I was reading some articles about a lawsuit between a photographer and a stock agency over lost negatives \ slides and it brought home the changes in the industry and what we now take for granted (link here). During the period in question (not a million years ago) a photographer would shoot the film and courier it to the magazine \ paper who would soup the film, use the picture and forward on the processed material to an agency who would then sell on the photographers work. They would be responsible for the archiving.

It is technically possible to duplicate negatives and slides, it is also possible to maintain a digital backup, but this is out of the photographers hands.  They shot the film and had to rush it to the publication to meet a deadline, they don’t have time to do anything other than hand it to a courier or drop it in directly at the publication. This is where their involvement ends.  It appears that due to poor record keeping many negatives \ slides were lost.

It must be truly gut wrenching to have lost a lifetimes work. Most people know the sick feeling when a computer dies and you know that whilst you have lots of the information backed up elsewhere you don’t have all of it, imagine that 1000 times worse and its probably close. This was the photographers pension, it was an archive of their lives work that would continue to provide revenue. 

Comparing this to my personal workflow which sees images backed up across multiple locations and on hard drive and dvd (two sets of dvd’s) I am forced to concede that I have life very easy! It would take the kind of event that would render the need for the archive null. It would require three separate data centres to be destroys and two housefires after which I don’t think I would be focusing on my images!

Several things did strike me as odd about the trials. Firstly the value attributed to the images. Whilst I believe the photographers over estimated the value of their collections I feel the judge under valued them. They judge also seemed the avoid any punitive damages (I’m not a lawyer, they probably weren’t entitled to punitive damages) but the result is that the financial impact is less than the expense account of a board member. The only way to make a big company sit up and change its ways it to hit it where it hurts. Make a CEO stand up at the AGM and have to admit that bad practice cost them their profit margin and by the way, there’s no dividend this year. That would encourage a top down enforcement of standards. $7 an image isn’t much considering the going rate but this was based around the likelihood that not all images would resell.

The second and most important (for me) realisation is how insane  the legal system can be.  There are times when it truly excels, and there are times when it gets it so diabolically wrong! After reading a comment by the archivist of one of the photographers ( linkies) it is apparent that the world has gone bonkers. Apparently when she was transcribing the details of the envelopes which contained the film she made a few typos on the excel sheet. This allowed ‘the opposition’ to have them omitted. To me this is simply madness. I agree as much as the next person that due process needs to be followed, but a deviancy from due process (obtaining a warrant, filling out of a form correctly) shouldn’t negate the original offense. It should be dealt with separately and in a manner which reflects the magnitude of the breach. In this case it was a simple typo which was probably made due to a lack of resources.  The court should not and cannot expect that an individual of normal means can prepare a case as perfectly as a huge corporation with an army of lawyers.  That’s entirely different from the police making an arrest after not following due process and violating a persons rights, although if they are guilty they should be guilty irrespective of how they are found and the officers should be punished not the rest of us that are put at risk of a repeat offending.

I should state that it appears that Corbis weren’t directly at fault, it seems to be an agency they acquired had bad practices in the past.  I also think the amounts the photographers wanted were very high, but then again you have to ask high to give yourself room to move. My heart goes out to the photographers and in general for the loss of all those great images. We look now at images from NASA of the moon landings etc, they are an integral part of our history. Over the past 100+ years we have had the ability to document our lives for the future in an unprecedented manner. Photography and Video has meant that future historians will have a rich record of our lives, and every loss like this especially of many of the important events they covered, is a loss that will be felt for a long time.

Briefly before I sign off, where to backup? I have them stored on

• an internal hard drive array with redundancy
• an external hard drive (they are slow, not recommended for working directly off)
• a personal online archive
• a backup of this archive at www.bqbackup.com
• many pictures at also shown on my website which is in turn backed up
• 2 dvd archives.

Worth all the trouble? I hope I never have to find out. At some point I intend to hire a storage unit and archive to hard drive there. Whilst DVD’s boast long life spans I am not sure I trust them entirely. I think  I will invest in a decent DAS unit for home and store on usb hard drives AND dvd in a storage unit perhaps?

 There was a piece of ‘journalism’ recently on the New York Times website which has stirred up some emotion. You can find the original ‘article’ here http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/flickr-as-an-interior-decorator-tool/, and the follow up here http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/are-flickr-photos-fair-game-for-home-printing/.

The first article basically states that if you want some free pictures to decorate your walls just download them from flickr and print them on your home printer. Sonia goes on to state that in her opinion this is ‘fair use’ so not subject to copyright. The article has been widely linked from photo forums. There is some support for her viewpoint although notably it seems to be from non photogs. Personally I find it extremely rude and arrogant to simply assume you are entitled to take someone elses work because you want to and that because you aren’t making any money from it, it will be ok. It is fair to say that if you put your work online you have to expect that some of it will be misappropriated. That doesn’t mean that it is ok for that to happen or that when made aware you shouldn’t take the person to task.

I was somewhat surprised an esteemed publication such as the NYT would publish such a controversial article, at absolute best it is a gray area.

Now when I put a picture online to showcase my work I make my best effort to ensure it will be faithfully displayed on peoples screens, however I have no control over your browser or monitor so a picture may look poor when in reality it is not. However there is a fair chance it will be close. Prints can vary massively in quality and a budget home printer will not produce the same results as a pro lab. This misrepresents my work.

Some of the people who have commented have made far better arguments that I, if anything I just feel it is incredibly bad form \ rude to take without even asking. As one poster put it, it shows a lack of respect for other peoples work.

From now on I will be watermarking pictures. Its sad to have to do it but I guess I was naive in thinking people wouldn’t be so disrespectful. In general people are very respectful and will at least ask permission and it is virtually always granted, but some people are beyond belief!