How Long Until Pinterest Is Sued Into Oblivion Like Napster?

Pinterest, the hot new social sharing platform has a serious problem when it comes to the medium it’s designed to share. Despite careful wording on their about page that you agree not to post, upload, publish, submit, provide access to or transmit any content that infringes, misappropriates or violates a third party’s copyright… many (most) of the images on the site do just that. Several lawyers have weighed in on the controversy advising:

“…you should never pin an image on Pinterest for which you don’t own the copyright interest or for which you have not obtained a license from the copyright owner.”

— Jonathan Pink, a California-based intellectual property lawyer with Bryan Cave LLP via, WSJ.

Federal copyright laws give the author of any copyrighted work (which includes photographs and copyright attaches automatically as soon as the work is created) the sole and exclusive right to publish and reproduce such work.  So, basically, when you see a photograph that you love, you do not have any right to publish or reproduce that photograph unless you took the photo or got consent from the photographer to use the photo.

…in my humble opinion, the only “safe” conclusion here, for me, is to either get off of Pinterest or pin only your own work or work you have a license to use.

—  Kirsten Kowalski via, ddkportraits.com

If that’s not enough, Pinterest CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann has completely deleted his boards: http://pinterest.com/ben/ even though he was named #2 in a list of 21 must follow Pinterest users on mashable.com.

On the flip side we have a very exciting way to share photography that some photographers like:

Photographers need to look beyond their own nose when it comes to social media web sites and copyright concerns. I’ve written about a fair number of photography rights grabs here on my blog and there have certainly been cases where there have been egregious violations of copyright that photographers should have been concerned about. By and large Pinterest has not proven to me they fit in that category. In addition social media web sites and the Internet as a whole are great tools to be exploited by photographers. Don’t be afraid of having your work seen. If you look beyond your own nose you’ll see these new tools and sites can be creatively applied to enhance your business versus kill it. Being creative isn’t just about taking photos its about creatively enabling your work to be found.

—  Jim M. Goldstein via, Pinterest – Seeing beyond your own nose

I even have it on good authority that top creative directors are actively pinning and competing to have the most creative boards. My source tells me that it’s not impossible to imagine a future where your pin board is part of your resume.

So, I agree that there’s potential here to make a great service for sharing, driving traffic to, and bookmarking photographers. But they just haven’t figured out how to do it without running afoul of copyright laws.

Then there’s the separate matter of their heinous terms:

We may, in our sole discretion, permit Members to post, upload, publish, submit or transmit Member Content. By making available any Member Content through the Site, Application or Services, you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content only on, through or by means of the Site, Application or Services. Cold Brew Labs does not claim any ownership rights in any such Member Content and nothing in these Terms will be deemed to restrict any rights that you may have to use and exploit any such Member Content.

Facebook has similar terms:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

And so does Twitter:

By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).

My prediction is that before they get sued into oblivion they will figure out a reasonable way to get it to work. But for those who think whiny photographers or outdated copyright laws are to blame, I’ll leave you with one last set of quotes to chew on:

For the first 1,500 years of the last two millennia, man was generally poor. Though there were empires and kingdoms, the gross world product (GWP) was largely flat. For generations, people did not experience any major change in their living standards.

And then something changed: the Western world introduced stronger property rights, including intellectual property rights, which allowed people to pursue new ideas, firm in the knowledge that success could bring financial rewards.

Today, all of the contemporary advanced economies have strong property rights, and data shows a strong correlation between property rights, productivity, living standards and innovation.

via  Ndubuisi Ekekwe – Harvard Business Review.

 

 

The Daily Edit – Wednesday
3.14.11

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Cowboys & Indians

Art Director: Lauren Crispin
Production Director: Jonathan Fehr
Production Designer: Nancy Franzen

Photographer: Michael Friberg

Note: Content for The Daily Edit is found on the newsstands. Submissions are not accepted

PDN 30 2012

Congratulations to this years class of 30 photographers to watch:

Mustafah Abdulaziz
Jenn Ackerman
Kyle Alexander
Meiko Takechi Arquillos
Michele Borzoni
Dominic Bracco II
Peter DiCampo
Eliot Dudik
Sarah Elliott
Mark Fisher
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Misha Friedman
Andrea Gjestvang
Mark Hartman
Lauren Hermele
Ingalls Photography
JUCO
Sam Kaplan
Peter Ash Lee
Sebastián Liste
Mark Mahaney
Chloe Dewe Mathews
Ilvy Njiokiktjien
Ryan Pfluger
Markel Redondo
AnaStasia Rudenko
Daniel Shea
Jake Stangel
Christopher Testani
Yasu+Junko

You can see all their pictures here.

The Daily Edit – Tuesday
3.13.12

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Whole Living

Creative Director: Eric A. Pike
Design Director: Matthew Axe
Art Director: Jamie Prokell
Associate Art Directors: Alexandra Drozda, Erin Wengrovius
Senior Associate Photo Editor: Erika Pruess

Photographer: Richard Phibbs

Note: Content for The Daily Edit is found on the newsstands. Submissions are not accepted

Diving Dogs Photos Boost Photographers Career

The story of Seth Casteel and his diving dog photos is the perfect example of what happens when something goes viral and the person is prepared to take advantage of it. Seth was your typical on-the-move freelance photographer when he created the now famous underwater images of dogs diving in a pool after balls. As you’ll see in the story below by Wired on the Raw File blog, he was prepared to handle all the inquiries about him and his work, because he’d teamed up with the good people at Tandem Stills + Motion to handle licensing and PR. While it’s impossible to make something go viral or predict when it might happen it’s good to know professionals can turn all that attention into business.

On that fateful February 9th, the photos mysteriously landed on Reddit, Facebook, Google+ and then Warholian, becoming one of the hottest trends amongst viewers on at least five or six continents.

More than 1,000 people all over the world have subsequently asked him to shoot photos of their pets. He’s got a line of publishing houses fighting to get the rights to his forthcoming book of underwater dog photos, and he’s made appearance on, or in, most major American news publications from the The New York Times to Good Morning America.

He credits his licensing and PR firm, Tandem Stills + Motion, with successfully converting his new audience. Where many internet stars fade away after a few days of intense popularity, his firm capitalized on the traffic by handling most of Casteel’s business transactions and press requests.

“The business side is so important because you can have something go viral and be silly about it and you won’t make a dollar off it,” Casteel says. “Without [Tandem Stills + Motion] it would have been a fail.”

via Diving Dogs Are Good Catch for Photographer | Raw File | Wired.com.

The Daily Edit – Monday
3.12.12

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Popular Science

Creative Director: Sam Syed
Art Director: Tod Detwiler
Photo Editor: Thomas Payne

Photographer: Jack Thompson

Note: Content for The Daily Edit is found on the newsstands. Submissions are not accepted

This Week In Photography Books – Deborah Luster

by Jonathan Blaustein

It’s 4 something in the morning, and I ought to be asleep right now. Instead, I’m staring at a computer screen. (Insert pathetic attempt at humor here.) Why? I’m shaking the last vestiges of a nasty case of jet lag. Such a small, almost elegant term. What it really means is, you feel like your liver and stomach are doing battle for supremacy of your viscera. Your head hurts, it’s hard to complete a sentence, and you see a little man out of the corner of your eye who’s never actually there. (OK, I made that last part up.)

The human body was not designed for Inter-Continental air travel. Don’t bother arguing the point. It used to take someone like me a week to horse it down to Albuquerque, and now I can make it in a couple of hours. Technology has fundamentally changed the way our bodies interact with time, and mine still clings to GMT, for some odd reason.

So here I am, watching words miraculously appear in front of me, one at a time, as they march from my mind to you, our most excellent Global readership. Now that I have your attention, and have admitted that my half-mad ravings ought to be understood within a particular context, we might as well talk about a book, no?

As you’ll soon find out, I was in London last week, eating, drinking, and seeing lots of fantastic things. All to report back to you, in a series of upcoming features. Stay tuned. One thing I can say, straightaway, is that weight of history there is palpable, as is the awareness of all those people who’ve previously trod the ground on which you stand. As photographers, we’ve all visited old cities before, or battlefields, or former nuclear test sites. Places sanctified by blood. We accept that a spot of ground can radiate emotion well after some dark moment occurred in the past.

Deborah Luster researched and visited a series of such places for her new book, “Tooth For An Eye,” published in 2011 by Twin Palms. Except her collection of locales would otherwise have been anonymous, spots where people were murdered across the city of New Orleans. Such a grim concept, mashed together in such a beautiful volume. Like I said last week, I like to be surprised.

This book is over-sized yet slim, the front and back cover mirror images of luminous birds on wires, white on gray. Lovely. As to the grayscale theme, it continues inside. Each double-page spread contains a sheet of text on the left, and a circular, black and white photographic image on the right. The text, hand-written on a sort-of-bureaucratic-looking-form, details the victim, and the manner in which they were killed. The photos depict the location.

Would we care about the photographs without knowing the tragic back-story? I ask the question only to debunk it, because it really doesn’t matter. We do know what happened, and that’s the point. A great book has a story to tell, whether delivered by words, pictures, or both. But yes, the photographs are poignant enough that they’d hold attention regardless. As to the circular shape, well, I might always see the world through that prism if the last thing I saw was the barrel of a gun. (Yes, that’s a bit of a metaphorical stretch, but then again, it’s 4 something in the morning.)

I’m not big on rankings, but this might just be the best book I’ve reviewed yet. The photographs are powerful, the artist is staring down the macabre, and not blinking. As an object, you want to pick it up again and again, seduced by it’s desire to memorialize people who far to often fade away as if they were never here. And those birds on those wires, glowing on the cover, re-appear as the last photo in the book. Brian Christopher Smith, age 22, killed on July 14, 2009. He was found face up, and died of multiple gunshot wounds. That is all.

Bottom Line: Brilliant book, enough said

To purchase “Tooth For An Eye” visit Photo-Eye

Full Disclosure: Books are provided by Photo-Eye in exchange for links back for purchase.

Books are found in the bookstore and submissions are not accepted.

More is almost never better; more is usually just more

All my tricks and gimmicks were nothing more than window dressing, but that was the seductive allure, the madness in the method. It’s fun to dress windows, and easy to get lost in them, and I did for a while. And in the commercial photography world, the urge to use tricks and gimmicks never dies. Technique for technique’s sake is more prevalent than ever, thanks to retouching and the ease of digital capture. Using the same “dramatic” lighting setup for everything and dropping a set of  curves on a mediocre shot won’t make it into something good, it will just be a mediocre shot in fancy, desaturated, over-sharpened clothes.

via planet shapton.

The Daily Edit – Friday
3.9.12

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Discover

Creative Director: Michael F. Di Ioia
Deputy Art Director: Frank Maiocco
Photo Editor: Randi Slatken
Associate Photo Editor: Katie Hausenbauer

Photographer: Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters

Note: Content for The Daily Edit is found on the newsstands. Submissions are not accepted

Remembering Paula Lerner

Paula Lerner, photographer and photography advocate, died on Tuesday from breast cancer at the age of 52. Steve Skoll gathered these comments from those who knew her.

Steve: A collection of thoughts from friends and colleagues on the passing of Paula Lerner.

Manuello Paganelli writes: Folks I just learned the awful news that our friend, dear colleague, talented and award winning still/video photographer and former Editorial Photographer (EP), President passed away.

You all know that she was a strong advocate for photographer’s rights and was always there willing to show her wisdom and vision with the rest. She was also batting for photographers making sure magazines would pay decent day and space rates and less rights grabbing.

Today my heart just dropped out. RIP wonderful Paula…my heart goes to your husband and children.

Brian Smith, President of EP writes: I’m deeply shocked and saddened by the news of Paula Lerner’s death. As the founding Vice President of Editorial Photographers, Paula was instrumental to setting EP’s course. She was directly involved in negotiating the Business Week and Forbes contracts that raised the bar for fair deals for editorial photographers. Paula remained committed to educating and inspiring others and it is extremely sad to lose her just as she was producing the finest work of her career.

Our thoughts and prayers are with her family.

Ed Greenberg writes: It is with unspeakable sadness that we inform you of the untimely death of a great lady, Paula Lerner. Paula possessed the all too rare qualities of both bravery and courage well before the insidious cancer ever invaded her body.

While most of us are content with the safety of our daily lives, Paula was busy risking her life to bring home the intimate stories of the brave women in war torn Afghanistan. Dodging bombs and bullets on five journeys, Paula created the finest collection of photography ever created in or about Afghanistan. Paula won a richly deserved Emmy Award for her work as a photojournalist on “Behind the Veil” an in depth multi media feature which also captured an EPPY Award for Best Web Feature.

Those of us who create prose rather than images, know all to well that there is simply no “appropriate” space limitations when extolling the virtues of Paula whether referencing her work or her character. The fact that both her images and life story will become part of the curriculum at Harvard is testament to an extraordinary life that precious few of us will ever even approach in magnitude. Her images will continue to speak to us and that makes her great photographer. Her character, charity, kindness, curiosity, tenaciousness and bravery made her a great person. Her family, friends, colleagues and clients know that her kind won’t pass this way again.

Michael Grecco writes: Paula was fearless in the pursuit of the things she believed in, whether it was to fight for photographer’s rights, as the first Vice President of Editorial Photographers, or when traveling to the war zone to use her lens and multimedia skills to expose the plight of the women of Afghanistan. I was thrilled when she won an Emmy for her hard work. She was a dear friend and will be missed.

Andrew Buchanan writes: In working with Paula professionally for more than ten years, I knew I was working with someone with passion. Not coming from a photojournalism background myself, I was inspired by someone who found a cause she believed in, then used both her artistic and journalistic abilities to get the story and make a difference.

But in pursuing her passion, Paula never forgot her purpose — to inspire, to share, to lead by example. She was generous with her time, her knowledge, and her inspiration. Knowing her made me a better photographer, but more importantly she made me a better person.

Thank you for that Paula, you’ve left your mark on this world in ways you maybe never even knew. My best thoughts to your family at this very difficult time.

Link to piece on PDN: Photographer Paula Lerner, Leader of Photo Advocacy Group.

There are threads on APAGroups and Editorial Photographers paying tribute to Paula Lerner.

The Daily Edit – Thursday
3.8.12

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TeenVogue

Creative Director: Katia Kuethe
Associate Art Director: Sarah Waiser
Photo Director: Jennifer Pastore
Associate Photo Editor: Jacqurline Ladner

Photographer: Paola Kudacki

Note: Content for The Daily Edit is found on the newsstands. Submissions are not accepted

Still Images in Great Advertising – Achim Lippoth

Still Images In Great Advertising, is a column where Suzanne Sease discovers great advertising images and then speaks with the photographers about it.

I  always like when fashion images push the envelope and stand out above the others. Most of the time that means pushing the images sexually, so I guess that is why I thought of these as a refreshing way to push the envelope!

Suzanne: What a brilliant way to get the attention of the viewer. How much input did you have in the concept of these ads?

Achim: the rough idea comes mostly from the agency, the client wants my point of view as well as how to bring the ideas  to life with casting, location, setting, light, angels and so on.

Suzanne: How did you go about producing these ads. Did you have a chicken wrangler on set? How many chicken were actually photographed?

Achim: yes, actually we had a animal wrangler on set and we shot 15 chicken in many different positions and angels.

Suzanne: I see Achim has been used on some American campaigns but is based overseas. Does he come to the US to shoot? Like the Calvin Klein Jeans or American Eagle campaigns?

Susanne Bransch ( US Rep): Achim is booked for many ad-campaigns in the USA and frequently shoots for American Eagle, Target, Calvin Klein and Kenneth Cole. If you go on the Bransch website, you can get more info about this work.

Note: Content for Still Images In Great Advertising is found. Submissions are not accepted.

APE contributor Suzanne Sease currently works as a consultant for photographers and illustrators around the world. She has been involved in the photography and illustration industry since the mid 80s, after founding the art buying department at The Martin Agency then working for Kaplan-Thaler, Capital One, Best Buy and numerous smaller agencies and companies.

Does Your Personal Aesthetic Affect Hiring Decisions?

Absolutely. It is to learn to separate my personal taste from what the client needs and wants. I also believe in meeting photographers for a sheer fact that a good percentage of the experience is what kind of person photographer is. They can be brilliant but hard to work with which is very unfortunate.

— Ilona Siller of DraftFCB NY

via Heather Elder Represents Blog.

The Daily Edit – Wednesday
3.7.12

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Dwell

Creative Director: Alejandro Chavetta
Photo Director: Anna Goldwater Alexander
Assistant Photo Editor: Julia Sabot

Photographer: John Clark

Note: Content for The Daily Edit is found on the newsstands. Submissions are not accepted