Thanks
Sandra Dalene VanAlstine

I have written a book and am interested in obtaining a copyright authorization for the photo of two Charleston dancers on the cover of Life magazine’s February 18th, 1926, issue. I would appreciate your advising me as to a contact for obtaining this permission.

Sincerely, C. C. Bradbury

I don’t know and am no expert, but the photographers
were probably hired under standard “work for hire” contract and since Life Magazine no longer exists (does any subsidiary who might have renewed the rights?), the pictures are out of copyright. Would love to see an actual Life Mag contract with photographers.

I try to license my pictures instead of selling services outright under a “work for hire” situation. Sometimes that works, sometimes not. I wonder how other photographers in this blog work…

Benqq

Google is a fairly young company that was founded just a year before Napster kicked off the Internet copyright-infringement revolution. They recruit massively at high-end technical schools like MIT, Stanford, and Caltech; their strategy is to get thousands of the most brilliant computer-science students right out of college or grad school.

This means that by and large the people that run Google grew up in a world where content was something they downloaded from Napster and BitTorrent and Kazaa; by and large, content was something that Other People did for a living. If they came to Google with content-creation experience, it was probably a hobby.

The meat-and-potatoes — the stuff they really cared about — was the engineering, the code, the technology that delivered the content. Even then, many of them grew up surrounded by the Free Software / Open Source ethos of sharing the intellectual property they create (the software code) with the world so that others could adapt and improve upon it.

Therefore, many of Google’s engineers likely consider the entire idea of copyright to be an obstacle in their paths. While they understand that they must follow the advice of Google’s legal department on copyright, many likely believe that “information wants to be free” with an intensity of faith heretofore seen only among religious fundamentalists.

While many participate in sites like Flickr, comparatively few probably understand what it means to be a professional artist who depends on intellectual property for income. If they think they do, it’s probably because they or someone they know uploads to iStockphoto or does graphic design work on the side.

On the other hand, Google as a company is deeply committed to delivering the best possible experience to the end user: the searcher. They want you to find the most useful possible result as quickly as possible. That means delivering easy-to-download images from the Life archive that are high enough resolution that people find them useful — regardless what that use may be.

And like it or not, these people are in charge of the world’s information and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

Fortunately, they’re starting to learn that intellectual property is something they have to live with. The AP’s photos and content are now hosted on Google’s servers as part of a (presumably revenue-sharing) agreement with Google. Some time ago, the Google-owned YouTube introduced a system whereby copyright holders had three options for dealing with infringing videos: leave it up, take it down, or monetize it through ads. And the recent Google Book Search $115 million settlement gave Google the ability to more or less fulfill their mission of organizing the information in books while giving the content owners a new and hopefully profitable revenue stream from people who wouldn’t otherwise know about those books.

I think this trend will continue — even if it happens by Google being dragged kicking and screaming along by the courts. They may not know it and certainly publicly deny it, but their continued existence depends on this happening. Remember how I said that the people behind Google are often incredibly focused on the engineering and technology and often ignore the value of the content their technology operates on? Well, the explosion of the web — the vast body of information that makes Google’s success at search a commercially valuable product — may be driven by technology enabling increasing access to information, but it can’t exist without information. The key fact that Google, the blogosphere, the user-generated content champions, the Creative Commons advocates, and all the rest of the Web 2.0 wonks like to forget is that professional content is key. If it’s not profitable to produce content, then there is precious little to search through, link to, remix, mashup, or comment on.

I recently attended a presentation at the MIT Media Lab from a researcher who had mapped the links between blogs and other user-generated-content sites. The data he showed us demonstrated unequivocally that professional journalism (the New York Times, in particular) represented an 800lb-gorilla of original material that the bloggers linked to far more often than user-generated-content. How does that matter for us? Without that professional content, the articles that feed the great blogging machine, the videos that people re-edit for humor value on YouTube, and the beautiful campaign photos that people post to blogs all will vanish. The fact that blogs link to the pros around an order of magnitude more than they link to other blogs shows their unwillingness to accept a less-professional substitute. (Even in the do-it-yourself community of Strobist photographers, the longest-lasting thread in the Strobist Flickr group is about achieving a ‘look’ that first came from pro shooter Dave Hill!) If Vincent Laforet’s predictions of a perfect storm for the editorial world come to pass, the amateurs will be hard-pressed to fill the vacuum. And nature abhors a vacuum.

There is simply too much demand for professional content for someone to not monetize it in the new economy. We’re already seeing the beginning of the inevitable with the wild success of the iTunes Music Store. I expect we’ll see more of it with Hulu, with the YouTube ad-revenue sharing scheme, and with Google Book Search. The question then is not _if_ Google will start realizing that content has value; they’ve already started down that path. The question is how long until they realize that they can make more money by making things profitable for content creators than they can by trampling those creators’ rights.

As a publicly-held company, Google is required to act in the best interest of their shareholders — nothing more, and nothing less. This has kept them respecting copyright when forced to do so by the law, and it will push them to support content creators when forced to do so by the economy. But as an organization made up of people who have very different views on how intellectual property should work, they won’t do it in the traditional ways. They’ll never become a rights-managed stock house licensing photos for $400 apiece any more than they would take a hard-line approach to YouTube copyright infringement. That’s fundamentally incompatible with a market where most of the people using the content think of things in terms of $19 a month for their Internet connection and buying $10 extra in books to save $5 on shipping from Amazon.com — and for whom ownership is defined by physical and not legal constraints. Those new users are the ones that came to iStock and thought it was perfectly reasonable to sell their photos for $1 a shot in the beginning, and they’re the ones that figure it’s okay to “borrow” images on a blog because those hefty licensing fees can’t possibly apply to them. Compared to traditional licensees, the new user base is an alien species that traditional content creators can’t really be expected to understand. If these new users are the ever-closer future of the editorial industry, no wonder things are going to hell in a handbasket…

Just as the Internet came out of far left field from the perspective of traditional media, so too will the solutions for making money off media in the age of the Internet. And I’d say Google is in a good a position as anyone to come up with some good ones. It’s not like they have a choice.

(this ended up getting so long that I posted it here: http://analysis.ericschmiedl.com/2008/11/why-google-and-the-internet-will-embrace-creators-rights/
I created analysis.ericschmiedl.com a while ago as a future home for thoughts on where the industry is going, and I’ll be updating it both with some older essays and newer ideas as they come.)

When I manually copy and paste “Henri Cartier-Bresson” in the search field I get some results, but I don’t know if what is displayed are the only HCB images in the archive, even if I suspect there are more. There are content tags but the photographers don’t seem to ever show up in those tags. Related, it seems like Bert Stern is not in there at all.

Anyone want to open a tea shop with me?

a) Photographer and Credit is illustrated with each image in readable font, such as Joe Smith © Time Inc., Courtesy of LIFE.com

b) The blog or personal site contains no ads or commerce of any find”

Excuse me, but there are images in this archive going back into the 1700’s. Are we suppose to sit here and believe that EVERY IMAGE is copyrighted by Life? Lifetime of the photographer plus 75 years protection last I checked, which means those early photos are available for commercial use or whatever other use a person may have for them, despite Life’s little caveat emptor. It’s misinformation like this that makes actual copyright law loathed by the consuming public.

“We are fine will personal non-commercial uses of our images, as long as:

a) Photographer and Credit is illustrated with each image in readable font, such as Joe Smith © Time Inc., Courtesy of LIFE.com

b) The blog or personal site contains no ads or commerce of any find

Jeff Burak
Director, Business Development – LIFE
.COM | Branded Products | Picture Collection | Picture Syndication
212-522-2114 (o)
917-374-7715 (m)
AIM: JeffLBurak”

Sounds so altruistic. Perhaps “our mission is to organize all the world’s information so we can exploit it for our own profit by selling ads and turning pages” would be closer to the mark.

There’s also no contact information of any kind, making it impossible to obtain further information about rights.

Not is there any means of offering corrections. The very first photo I saw is completely mislabled.

http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=2e8d8e600e2b420e

Yer Model T didn’t appear until the end of 1908; what they got there is a Cadillac Model K. Feh, and double feh.

Interestingly the archive links only go to the 1970s. Admittedly this covers the Golden Era of the magazine. Maybe they are still busy scanning!

Alternately, maybe by the 80s photographers became a bit wiser regarding contract details. Try searching for work by Joe McNally (on staff for Life in the 90s) and you will not get anything except a few Time covers…

I did find these gems from the 90s by Eisie of Bill Clinton & family…
http://tbn0.google.com/hosted/images/c?q=a86352f4036fa2f5_landing

http://images.google.com/hosted/life/f?q=bill+clinton+source:life&imgurl=9d9f7993b7e61fb1

Thanks for sharing this Rob.

If they shot as work-for-hire, then Life owns the copyright, pure and simple. Even if they didn’t work for hire, they may have signed licensing agreements that gave Life the legal right to do just this.

One more reason to look closely at the contracts you sign when accepting assignments.

Spanish Village:
http://images.google.com/images?q=Spanish+Village&q=source%3Alife

Country Doctor:

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=Country+Doctor+source%3Alife&btnG=Search+Images

It is fun to see the extended shoot as well as the finished layout.

Is there any reason this is not breaking federal copyright law?

Is there any reason anyone should ever believe Google are interested in anything but themselves?

Mike