Notice that I didn’t reblog the image but instead linked back to the political cartoonist Daryl Cagle’s blog. I’m not making a statement here, I came close to reflagging the image with proper permission and attribution of course, but, I want Cagle to get the traffic, he’s the artist so best to just put in a link. It’s a great cartoon as you’ll see if you follow the link.

I saw this cartoon on the site Political Irony where the site’s author discusses his own reposting of the cartoon and goes on to discuss the difference between copyright infringement and stealing (they’re different).

My question is different and I posted it as a comment on Political Irony:

An interesting question is whether revenue generated by advertising at a site that has permission to reuse material ought to be shared with content providers, many of whom are traditional “analog” artists who may not know a referrer log from a lincoln log.

And, I think those of us who are consumers of reflagged content have an obligation to follow links when interested so that the content provider gets some traffic (and maybe a comment) too. Most of these folks draw these cartoons for their day jobs and while they may make money from newspaper syndication, as we all know, that medium of exchange is in trouble.

Jeremy Nicholl has written an amazing commentary on a fascinating and controversial series of events.

A quick backstory:

The photographer Jay Maisel took a picture of Miles Davis for the cover of the famous album Kind of Blue. Maisel owns the copyright to the image.

Many years later Andy Baio decided to use the image as the basis for the graphic design for the cover of a new album, Kind of Bloop. The new image is highly pixelated but the original image can be made out.

Maisel sued Baio for copyright infringement. Baio, who is well known on the web posted Kind of Screwed describing what happened to him and his feelings about fair use. Baio’s post is well worth reading just for his history of the fair use issue no matter how you feel about this particular incident.

Then things got ugly as people who had no idea who Jay Maisel was formed a lynch mob and went after him both on the internet and at his studio. The most vocal of these people was/is a guy named Thomas Hawk (a pseudonym for Andrew Peterson) who my friend Dale and I have been disgusted with since from the early days of flickr. Hawk/Peterson is a professional victim and ambulance chaser, wherever there’s controversy there’s Thomas Hawk, usually claiming victimhood for himself or someone else.

Now that you have a bit of backstory and the names of the major players, read Jeremy’s commentary and don’t forget the comment thread under it, some great posts there.

You may wonder how I feel about this and the truth is, I have mixed feelings about the gray area where copying collides with standing on another person’s shoulders and taking an idea further. The aspect of this that most infuriates me has nothing to do with copyright or fair use, it has to do with internet lynch mobs who can do serious damage to a person without having to take responsibility for it.

The downside of the social internet is that it gives people tools to spread an idea around the world in minutes with no vetting on the accuracy of the idea. As the idea is telephoned through Twitter, Facebook, blogs (like this one) and more it becomes decontextualized or re-contextualized and warped, usually leaving an over-simplified story that is ripe for the likes of Thomas Hawk and his tribe of ambulance chasers.

NPR’s Laura Sydell has a nice overview of Apple’s upcoming iCloud announcement. Worth listening to even if you know quite a bit about it already.

Stefanie Gordon took a picture of the Space Shuttle taking off from a commercial airliner. No doubt some of you have seen the image. She tweeted it to friends with Twitter when she landed and didn’t think much more about it.

By the time she was out of the airport she was getting congratulatory messages about the image from people she’d never met. The image went viral in a matter of minutes and has been viewed over a million times.

The linked to piece above discusses the legal technicalities of taking pictures, sharing them and having them lifted by third parties you don’t know who see them on the web. Fascinating stuff and well thought out. Bottom line:

The mere act of taking a photograph means the photographer holds the copyright for that picture. Sharing it on a social media site does nothing to limit or reduce that fundamental right.

[via Coudal Partners]

A Letter to Our Readers About Digital Subscriptions

I saw a tweet from The New York Times this morning and I followed it. It was a wonderful little op/ed by Andy Selsberg called “Teaching to the Text Message” on the value of concise writing, a more positive look at writing in the age of 140 character limits. I was going to add it to instapaper, re-tweet it, and maybe write a blog post about it (add my opinion to the mix) with a link back to it. I thought about the new subscription model noted above and thought:

1. My own personal NY Times counter will start clocking my visits and revisits

2. How many people who will follow a re-tweet of mine or follow a link on this blog will have a subscription to the Times, or, if they don’t, will pause as they consider whether they want to follow my link and add to their NY Times view count (up to 20 free, after that pay)?

The fact that I paused to rethink pointing people to New York Times content because of their subscription model reminds me of the fact that over the years I’ve been pointing people at their content, many folks can’t get to content because of login issues. Even I can’t get to their content at times because their site forgets who I am (I have an account with them).

I’ve had enough.

New York Times editor Bill Keller’s odd thoughts on aggregation were and are telling. The New York Times, at least its management, is living in some kid of bubble, maybe breathing a bit too much of their own exhaust. I think The New Yorker magazine is too. Neither has found a graceful way to make money from online content while in fact, they both have the potential to do so because they have great content loved by large numbers of readers all over the world.

The clumsiness of their struggles are telling and add to the idea that both institutions are elitist. I don’t think of them that way (content-wise) but the way they protect their content seems out of step with the rest of the online world.

I appreciate print publications’ struggle to figure out how to make money in a world where the expectation is that if it’s online its free, but The New York Times’ various experiments in making money leave me cold and I won’t bite. I’ll find other news sources before I get entwined in their confusing pay schemes.

When Salon invented “Salon Premium,” their subscription model, I bit on it as it was simple and it worked. When flickr offered “Pro” accounts I signed up for 5 years because it was simple and it was a great deal given what the service offered me.

In a world where people make real money selling 99 cent apps one would think that the geniuses over at The NY Times could come up with a subscription model that made them money and was reasonable for their online readership.

Right off the top of my head: $25 a year, single login for any number of devices. $50 family/household rate for up to 5 users under a single roof (like Apple’s Family Pack). If it gets gamed, don’t sweat it. Enough people will bite to make them serious money.

I’m not hopeful and in the end, the clumsiness of this paywall scheme will hurt The New York Times more than it helps them.

I love it. Matthew Ingram’s Gigaom piece was aggregated by the New York Times and the piece is about Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times looking down on aggregation as theft.

The piece is brilliant.

Here’s the piece that set Matthew Ingram off: All the Aggregation That’s Fit to Aggregate. I’m with Matthew Ingram, Keller comes off like an ass.

The Stolen Scream: A Story About Noam Galai from FStoppers on Vimeo.

About two years after publishing photos of myself screaming on the Flickr, I discovered that my face was ‘for sale’ in several stores around the world, as well as on the Web and spotted it in places like Spain, Iran, Mexico, England and many other places. When I realized that its not a one-time-thing and my face is being used in so many places i decided to start collecting images/videos of all my ‘appearances’.

This is not an unusual story (unfortunately) but the scale of it is amazing and sad. It would be interesting to know how he had the original image(s) posted on flickr: full copyright, CCC, etc. No matter what this should not happen.

Check out his Scream Everywhere blog where he catalogs sightings of his (stolen) image around the world.

[via Edward McKeown]

The Associated Press and the artist Shepard Fairey have settled their copyright battle over the unlicensed use by Mr. Fairey of an A.P. photograph of Barack Obama in the memorable 2008 “Hope” poster. The A.P. announced the settlement on Wednesday.

Background on this here.

Great headline. Fascinating story.

Linda Holmes at NPR has written the best overview I’ve read yet of this now viral story about copyright and ignorance. I particularly like that Linda makes reference to what I call virtual lynch mobs: people ganging up on others just because a bunch of people have tweeted that these people have done something wrong. I’m not defending Cook’s Source or the editor, they deserve to be routed for thinking it okay to lift copyrighted information and republish it, even with proper citation but without permission, but no doubt the comments on Facebook and elsewhere involved dismembering people for this nasty deed. Support the authors who were plagiarized, stop subscribing to and using Cook’s Source and put them out of business but let’s not waterboard the editor.

A private equity firm took over the debt Leibovitz owed the loan organization that fronted her $24 million in exchange for signing over the rights to all her past, current, and future work.

So, she’s still under the thumbs of money men but these money men are helping her market her work and no doubt have a piece of the action as well as the debt.

This is no doubt a common story in the art, music, and performance world, it’s just that the scale is bigger here.