The intersection of the online/sharing culture, copyright, and photography

Seth Anderson at B12 Solipsism has an excellent series of posts (here, here, and here) about the intersection of the new online/sharing culture, copyright, and photography.

The first post is about the issue of copyright and fair use--many people fail to understand that "fair use" means you have already violated copyright, but you have a valid legal excuse. In photography, Seth points out that the ability to take an excerpt is potentially not possible, leaving every use of a photograph without permission a copyright violation.

The second post is a dust-up by a writer for the New York Times, who argued it was okay to print out a copy of any Flickr photograph and put it up in your private residence. This did not go over well with people who create--i.e., the photographers. While it may be ok for certain Creative Commons and Public Domain photographs, it is a violation of copyright to do that to a owned photograph. The legal question is, as I mentioned above, is this use considered Fair? You would be surprised at the muddled mess in the case law. A professor for instance lost a copyright case because he made personal copies of many science papers and kept them in his office. The turning distinction on that case was the amount of papers he made copies of that drove the copyright violation from "fair use" to a civil violation. Is one printed photo fair use? What if you decorate your whole apartment with them? What size can your print fairly? What about your friends' apartments?

The issues are completely muddy and complex--as a photographer, for instance, I feel I should be compensated for my work. Websites like say Chicagoist or Treehugger use flickr CC shared images to illustrate their stories. In the traditional media, the photographer would be compensated for their work, either by being employed or by a fee. This is not being done at all for most of the non-traditional sites on the internet. It is also a truth that these sites probably couldn't afford the going rate for photographs. Getting your image out for people to see for a photographer is a very important thing, but is it driving the image creation business out of a profession and into the hands of casual photographers? (The latin term amateur is perfect for here but misused--these photographers love what they do and are often just as good as a pro, but the amateurs are not paid).

You would be surprised what it costs to get the rights to every photograph in a magazine. Years ago I was paid once for an image covering less than 1/4 of a page in a small publication more than it costs for ten years of Flickr Pro. More recently, if someone can't get the image use for free, they move on to find another CC licensed image. At what point do I give away my images? For specific charity non-profits? For non-profits? The National Geographic Society is a non-profit, should they get images for free? For school textbooks? For medical school textbooks? There are no good answers, except I am sure there will be fewer pro photographers out there in the future.

There is also the new culture driven out of the Free Software/File Sharing culture where the belief is all content is free and the driving force behind creation of works is not the desire to make money; if you make money you have to find a way to do it selling something tangible, whether it be technical support, concerts, or physical items. This belief is moving beyond the software paradigm, is being fought in the music and movie industries (and being lost completely by the industries), and now is moving into books, photography, and other creative markets. Google was asking illustrators to create for free custom themes for the search engine. Google, a company with a 134 Billion market capitalization, was asking artists to work for free.

I benefit from many of these changes. I listen to music online (and I also still buy CDs, old fashioned me). I work in a field that utilizes free software every day. It is conflicting internally to know that somewhere an artisan may end their craft because they cannot afford to continue, because I chose the free option. I also know there are things I cannot do unless the cost is cheap enough for me to afford. For me, much work remains to allow the creative domains and artists the ability to ply their crafts in the future. I do not know how to get there from here.

Ask a volcanologist about funding

Were you wondering about the Republican response to the State of the Union speech where Gov. Jindal derided the '$140 million for something called "volcano monitoring."'? Me too. I did a double-take, and I assume most others with geoscience backgrounds did too. Regardless of your political leanings, I would assume people would want to know if a volcano erupted (say while you were in a jet plane heading to Japan) or what the risk was if there were an eruption (if you lived in a possible lahar zone, like parts of Tacoma, for instance).

Take a gander at an interview with Rick Wunderman at DCist.

The law applies to everyone

And when we fail to prosecute crimes by "special people", everyone loses. Elected officials deserve the highest scrutiny. Those entrusted with enforcing the law must, must, be held to the same standards they judge others.

Special license plates shield officials from traffic tickets

The Push for Imported Drugs

There was a bit of a dust-up in the prescription drug industry a few years ago: because of the high cost of many drugs in the United States, many seniors and others with high pharmacy costs were physically purchasing the same drugs in Canada or Mexico and taking them home with them. Then the obvious follow-up was: Why not just have the pharmacy mail them to you? And the answer was it was illegal under current US law. Then the drug industry in a major campaign said imported drugs wouldn't be safe because they weren't under FDA supervision, despite the fact that many of the drugs in the US were actually made in these same factories and imported by the drug makers. And various attempts to legalize importation from certain countries were tabled.

The FDA said in 2002

Drugs sold in the United States also must have proper labeling that conforms with the FDA's requirements, and must be made in accordance with good manufacturing practices.

As part of the FDA's high standards, drugs can only be manufactured at plants registered with the agency, whether those facilities are domestic or foreign. If a foreign firm is listed as a manufacturer or supplier of a drug's ingredient on a new drug application, the FDA generally travels to that site to inspect it.

After the FDA approves a drug, manufacturers still are subject to FDA inspections and must continue to comply with good manufacturing practices. "With an unapproved drug, you can't be sure that it has been shipped, handled, and stored under conditions that meet U.S. requirements," McCallion says.

Now, we learn that heparin manufactured by Baxter is actually created with pigs from China with incredibly questionable processes--buying random pig's intestines from unknown city farms. Over a dozen deaths, and potentially 400 serious reactions have been linked to the failure of the FDA and the drug industry to maintain quality control.

Is this the quality we were supposed to get from a forced domestic drug industry? Is this what happens with a neutered federal watchdog administration?


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/world/asia/28drug.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/us/16baxter.html?st=cse&sq=heparin&scp=5

National Energy Policy

Sam, Colin and I were talking about biodiesel last night as walk-home talk fodder. It's a great thing--a no-modification substitute for fossil fuel diesel. Every gallon of biodiesel does nothing for carbon or pollution emissions or energy use, but reduces our dependance on Middle-East oil by a gallon. Naysayers complain about its sluggishness in cold weather, but this is standard behavior for #2 diesel, and complaints from Minnesota about it are related to poor-quality vendor biodiesel. Get companies that care about (or are forced to) producing a quality product and the clogs will stop.

The New York Times is reporting that President Bush will be talking about national energy policy in tonight's State of the Union. As usual, instead of dealing with proven strategies for increasing efficiency, he will argue for more pie-in-the-sky ideas that are far off. Far off enough to dump large subsidies into corporations for research of bad ideas, like the hydrogen car. Remember the hydrogen car? Instead of increasing today's automobiles' gas mileage by a few MPG by raising the CAFE requirements and getting the huge exemption of SUVs into the fold, he dropped them and asked for research into a non-proven, non-existent technology. Drop the idea of fuel-cells for cars. Stick them in houses, where they would actually work great.

It's a standard technique--drop funding for some project that could work but isn't on their party's agenda (cough hybrids cough). Claim that you have to use that money to research for something in the future like the hydrogen car. Watch as corporations use that R&D money to do nothing important. Quietly drop funding a few years later, claiming hydrogen cars weren't feasible. Congratulations! You've killed funding for the thing the other party wanted, without people noticing. Sound familiar, NASA? Drop science funding for "Manned space exploration of the Moon". Quietly kill that in a few years. Science funding never comes back.


The government should do three things for the energy security of the United States.
1. Spend on Research and Development, and avoid throwing money at corporate welfare. Science is very important for the long-term future, and its funding should never be in jeopardy.
2. There is nothing inherently wrong in nuclear power--it's cleaner than coal (yes, a point for another post). We need new energy sources as use naturally increases with time, and it's the most efficient way.
3. Reprocess nuclear fuel and recover the huge amounts of wasted U-235 and Plutonium that are just left to rot. Reprocessing would drop the need to immediately build Yucca Mountains every twenty years.
4. Encourage inexpensive solar energy development. Why haven't we powered Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, or Phoenix via solar power yet? Just using simple solar water heaters is a cheap and great start. My family heated our water for years with solar--why can't everyone in the southwest do this?
5. Biodiesel is a great option to immediately encourage--a direct replacement for diesel, especially in warm climates. Subtracting the national cost of supporting Middle-East oil, it becomes cheaper than you think.
6. Increase the efficiency of cars, and continue tax credits for all hybrids, including popular ones, but don't let the manufacturers trade efficiency for power.

Posner's failed analysis of domestic spying

Posner writes a defense against the illegal searches of domestic communications:
Posner wrote:

The collection, mainly through electronic means, of vast amounts of personal data is said to invade privacy. But machine collection and processing of data cannot, as such, invade privacy. Because of their volume, the data are first sifted by computers, which search for names, addresses, phone numbers, etc., that may have intelligence value. This initial sifting, far from invading privacy (a computer is not a sentient being), keeps most private data from being read by any intelligence officer.

You can't open up my mail (or e-mail) and look for names, addresses, and phone numbers without violating my privacy. The courts have held that e-mail headers are like pen information on phone calls, but the contents of the message are private. Get that? It doesn't matter what or who in the government opens my private communication, they've opened it and it's a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment.

You've got to have a warrant, mister, with a good reason, signed by a judge (hopefully not Posner), describing exactly what you are looking for and why you think you have sufficient cause. You can't open up everyone's communications fishing for crimes.

P.S. Richard Posner later writes during a chat:

I don't think most people would mind the government's scrutinizing their conversations for information of potential intelligence value if they trusted the government not to misuse the information.

Uhh... yeah, we mind. This fellow probably shouldn't be a judge based on his poor reading of the Constitution. It's not what "most people" would mind, it's whether these things violate the Constitution. And they do.