Cooks Source debacle shows piracy double-standard

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks confused (you may be surprised to find that’s not my default setting). Let me explain the situation, and hopefully you can help sort things out.

Earlier this month, the editor of an American magazine called Cooks Source earned the full force of the web’s fury by not only stealing a writer’s article – “A Tale of Two Tarts,” about the non-American origins of apple pie, complete with medieval recipes – but by defending her move with this clearly ridiculous line: “The web is considered ‘public domain’ and you should be happy we just didn’t ‘lift’ your whole article and put someone else’s name on it.”

The day the story broke, Twitter, Facebook and my inbox were filled with people sharing the story and abusing the editor’s lack of sense and knowledge of copyright law. What an idiot, the general tone was, to think that just because something’s available online in digital form that you can just take it without paying the creator.

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“Big cameras” banned

Monday, June 30th, 2008

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.

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Photoshop Express: Rights and Wrongs

Friday, May 30th, 2008

The web-based economy is bizarre. In the real world you naturally expect to pay for products and services, but out in the virtual world everything has to be free. It’s the world’s biggest all-you-can-eat buffet, in which the browser can gorge themselves day-in and day-out for absolutely nothing. And woe betide the naive web-based developer who breaks the unwritten rule and suggests that they might like something in return.

This point hit home recently when looking at the mini-storm that broke out regarding Adobe’s new Photoshop Express service. Like everything else on the web signing up for Photoshop Express is free – at least for the first 2GB of storage space. However, the original terms and conditions made it clear that by posting to the public galleries you were granting Adobe a “worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from… such Content.” (terms since entirely rewritten)

Like everyone else my original reaction was horror. They’re planning to sell on my photos! How dare they? All that money should be coming to me! Daylight robbery!

But let’s stand back a little… and get real.

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What rights do I have to my photos? #!

Friday, May 23rd, 2008

Recently there’s been a lot of excitement about Adobe’s launch of a free online version of Photoshop, Photoshop Express. However the biggest squeals weren’t of delight and you only have to take a look at the original Terms and Conditions to see why…

8. Use of Your Content. Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

You don’t have to be a lawyer to see that basically you were handing over your all rights as originator and giving Adobe free rein to make money from your photos however it saw fit!

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