|
Still wondering if registering your copyright is worth the effort?
There's no telling how much Kelly Fajack could have received if he'd registered his photo of schoolchildren in Burundi working at their desks in 2002. It was a tricky capture, on Kodak Ektachrome E100S film with his Contax G2, backlit with dark faces. And it was beautifully composed -- which is why it ended up on the 10,000 franc note (about $10) in Burundi's paper currency. An American diplomat tipped him off.
Last spring Fajack settled with the British printing behemoth De la Rue, which makes currency for about half the world's nations, for a sum he can't divulge. But it wasn't anything near the $150,000 he could have asked for in court, had he registered his copyright. "The vast majority thinks everything is free for the taking on the internet," says Fajack, who has found eight other websites using his pictures without permission.
His reaction to having one of his shots immortalized on paper money is mixed. "I'm happy to have my own little piece of African history. I settled and I'm okay with it," he says. "But theft is so common on the web now, and photographers are getting the short end of the straw."
Free Photos?
What's between royalty-free and all rights reserved? Creative Commons.
A brainchild of Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, it's grown from a bright idea -- how can I share my copyrighted picture/software/book for free? -- to a global cultural movement.
Creative Commons (creativecommons.org) was inspired in part by the music industry's aggressive attacks on free music downloading and swapping. And there are libertarian technophiles who think computer operating software should be free. Lessig came up with the idea of this middle ground where creators could use each other's work without the choking cloud of commercialism.
Under Creative Commons, licenses (there are several types) reserve limited rights, such as requiring only that you be credited for the work or that the copyright expire 14 years after you do (compared with 70 years in current law). You can even assign your work to the public domain for anybody to use without attribution, in whole or in part.
Think about it. You're not a pro -- you just love taking photographs. Maybe you'd like to discover one on some fancy travel website, or flashing on a billboard, or even on the back of some landlocked country's $2 bill?
Pros hate the idea because a larger pool of royalty-free pictures cuts into their bottom line.
But if you think the world will be better off by emancipating your photographic offspring, it's your own bottom line that matters.
|
