davidconnell.net

MSNBC’s Red Tape blog has an interesting piece on the latest social snaring-fueled photo-riights kerfuffle: Stephanie Gordon, who snapped the photo of the last space shuttle breaking through the clouds only to see it taken without compensation by several major and non-majpr news outlets.

The piece has a lot of interesting details in it, including this quote from Janis Krum, who snapped one of the photos of the  US Airways jet landing on the Hudson, which I think pretty accurately sums up the attitude of a lot of publications these days:

“In some ways, it seems more socially acceptable to take advantage of a naïve rights holder. ‘Organizations say, ‘Well, it’s a regular person we don’t even have to compensate them.’ They do things they wouldn’t do with a professional photographer,’ Krum said.”

I’d also add that a lot of organizations probably believe — or convince themselves — that they’re doing the rights holder a favor by, “making them famous” or “spreading their work around.” Editors who do this type of thing imagine the rights holder sitting at home and getting a little thrill when their work is stolen for publication by someone else.

The piece also highlights the Terms of Service of some photo sharing sites, including TwitPic that maintain distribution rights to photos stored there. In other words, the shooter is free to sell the work, but then so is TwitPic.

The always sharp Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand.com tells Red Tape that the photo sharing sites could help alleviate these issues by acting as a broker for the sale of images and providing accurate and reliable contact information for the shooter when a photo becomes newsworthy.

For all the criticism its received lately about poor design and lack of updates I have to give credit to Flickr for handling this issue pretty well. All photos on Flickr are clearly marked as copyrighted by the shooter and provides easy access to Creative Commons licenses to those who do want to share their photos but maintain some of their rights.