photo

Free Getty Images have take backsies

It feels like a good day when you wake up to the news that Getty Images is making 35 million images free to use. That’s nice… or is it?

 

The embedd tool is only will allow users to (WSJ)

..include images on websites, such as non-commercial WordPress blogs. The eligible images also come with buttons for Tumblr and Twitter, where a link to the image can be shared. (The image itself doesn’t appear on Twitter, however.)

The obvious question about this is the elusive term non-commercial – attempting to define what is and isn’t commercial is a minefield. But the real question here is one of control. Poynter, referring to the Verge, picks up this point in their reporting of the release. Getty is not giving something for nothing and what they will have is control. Previously images were used without clearing copyright but by providing easy embedding code users will be encouraged to use the images in the ways in which Getty desires.

The new money comes because, once the images are embedded, Getty has much more control over the images. The new embeds are built on the same iframe code that lets you embed a tweet or a YouTube video, which means the company can use embeds to plant ads or collect user information.

The terms of service makes the control pretty clear. Under termination they write:

Notwithstanding any of these Site Terms, Getty Images reserves the right, without notice and in its sole discretion, to terminate your account and/or to block your use of the Site.

If they don’t like you, you don’t get to use the images any more. If you have built up a following based on images they provide – and by doing this provide them with viewers/customers/revenue you still have no rights to use their images if they decide not to share with you any more. As they are embedded images they don’t even have to demand that you take the images down.

This is conditional freedom. This is not a gift but a conditional exchange where those who embed images become the advance marketers of Getty. We have all seen this, this is classic social media thinking. We should know by now:

If you are not paying for it, you are the product being sold. Or an unpaid part of the sales team.

Lets be clear. Getty images has the right to do what they please with these images. I have no problem with their approach. I just want to point out the difference between giving something away while keeping the right to take it back and giving something away.

Compare this with the 100s of millions (if not billions) of images available under Creative Commons licenses. Here the exchange is free and non-revokable. If I use an image that a photographer has licensed under CC. I can use that image forever.

A Big Appetite by Julie Falk CC BY NC

Now this is a free lunch.

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Polaroid is back, baby!

Polaroid is back! This via Futuramb. Wonderful that certain technologies refuse to die.

The Impossible Project, Made Possible: Polaroid Instant Film Is Back on Sale | Dan’s FC Blog | Fast Company A story about when enthusiasts striving for feel and authenticity are recreating what a company recently decided it would drop. Polaroid film is back!

The Impossible Project, Made Possible: Polaroid Instant Film Is Back on Sale | Dan’s FC Blog | Fast Company

A story about when enthusiasts striving for feel and authenticity are recreating what a company recently decided it would drop. Polaroid film is back! Via Fastcompany:

The Impossible project’s film is actually more expensive than the original Polaroid film available on eBay and Craigslist, but the point is that those stores of original Polaroid film will eventually be used–and the Impossible project is here to stay, at least until people stop caring about Polaroid (probably never).

The film will be available starting this Thursday, March 25, through the company’s site.

Posted on by mklang

On the joy of reuse

Mike Linksvayer has written a post on the Creative Commons blog on the joy of having other people find and reuse material. And I agree. So ok I am a hobby photographer and like so many of us I take good and bad pictures and post them online. Well to be fair a large group of hobby photographers take brilliant photographs and post them online.

The fun part is that lots of my photographs have been used to illustrate stuff online on blogs (sweet things to say & your monkey called), discussion forums, encyclopedia (construmatica) and even as a title photo for a group on library thing. Some don’t get the whole attribution thing but most do and it is really a kick looking up photo’s that I have taken and finding them somewhere unexpected – sometimes on sites in languages I don’t understand.

For me it’s not about the mass recognition (well ok I admit it would be fun) but it’s about the everyday use all over the place that gives my work with the camera an extra kick.

Posted on by mklang

My camera history

The first camera I remember was my grandfather’s Ikoflex 1A 854/16

This is a very cool camera which I never really mastered. I now have this as a memory of my grandfather but after reading Ivor Matanle’s article on the history and use of the Ikoflex TLRs Classics to Use (Amateur Photographer, 29 October 2005) I have been inspired to test the camera.

My first camera was nothing this complex. I was eventually given a Kodak Instamatic with a cubeflash. I used this to take my first pictures.

There was an especially long gap between the Instamatic and my next camera. With my first paycheck I bought a Nikon F-301, a really cool toy which I used to experiment with. I tried out different lenses and external flashes. The only drawback was that I did not develop my own photos so experiments were slow and expensive. So I really did not make much progress. Eventually I dropped photography.

My hobby came back when I bought a Canon EOS 30 which was a really cool camera but still had the main drawback in that I needed to develop the photographs before I could analyze the mistakes I had made. Actually I should have gone straight to a digital version but due to some misguided snobbery I chose not to go digital.

Finally, I made the move to digital and got a Canon EOS 400D. Now I am happily taking photos, attempting to understand the results and develop what I see and learn. In addition to this, thanks to my Flickr account I am able to easily upload and share my photographs.

So by going digital I was able to develop my hobby to the extent that it actually can be called a hobby.

Posted on by mklang

Censorship on Flickr

Since I put many of my photo’s on Flickr I was disturbed to read the following story. The more I thought about it the more I realised that it was obvious that Flickr would have the same types of rules as all the other social networking sites but it is still a reason for concern.

Photographer Maarten Dors (his Flickr Profile) received the following email from Flickr concerning a picture if a young boy smoking (Would like put it online here if I had permission… hint hint).

====
case354736@support.flickr.com

Hi Maarten Dors,

Images of children under the age of 18 who are smoking
tobacco is prohibited across all of Yahoo’s properties.
I’ve gone ahead and deleted the image “The Romanian Way”
from your photostream.
We appreciate your understanding.

-Terrence
====

According to Reason Magazine, Dors argued that the photo was not a glorification of smoking but a documentation of living condition in less prosperous countries. This somehow was motivation enough for Flickr to return the photo online. Then, apparently, another employee who was unfamiliar with the exception took it down again. Which was followed by someone else from Flickr returning the image again.

Even though I know better I sometimes get fooled into thinking that sites and services on the Internet are public “goods” services which we all can use and abuse on an equal and fair footing. Naturally this isn’t so. Flickr is, like all other online businesses, online for profit. They have no interest in protecting user rights – in fact if user rights conflict with profits they have a duty towards the shareholders to maximize profits and damn the users.

Naturally we as users have legally agreed to the rights of companies such as Flickr to behave in this way when we clicked on the “I Agree” button.

But, and this is a big but, the legal status of these agreements can be questioned.

I have commented the inequality, injustice and the ways in which we could argue against such agreements in my research but it can all be summed up in the with the idea that the agreements we sign cannot be binding if they are the product of a mix of encouraged misunderstanding and misdirection. By creating an environment of openness the companies should not be allowed to impose draconian user terms on their own customers.

However this is an argument from a human rights perspective and no matter how much we like them, most courts still prefer the security and predictability of contract law. So until the courts develop a sense of courage they tend to praise but not emulate the users of all technology are at risk through the licensing agreements they are forced to sign.

(via Politics, Theory & Photography)

Posted on by mklang