Thursday, October 18, 2007
Blogger Play
Blogger Help: "Blogger Play is a real-time slideshow of photos Blogger users have recently uploaded to their blogs. It's a great snapshot of what people are thinking and posting about, right now!"
Friday, October 12, 2007
Emulator | dotMobi
Emulator | dotMobi: "Researchers at IDC say that 1.3 billion people will connect to the Internet via mobile phones by 2008. To see your site the same way that millions of mobile phone users do, use the .mobi mobile Emulator, which 'emulates' a real mobile phone Internet browser."
Sunday, October 07, 2007
SearchEngineWatch
SearchEngineWatch: Major Search Engines and Directories: "In the search engine list below, Search Engine Watch provides a guide to the major search engines of the web. Why are these considered to be 'major' search engines? Because they are either well-known or well-used."
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Digital Photography
The way the Copyright Law is written and currently interpreted, it’s easier than ever to legally combine parts of several digital images to make an entirely new image. And the Big 3 (Getty, Corbis, and JupiterImages) have the resources to employ this as a standard procedure. They own the rights to a major portion of the commercial stock photography in the world, and the race is still on between them. They have just about pulled it off.
Like a view under the microscope of an ever-expanding organism dividing and reproducing itself, the Big 3 present a macro view of how the world of commercial stock photography is growing. And it’s not through photographers tramping the globe, taking more photos. Instead it’s due to an incestuous technique (like cloning sheep) to which the Digital Age has given birth. The Big 3 add to this hidden trump card each time they buy up yet another stock photo agency and gain certain electronic rights for that agency’s photos. They also take steps to gain the right to digitally combine those images with other images in their files, by use of a waiver clause in their contracts with photographers. Typical is the Getty contract, in section 106A (see this at http://www.photosource.com/106A.html), sub-section (a) “Transfer and Waiver.” Photographers who are not aware of what they are signing can inadvertently waive the attributions and integrity rights to a single photo or group of photos. The mathematics of this process are ingenious. Not only do the Big 3 acquire new companies and new images, but an exponential expansion of some of those images, whose copyright can become their property, according to current copyright interpretation. In the Digital Age of photography, this new genre of photograph is emerging. It has not arrived on main-street digital yetbut we see prototypes of it in print ads and especially on TV. I call this the “kaleidoscope strategy.” (Remember the tube toy you once raised to the sky and then marveled at the changing myriad images as you turned it?) In terms of arithmetic, it goes like this: Any one of The Big 3 select five of their waivered pictures, digitize them, combine elements from the five into a variety of 25 new pictures, each substantially different from the original (green sky on this one, a small tree from that one, a vintage automobile from this one, etc.) and presto! They have a completely different mood, expression and feeling in each new photoand none are recognizable as any of the five original pictures. Photographers who have signed contracts with the Big 3 did so in good faith, expecting their pictures to continue to belong to them. While their original contracts may prohibit altering their original photos, nothing is mentioned about extracting parts of an image to produce a new image of separate copyright. Some “work for hire” contracts, for example, stipulate “we retain usage rights in any medium now known or hereinafter developed for no additional payment.” As you can see, the photographer loses control of his/her picture when it is combined with parts of other photographers’ images.
Can the courts help? No doubt court cases will toss the kaleidoscope strategy back and forth for years to come. The U.S. Copyright Law is a balance of interests: the user, the creator and the publisher. In the end, those in judicial command who interpret the Copyright Law, will probably decree that it would interfere with “creativity” to disallow the process of combining images to make new ones, in the spirit of how Picasso and other artists combined images and items to make collages or sculptures.
Like a view under the microscope of an ever-expanding organism dividing and reproducing itself, the Big 3 present a macro view of how the world of commercial stock photography is growing. And it’s not through photographers tramping the globe, taking more photos. Instead it’s due to an incestuous technique (like cloning sheep) to which the Digital Age has given birth. The Big 3 add to this hidden trump card each time they buy up yet another stock photo agency and gain certain electronic rights for that agency’s photos. They also take steps to gain the right to digitally combine those images with other images in their files, by use of a waiver clause in their contracts with photographers. Typical is the Getty contract, in section 106A (see this at http://www.photosource.com/106A.html), sub-section (a) “Transfer and Waiver.” Photographers who are not aware of what they are signing can inadvertently waive the attributions and integrity rights to a single photo or group of photos. The mathematics of this process are ingenious. Not only do the Big 3 acquire new companies and new images, but an exponential expansion of some of those images, whose copyright can become their property, according to current copyright interpretation. In the Digital Age of photography, this new genre of photograph is emerging. It has not arrived on main-street digital yetbut we see prototypes of it in print ads and especially on TV. I call this the “kaleidoscope strategy.” (Remember the tube toy you once raised to the sky and then marveled at the changing myriad images as you turned it?) In terms of arithmetic, it goes like this: Any one of The Big 3 select five of their waivered pictures, digitize them, combine elements from the five into a variety of 25 new pictures, each substantially different from the original (green sky on this one, a small tree from that one, a vintage automobile from this one, etc.) and presto! They have a completely different mood, expression and feeling in each new photoand none are recognizable as any of the five original pictures. Photographers who have signed contracts with the Big 3 did so in good faith, expecting their pictures to continue to belong to them. While their original contracts may prohibit altering their original photos, nothing is mentioned about extracting parts of an image to produce a new image of separate copyright. Some “work for hire” contracts, for example, stipulate “we retain usage rights in any medium now known or hereinafter developed for no additional payment.” As you can see, the photographer loses control of his/her picture when it is combined with parts of other photographers’ images.
Can the courts help? No doubt court cases will toss the kaleidoscope strategy back and forth for years to come. The U.S. Copyright Law is a balance of interests: the user, the creator and the publisher. In the end, those in judicial command who interpret the Copyright Law, will probably decree that it would interfere with “creativity” to disallow the process of combining images to make new ones, in the spirit of how Picasso and other artists combined images and items to make collages or sculptures.
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