can react however she likes to what has happened – ignore it, inform the website that the photo is hers, even go after the other person for using her photo. I hope she approaches it sensibly. But nothing has been “stolen” from her. She has not lost anything. Saying that she has had Intellectual Property stolen is misleading, as it infers that she is now missing something. Her copyright has been infringed, sure, but there is no theft here. This is not a semantic argument, it is a genuine issue.
- The more important issue here is one of reputation. Sarah is upset that someone else used her work to promote themselves. And that comes through in the post.There could have been many motives behind sharing her photos: displaying her work, asking for comments, contributing to a pool of information, to suggest just a few. In this way, the benefits of sharing the photos most likely quite outweighs the benefits of keeping them to herself. She should have no regrets about sharing her work. Instead, it will be the person who tried to pass off your work as their own that will suffer.
As another post on Techdirt notes:
A person, organization, band or company’s reputation is an important “scarce” good — and once damaged, it’s quite difficult (though not impossible) to rebuild the shattered goodwill. When talking about what would happen in a world without copyright, for example, people often say “but in a world without copyright, couldn’t someone just copy your own creation and pretend they were their own.” The answer is yes, but they do so at the risk to their own reputation. If the news comes out that the person/organization/band/whatever was taking others’ works and not giving credit where it was due, that would harm their reputation.
On a different note, I’m not sure where or what the “Creative Commons vs Intellectual Property debate” is. Creative Commons provides ready-made licences that allow creators and authors to loosen selected copyright (and other) restrictions on some of their works. The licences work within copyright and other Intellectual Property laws, not against them.
This issue could probably be quite easily resolved by contacting the website hosting the photo, and letting them know that the credit is incorrect. It is in Sarah’s interest to keep the photo there, as it may improve her reputation in the area of photography or others’ view of how open and willing to share she is.I is also a part of the current news, and helps to illustrate the events. In future, she might also want to just let people know that she’s happy to share her photos, as long as she gets credit. And credit is really what this is all about. Reputation. Let’s try to avoid tangling issues of reputation and copyright.