Copyright
Copyright is not as complicated as colour management (see below). Basically, it means that it’s not right to copy anything that has copyright. It’s wrong. We know this from watching rented films, where at the beginning there is a big message in red (sometimes blue or green) warning that the FBI will come and get you if you copy the movie. Scary. (Are you doing something illegal if you fast-forward through that message without reading it?)
We’re Canadian (notice the spelling of colour) so actually it’s the RCMP that’s monitoring your clipboard as you work the copy/paste commands in your edit menu. It would be cute to insert here a little picture of a lance-bearing red-coat on a horse, but that iconic image is itself copyrighted. As is everything on this weblog; the photographs AND the words.
The reason why everything on this weblog is copyrighted is because all of us make our living from photography and in many cases, writing about it. But unlike looking at our images and reading about them in books and magazines, which you have to buy, your access to this weblog is free. So is the access of anyone to whom you may forward the links to these pages. In fact we would be grateful and pleased if you did, and distinctly displeased if you instead copied any of this material to forward in emails to your own credit.
What would happen if you made one of our photos your desktop? Probably nothing would happen. How would we find out? (Although we can’t speak for the RCMP). But this is where colour management comes in. Whether you are serious about working with digital images on your computer, or just about viewing fine photography on your monitor, it’s best to have a uniform neutral grey as your desktop (as all of us here do), not one of our pictures.
Google “colour management” and while you’re at it, look up the work of painter Josef Albers: if your desktop were fluorescent green, the pictures on your screen would look too pink, etc.). What, on the other hand, would happen if you were in a business where you understood colour management quite well and decided to lift one of these images for distribution in, for example, an overseas printed brochure? Obviously you would know exactly what you were doing. Perhaps no one would ever find out, but here is what could happen. The record “usage” fee for a single picture of one of the photographers on this blog was $45,000 US. That fee was “negotiated” with the photographer’s stock photo agency lawyer when a client violated copyright not even by copying the actual image, but just by getting a commercial illustrator to do so. The same stock agency has offices worldwide, and invests several tens of thousands of dollars in magazine subscriptions alone, as well as full-time staff, in monitoring the usage of its photographers’ images. It actually more than pays them to do so. It must be said that in the great majority of cases, the extra revenue comes from clients inattentively extending the usage beyond what was licenced, and not from outright theft of copyright. Ya gotta love the latter, though, when it brings in those big windfalls.
All that said, please enjoy this site thoroughly, remembering that only auto thieves need worry at all about bait cars!!
