Ever since I wrote the piece “orphan work is good for you”, I have been slammed with emails which all pretty much revolved around the same issue : Orphan work bill is a open door for Copyright Infringement and the legalization of free usage. First and foremost, I keep onContinue Reading

A new company emerged from unknown depth a few days ago, proposing free “automated” tagging, or keywording. Named Tagcow, the company does not explain how the tagging is done. Curious, I decided to give it a spin with a couple of images including this image: After two days, the imageContinue Reading

We have to take responsibility for our actions and our businesses. Once again, shields are raised and emotions are running high. The Orphan work bill has been resurrected. In a nutshell, if passed, the Orphan Work bill would allow anyone to use a photograph, for free, after proving that aContinue Reading

We are all getting fat. let’s face it, we are gaining weight and it doesn’t seem like it is going to change. When we were dealing with slides and prints, we needed to physically move. We needed to get up and get the images in drawers, got to a lightboxe,Continue Reading

Not all is bad in the web 2.0 world. Take this new initiative by giant hosting site Flickr. It has posted a part of the huge Library of Congress collection to get some help in key wording for future generation to enjoy. It even has created a new copyright/license forContinue Reading

As much as I could understand the music industry for trying to stop the free for all downloads initiated by the old Napster , as much as I can’t agree with the Recording Industry Association of America latest move: According to the Washington Post of December 30, 2007 : ‘InContinue Reading

A rather big parallel universe to the photo industry is the copyright industry. According to the Copyright Alliance, “The U.S. core copyright industries accounted for an estimated $819.06 billion or 6.56% of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2005.” That, of course, includes music, graphic, video on top ofContinue Reading

There are many things we seem to forget while we all go about our daily business of licensing images. Some are good, some are bad, some are in between. In order to clear up the horizon, I made a little list. The Good ( or positive) : – Microstock :Continue Reading

~ A great idea is emerging from Europe and hopefully will cross the transatlantic pond. Instead of fighting the “orphan work” legislation, why don’t we try to work with it. One has to admit that it can be extremely hard to find the owner of an art work. Bad orContinue Reading

There has been numerous articles about  orphan work  and the legislation that might be passed. One of the key issue here, is that images posted on websites have absolutely no metadata, making it impossible for even a legitimate buyer to track down the creator of the image. IPTC has beenContinue Reading