Giving away work free of charge for the free enjoyment of others is something we all subscribe to, by putting work on the web in the first place. But the collision between naive amateurs and for-profit global media industries is literally and rapidly destroying pro photography.

It’s all very well to celebrate the emergence of ‘pro-ams’, but there’s little ‘pro-’ about charging on into an industry you don’t know or understand, and with no clue about the consequences. Nobody would be silly enough to set up as a ‘pro-am’ lawyer, entrepreneur, IT consultant, salesman, journalist, historian who gives away their skills to rich companies, yet that is the reality with photography. It’s astonishing.

For media companies, amateur work that is good enough is free money in their pockets. For amateurs a bit of flattery must seem worth it. I really cannot imagine what vast overweening vanity leads people to thrust extra $$ into the sticky hands of publishing executives. Would you take cash out of your wallet and pay them to byline your work? Because that is what you are doing.

Maybe you are wealthy enough not to care, but that is not true of most photographers around the world. Do we really want our media to pick their suppliers from, on the one hand, monopolistic empires like Getty who dictate terms to suppliers and clients alike, and on the other, privileged amateurs in the wealthy developed world who can afford self indulgence? Do you imagine companies like Forbes will behave more generously to poorer photographers, or that they’ll simply look elsewhere for someone like you? You can’t blame the publishers, they are bound to maximise profits, that is what they exist to achieve. Surely you want your photos used because they have merit as photos, not because accountants prefer the price?

Most disturbingly of all, what sort of picture of the world will emerge from media, once amateurs become the preferred suppliers?

Some years ago a publisher said to me ‘I am going to stop using expensive commissioned photography and see if it impacts circulation’. He was right, it didn’t matter a damn to readers that they switched to dreary PR headshots. They made $2,000 a month more profit.

In the words of the late Sir Tom Hopkinson ‘you have to remember that editorial is only there to get people to look at the advertisements’. Advertising is where magazines make their money, cover prices usually do little more than cover production costs. Free editorial content, free photos, are irresistible business logic.

But people just don’t value any commodity they can have for free. They will soon come to expect it as a right – and using photos without asking is exactly that. Then, once they discover that amateurs are falling over themselves to get their name in lights, a market will develop. They will start charging you.

This has already happened with some amateur-based stock libraries basing their business model on charging photographers fees rather than earning commission from selling work. This is vanity publishing, without the publishing.

I am sorry to say what Forbes did is pretty much normal business practice, familiar to any pro. Of course they paid and bylined Getty because they had to, they’d be sued senseless if they tried not to. They just used yours without permission or byline because they could, because they don’t care, and because they think you won’t. Magazines and newspapers have learned that almost always they can do this and get away with it. Cheating photographers is cost effective and bugger the ethics. In UK it is an epidemic, not helped by a law that limits damages to what they would have paid in the first place – in your case, nothing.

I’m a pro though I doubt for much longer, given the state of a market where nobody values photos either financially, culturally, or aesthetically. All pro’s have the recurrent experience of being contacted by ‘clients’ who want use of our images but ‘have no budget’. They’ll pay themselves, they’ll pay for paperclips and tea and even a courier, but photos are now perceived as free by right. They’ll offer a byline ‘which will give you fantastic exposure’. Exposure to more ‘clients’ who will say exactly the same. This jam-tomorrow lie is now as credible as ‘I won’t come in your mouth’.

Everybody is suddenly a photographer now, which I applaud, but few people care about it profoundly or invest their lives in it. In the future there will be many fewer. Beyond a certain level of engagement you cannot pursue a day job and photography as well, and that possibility is now being wrecked by market forces. This culling of pro photographers is also a cull of many of its best practitioners, it is an unwitting censorship of much committed work that can only be done by pro’s.

Those who do manage to survive will be mostly work-for-hire serfs of Big Media, squeezed by competition into exploitative contracts. Big Media, who, you may observe, never give any of their product away, and are fiercely restrictive of their IP. They are the enemies of free culture, determined to aggregate and resell and control everyone else’s IPR, and here and now we have a sea of boggle-eyed amateurs being seduced into collaboration.

It’s a pointless, Canute-like plea, but please don’t give away your work. It’s not that you owe pro’s anything, it’s that you owe it to photography to insist it is not worthless.

If you have the patience, read my 3-part blog on the changing landscape of photographic copyright at http://tonysleep.co.uk/blog/reviewing-gowers-1

So good for you to give your pictures away for free and keep up the good work.

Maybe I can start giving away investment advise for free, yeah, that’s the ticket, give it away, give it away….

I thought this information from Use Plus might help clear up the distinction between the common usage of the terms commercial and editorial in regards to photography.

Use Plus is a non-profit “worldwide coalition of leading companies, respected associations, and industry experts” whose goal is “to clearly define and standardize the core aspects of image licensing and its management.” Member organizations include Adobe, PDN, Adbase, Jupiter, and Microsoft.

Here is how Use Plus defines these terms:

Commercial Use: A descriptor for image uses that are part of sales or marketing efforts.

Editorial Use: Describes work in a periodical, online, on electronic media, presentation and/or broadcast that is educational or journalistic in nature, and which does not promote a product, person, service or company based on sponsorship.

Forbes usage of your Om image to illustrate a story is clearly editorial use. Whether editorial use is allowed under the CC license is potentially a gray area, but gray areas make me nervous. Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Joe

I think Mia’s correct and that even editorial commercial use would still be considered commercial use.

“Hey Thomas,

Well the one court case that has involved the enforcement of CC licenses did find that the use by a commercial newspaper of a CC NC licensed image violated that license condition so I think that you are accurate that there is no distinction between editorial use and commercial use: http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5944“

CC defines commercial use as: NonCommercial=you may not use the work in a manner primarily directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

As a fully commercial editorial venture Forbes is built primarily as a vehicle “directed toward commercial advantage” and thus should not be able to use the photo simply by using a byline.

On the other hand. If someone started a white supremacy blog as an individual blogger and was not a commercial venture you are right that they could use my work even if I objected via the cc non commercial license.

You certainly give up control over your work but at the same time you empower others to use it in ways where you never would have received compensation in the first place.

Do you have any research or citations that would contradict my thoughts on commercial use?

Best,

Tom

I just finished a blog post about Creative Commons. I hope the information will help clear up some misconceptions about what can happen when you use the CC license for photographs.

Cheers,

Joe