Over the weekend I got into a little debate with a fellow blogger and photographer Raul Gutierrez about a post on his site Heading East. Let me say I feel he makes wonderful work and his writing is excellent, I enjoy every visit.
But I did not enjoy my most recent visit after being greeted by a very familiar picture, a Robert Adams from his book “What We Bought: The New World” Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area 1970-1974 Spectrum/DAP.
You can and should read the original exchange, I probably was too miffed and said some uncharitable things…basically I called him a hypocrite (nicely) for asking others to respect his work and not use it without permission while he was pimping this great Robert Adams picture at the top of his blog. I felt he was riding on coat-tails so to speak. And that he didn’t need to do that, his own work was very very good.
More constructively I took issue with the blog post because I felt that swiping images from others without permission was essentially wrong, and was devaluing all work. If I can illustrate my creations with work from the best artists, who will pay for the less-than-great? There is the idea of fair use involved, the excerpt, the review, the transformative work. I have no doubt the anyone is fully entitled to write a piece featuring someone else’s work in that context. But I am not so much interested in copyright law as that train left the station for photographers long ago. About the only one protected by current copyright law is Mickey Mouse. You probably know the story. As long as litigation is involved, only the rich will have the protections of copyright law. Fair use yes, but I was asking fair to whom?
So I likened the blog post to something like a radio broadcast, This American Life for example. There are very concrete rules governing the use of copyrighted content on the public airwaves, because they have been regulated from the beginning. Or at least until Michael Powell came along. the point is not the specific rules but the acknowledgment of a value in the “performance” of work.
All of the above is probably me being a curmudgeon.
After a while the real issue hit me; Robert Adams’s work itself and the title of his book. I had referenced it in a previous post about the effects of convenience on the experience of our lives. Every frame of that work documents the transformation of a landscape and a people by the values of a culture with a fetish for convenience. It is so hard to talk about this because it is a part of everything we do now, it is the “modern” world. I could not be writing this unless someone thought it was a good thing to transform publishing so that an individual could do it.
What I am interested in is the value of creative work and how a society rewards that work particularly in the context of the increasing convenience with which creativity can be shared.
What are we trading for? The internets come along and at this point it is clear, with flickr and Youtube and myspace the sharing of imagery is at a galactic high. The volume of published work is astronomical. This is how technology affects convenience. The more advanced the tools the easier it is to do something. All reproductive technologies have destabilizing effects on society. I cannot halt any of that. But I think it is worth examining the trade we are making for convenience. My opinion is that while the sharing of images may be at an all time high, the value of those images is at an all time low. That is a subject that could be debated as well.
A lot of people will think I am making too much of this, that there is no consequence. I think we are probably not taking it seriously enough. Look at the business models of media. If I am wrong, and it is good to share all this stuff for free, then it will have to be regarded as just a kind of leakage I would say. You see it to one degree or another in for example, the stealing/sharing of music, software, and movies on down to blog posting using unauthorized content. If we accept that the technology is going to be disruptive no matter what, and that our ideas of copyright and compensation are outmoded in the new world, then the business model will have to change. Well, who can afford to change? Big business certainly can afford to change. They have always had to deal with leakage of one kind or another, theft, shoplifting, the stealing of product secrets, and now sharing over the internet. So you estimate the leakage to be a percentage of the total and amortize that over millions of transactions. It becomes an expense, the cost of doing business. You factor in the occasional lawsuit. It’s just business. And you vertically integrate so that not only do you sell the product but you sell the transportation of that product. Movie theaters, broadcasting networks, ISP’s, sharing sites, social networking, if you can be the toll keeper it doesn’t matter how much leakage there is, it is all traffic and all monetized somewhere along the flow.
Look at the other end of the scale-you and me. How can we afford to amortize or integrate the effects of this leakage? We don’t own the means to transmit the work. We pay for that. We don’t own the tools-we license those tools from others in the form of software licenses and hardware upgrades, a kind of tax in another form. All we own is the actual content, since we are the content producers. They are our ideas. It is not created out of nothing, it is created out of the individual mind. However, our consumer mindset thinks that we are not creators, that content comes from somewhere else, and that our actions in the marketplace have no impact. I believe they do have an impact and we have no way to shelter ourselves from its effects.
So all this sharing and blogging is great, but without respect for creative works it will in the end, harm the creators of those works themselves. There is no way out of that equation given the scale, the technology and the organization of the system. All we can control are our attitudes towards convenience and consumption and be aware of what we are trading for in the New World.
Ha. You lament the lost currency of images and talk about the trade we make for convenience, and yet you can’t help showing the image yourself. Of course you are quoting the image, but you are still showing it. You are also making the trade. Instead of allowing the post to be text only. If the argument is that images are sacrosanct and that their creators should always be paid for them regardless of how they are used then you should have not shown the image.
I think it’s a fact that the creation of images is no longer sacred. Photography by artists and professionals has been devalued. The creation of music by professionals has been devalued. But in it’s place has arisen a world of that in any ways is more interesting than the old one in which information and art were produced by a small circle of experts and which knowledge is essentially free. It will take time for artists to navigate this world and find a way to make money, but it will happen, it always does.
As a practice I refrain as much as humanly possible. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times.
Whereas Gawker has made an entire industry out of repackaging content bought and paid for elsewhere. Because it can be done.
No one really wants to acknowledge the ways in which we are mortgaging our future.
There is a difference of course, but the two are connected.
it is all related.
thanks for digging in the archives tho!