Fifteen years ago my sector had over a dozen photo-agencies which worked with freelance photographers, providing images to newspapers and magazines. Some specialized in sport, some in long-term documentary projects, some in hard news. Some were co-ops run by their members, some were big, some were small. In other words, the 'photo-eco-system' was reasonably diverse and a wide variety of imagery was produced by professional photographers earning decent fees. Nearly all those agencies are out of business and now only a few major image corporations like Getty Images, Corbis - owned by Bill Gates - and Jupiter Images dominate the market and produce 'wholly owned' work - the corporation owns the copyright - either from staff or contract photographers. The work varies across the board, from high-end stock photography to news images. If wholly-owned or virtually copyright-free (more commonly known as Royalty Free) content can be aggregated into a hub, and the economies of scale means the hub drives out smaller competitors, then huge profits be made. It's a volume and service business now to such an extent that you could argue that the individual image has been rendered almost worthless. People either won't pay for images, or will only pay a small fee - as little as 50 pence a time for images offered by iStockphoto, an image library owned by Getty Images. All this commodified 'off the peg' stock imagery has infected the attitudes of editors commissioning 'live' photography. These commissioning editors now see photographers as widget makers, and the cheaper the widget, the better. With mass rip-offs on the Web and the unit value of images crashing, photographers can no longer make a living independently from their work, and so are driven towards working for these corporations to earn a living. As digital content becomes more commodified, the more certain it is that only big business can profit from it, thanks to their economies of scale. And to put the final nail in the coffin, along comes "citizens journalism". Share cropping revisited Amateurism isn't intrinsically harmful, but it's now a factor in penalizing and impoverishing creatives who choose to pursue authorship as their sole, full time, economic function. Instead, we're expected to work for charity. "Crowdsourcing" is the latest buzzword, but under our present economic system its simply globalisation in practice - being the same force which drove 19th Century artisans into factories to sell their labour power to the factory boss. In this case, the lowest cost producer – the amateur photographer throwing their images onto the Web, to be 'content mined' - is also the consumer. The amateur will buy a newspaper or magazine simply for the thrill of being in print. It's the same model that mine owners used when they paid their workers in 'company money'. So the upshot is, a copyright-free environment has simply enriched large businesses at the direct expense of individual authors. But shouldn't the little guy enjoy the same protection of copyright law that the big corporations do? We can't afford to. Suing for multiple copyright theft is simply not feasible for individuals. There have been some signs of collective policing. For example, photo agencies in the US recently ganging up to sue the celebrity blogger 'Perez Hilton' for hundreds of thousands of dollars for unauthorized usage for their pictures placed on their websites, and software companies like PicScout have spotted a market for software which tracks illegal photo uses. (Perez Hilton generates lots of advertising revenue which isn't passed on to the photographers whose images have been stolen, and are used on the blog.) Only the big money corporations have the means to enforce their ownership rights, so the widespread theft of individual authors rights benefits them the most, and this has a chilling effect, as it discourages authors from placing their work on the Web. The Orphan Works Bill that the US Congress almost passed earlier this year had clauses that would have devastated individual artists, weakening their ability to pursue fine violators of 'their' content. If it goes into law, it will much make all content on the web easier to steal and much harder to pursue and stop. So in practice, it discourages professionals putting high quality images on the web and creates the very cultural barrier which Copyleft and Creative Commons advocates seek to abolish. Advocates who put out material under a "copy me" license or in the public domain usually have a day job. I don't. My photography is my job. Authors who do this it's usually a publicity gimmick or a loss-leader. To throw the baby out with the bathwater and abolish copyright altogether, or to behave like it doesn't exist is equally short-sighted, and brings us the very cultural atrophy that anti-copyright advocates claim to be against. Most anti-copyright arguments are based on a distaste for unfairly held "property". But for individual authors, it's not, and never really has been a property issue - it's our labour we're talking about. Copyright exists to allow us to earn a living, but routine flouting of this law simply strengthens the ability of large companies to seize that labour and sit on it for profit – as their property. In reality, what is happening on the web is the transfer of the authors' labour to large corporations for nothing. Anti-copyright lobbyists have become either unwitting allies, or shills, for big business. ®
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