I had a parental visit at the weekend, and we decided to take in some of the tourist sites around the capital. On Sunday the itinerary involved a quick spin on the London Eye – it does actually move much faster than it appears to from my office window - followed by a gig in Hyde Park.
To the embarrassment of my family I had items from my bag confiscated at both.
This often happens to me, as an inveterate tinkerer and technology hoarder; bike parts taken by Science Museum staff, USB drives and mobile phones at a laptop manufacturer’s design centre. It’s no big deal to me, as long as it’s justified.
On the Eye it was a small toolkit I carry in case my bike falls to pieces. Fair enough; the spanner could be used as a weapon, perhaps, or to undo the capsule and send it plunging into the Thames. At the concert, though, it was my DSLR which was flagged up, as I was told that on the second day of the two-day event, staff had been told to stop “big cameras” from entering. This has been happening more and more in the last year or two.
The problem here was nothing to do with security, but more to do with copyright. The organisers didn’t want people to take shots of the bands on “professional” cameras, even though everyone there had paid a considerable fee to see said bands. Strangely, no compact cameras or mobile phones were being taken, though.
So, at the entrance I was told that I needed to hand in my Nikon D40 at a steward’s office, and was ushered through the gate. I’m ashamed to admit that after a very, very brief search for this office I instead walked straight towards the stage, and as a result managed to get some lovely shots of my family relaxing in the sun. None of the stage, though - a shot of Sting from a quarter of a mile away isn’t much of a memento as far as I’m concerned.
The true piracy, as the concert organisers see it, was being perpetrated not by us “big camera” users, but with mobile phones. Cheap memory cards can handle lengthy clips now, and several hundred people seemed to be recording the whole concert from various angles. For what reason I may never know, as a two-hour set filmed in YouTube-quality seems like a waste of time to me.
Try taking 35,000 people’s mobile phones away, though, and see what happens…
Although the Eye was practically made for cameras, it seems strange that they are welcomed with open arms there, but (half-heartedly) banned elsewhere. Strange, also, that the organisers of the concert were happy to let me take a toolkit full of pointy metal things into their gig, but not a camera.
Perhaps technology needs to offer the solution here, as well as being the problem. Anti-camera technology has been around for a while, and could stop people taking pictures of certain copyrighted areas, designs, people, etc. while allowing photographs of friends and family without the intervention of security guards. Of course, another solution would be for people to lighten up about copyright a little.
Tags: camera, copyright, dslr, Security
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