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Who profits from works created by one person and disseminated into cyberspace? The increased accessibility of individual creativity in the digital world is not only a benefit to expanding the audience for that work, but increases the potential for its use by others. When this use is not a problem for the person who originally made it, there is no issue. Shareware is a prime example of payment for appreciation and a sense of debt to the maker. But what about those who take another's work, ignoring authorship, and use it as their own? Or worse, those who profit off another's sweat -- with or without acknowledgment?
Who Do Copyrights Serve?
For writers working in the public arena, unauthorized use has always been a risk, particularly since the advent of Xerox machines. Mass distribution of one's work opens the possibility of others finding and using it for their own purposes. A professional in this arena is prepared for this possibility, and takes steps to avert it. Ignorance of and contempt for the role of copyright in the careers of creative people is common (and for a period in the '80s was fashionable in the New York art world until Jeff Koons was taken down by the courts). Unauthorized use occurs even in the intellectual centres of our culture, when college professors photocopy readings from a book for students. This may be economical for the student, but not for the author. Also, in reducing the demand for the text, it reduces the likelihood that similar books would be published.
The dilemma of copyright is further raised by the growing presence of digital texts existing on the internet and elsewhere. Consider the following questions. Are these vast numbers of FAQ files (Frequently Asked Question Documents) public domain? What if an enterprising publisher were to compile them into an anthology? It would save people online time having to read them, and give them a handy, well organized means to access them. Would this business venture owe money to the people who originally wrote them and posted them in monkish diligence? Food for thought.
The New Wildcard: Digital Imagery
The latest evolution in the digital world is the ease of reproducing and disseminating precise reproductions of images. With a high-res scanner and machine of standard norms one can reproduce and disseminate large numbers of images with relative ease. There are currently Usenet groups and e-journals devoted to images and digital artworks For example, America On-Line allows for users to post GIF images of themselves, so when you meet that "significant other" in a romance forum you can check them out before you plunge too far; another example, a brothel in Arizona, disseminates files of their "employees" over the Internet to promote their phone-sex server. Admittedly, if you were to try to reproduce any of these images with any scale, you would end up with a soup of pixels. Hence, at this point the Internet is not a major player in the unauthorized mass dissemination of quality images.
However, large publications that have the finances and support for graphics and DTP-oriented machines, are capable of scanning and reproducing the hardcopy of an image. Further, they have the legal backing to write "big foot" letters (as McDonalds.com maven Josh Quittner calls them) to pacify or quash artists that might object to the theft of their work. Potential culprits include newspapers, due to their large photograph volumes, limited nationwide circulation and ability to efficiently use low quality images.
A strong example of this sort of piracy occurred in 1993 against FPG International, a stock photo agency in New York City. FPG brought a case to court against Newsday, a New York tabloid with the second largest circulation in the United States, who had scanned two images from an FPG catalog into a montaged image on the cover of a Sunday supplement in November 1993. Newsday never denied using the images without permission from FPG. Instead the news publication sought to rely on the "fair use" clause of copyright law, which allows for certain works to be reproduced without permission for certain uses -- a film still of a movie can be used in a review of the film, quotes from a book can be used in another book in order to draw support for its conclusions or plot. FPG was prepared to take this case to court to fight it out but instead both parties agreed to a substantial out-of-court settlement.
Newsday's infringement raises a number of prickly issues and exposes new holes in an already weak copyright system. Because they cannot get much in the way of punitory fees for infringement unless they register their works with the copyright office, an often costly and time consuming process, photographers are generally not well protected by current laws. Even if they do register copyright they must have a strong case just to recoup lawyer's fees.
One would think that it should be obvious when a photograph is used. You see your work on a printed page, helping to sell someone else's product, but you don't see a cheque in the mail. Newsday claimed that scanning an image published elsewhere and collaging it with other images from other sources effectively eliminated the copyright claim from the original sources and allowed them to claim copyright on their version. "The idea that millions of published photographs -- printed in copyrighted periodicals -- may be free for the picking by anyone using a scanner, is a terribly unsettling concept," explained FPG's President Barbara Roberts. Further, it jeopardizes the livelihood of photographers, graphic artists and designers, illustrators, and other artists, who do not have the resources to follow up on cases of infringement. The copyright law, as it is presently constructed, gives big business with legal support staff an additional advantage.
A World Without Copyright?
As it stands, there is minimal support for artists from the copyright statutes. Yes, the creators who have registered the work have ownership control in principle. In practice, it's another story. As the publishing industry continues to conglomerate in response to declining readership, larger and larger firms with greater infrastructures are born. What power could an individual artist have when up against the legal staff of the Times-Mirror? Further, what is to dissuade such companies from acting unethically in this regard? A settlement of even $20,000 (as in the FPG case), although substantive and precedent setting, is not a large sum of money to a national publishing firm -- not to mention to advertising agencies -- whose biggest fear is bad press which could affect readership and ad revenues.
Ed Bridges, a Brooklynite who works at FPG as an archivist, is also a photographer and small time publisher.