Two After the Storm. Mentioned on this episode, Gavin caught this image using his E-PL1 with a 20mm 1.7 lens. The detail and quality would be easily adaptable for a 30-40 inch canvas. Processing was done using LR and the Pickles Preset from Color Fantasies.
Today’s Host... Gavin Seim. This week Gavin look at news, the new rangefinder, Photo CS5, stolen images, education and studying, focus ideas and more.
Do you have pictures on Facebook? It looks like the FB lawyers are using that nice little trick of hiding the cunning goodies in the legal confusion and hoping people won’t notice.
Now we enjoy Facebook as well as the next guy, but this is a bit nuts. Thanks to Everett shooting it our way.
The Facebook terms of use state that any image you post is essentially theirs for the taking. As long as it remains on their site they say they can do pretty much whatever they want with it. Here’s the quote from their terms of use.
On the suggestions side. I myself always post low res images. Not only on FB, but on Flickr, my site etc. I usually logo them, and keep em in the 600-800px range. It’s true that at that size somebody could still steal them for their site, but what they’d get would not really be print quality. That however is no excuse for FB.
“By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content”
Looks like it’s time for the FB lawyers to call back to earth, and for a lot of users to voice their complaints. Especially those of us that are photographers. I seem to recall Adobe doing something like this recently (wink). They backed down after a bit of outrage. For the record let me say that YOU Facebook have NO RIGHTS to use my photos. I’ve just revoked them.
The Orphan Works Act of 2008 will take away the automatic protection that artists now have. Currently in the US if you take a picture, or make a piece of art you automatically own the copyright, and before someone uses of for their own purpose they have to obtain/purchase rights from you.
In essence the new law makes so that to retain copyright, you have to have it registered in a database (yep every image), and if it’s not found in the database the the person who wants to use it, then that work may be freely copied. They will do this by developing huge private certified software databases.
Soooo… every image you have ever created must be registered for you to retain copyright! That’s billions of photographs. Since that will never happen and all those photographers will instantly loose copyright protection.
If this passes, the government becomes steward of copyright, you essentially loose copyright to every image you have ever created, and all past, current and future work comes under the control of government. All it does is make stealing copyright really really easy.
Take Action… You can go to this site for specific details on the bill. You can also email your senators automatically right from the page as well.
Do I have your attention? I hope so!