On the Wisdom of Copyright Notices

Last night, I was browsing a drowsy little blog, in one of the more stagnant backwaters of the internet, and buried on a back page where it probably gets very little traffic, I read this hysterical rant about copyright notices on images:

Sometimes I wonder about the wisdom of putting copyright notices on online JPEGs.

Just this afternoon, yet again, I found a picture I would have liked to use for our “Random Excellence” feature. It was on a sleepy little site buried on a back page where it probably gets very little traffic, and the point of its being there is that the photographer, an Australian, is trying to sell prints of it for AUD$70.

What’s that you say?  The Online Photographer is not a drowsy little blog in a stagnant backwater?  Isn’t that funny?  It’s actually pretty hard to know, if a web site doesn’t have comment threads, whether the website is heavily trafficked or not.  That means that this ’sleepy little site’ might actually take quite a lot of traffic; it’s just very hard to know.  As the saying goes, on the internet, no one knows you’re a dog.  No one knows if you’re a 900 pound gorilla, either.

So far, we know this much: Mike is engaging in sophistry, here.  That’s fine, but it’s important to separate Mike being in a petulant, whiny mood from the idea that copyright notices are a bad idea.  Mike continues:

But how smart is this, really? Who’s going to steal your 750 x 500 pixel image and use it for anything that they should have paid you for? Who makes any money by doing that? (Perhaps porn mavens, I don’t know—then again, I doubt those types would be punctilious about the niceties of copyright.)

You just can’t do all that much with a 750-pixel-wide JPEG. And, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, there are rather a lot of them on the World Wide Web.

One of the big uses for photographs these days is on web sites.  One might think that the operator of a web site who is complaining about how this photographer made it hard for him to get a free photo to decorate his web site would not be claiming that this usage is insignificant.  I mean, maybe it’s just me, but it seems to be fairly disingenuous to say “I wanted to use this guy’s photo to decorate my blog, but I couldn’t because he had a copyright notice on it.  What a paranoid nitwit – what’s someone going to do with his stupid 750 pixel jpg, it’s not like it’s a useful thing.”  The very fact that Mike is whining about the copyright notice indicates that there’s actually some demand for the very thing he’s claiming is valueless because of zero demand.  Maybe Mike thinks he’s a porn maven, I don’t know.

And if there are so many 750 pixel wide jpgs on the WWW, why didn’t Mike just use one of the other jpgs instead?  Answer: photographs are not fungible.  So Mike wanted THIS jpg, and paradoxically, he seems immune to the thought that other people might feel similarly.

Beyond that, though, at 180 pixels/inch, which is probably high enough quality for something like a brochure, handbill, or any of the other business uses (think: powerpoint presentations, company reports, or any of the multitude of commercial uses of photography), a 750 pixel wide image will be four inches wide.  That’s big enough for a low quality postcard, and plenty big enough for a lot of uses.

What I would have done with the picture, of course, is to introduce it to a whole new audience and then link to the rest of the guy’s work. I don’t know if being seen by, I don’t know, maybe thirty or forty thousand sets of eyes on TOP over the next week or two would have sold any prints for the guy. But it probably couldn’t hurt. Again and again I get notes from people to whom we’ve linked telling me that we spiked their hit count big time.

Copyright may be  important for the big shots whose work is in tremendous demand. But I suspect it just helps small fry remain obscure.

Yeah, right.  Look, if Mike’s goal was to promote this artist, he’d just have used the image with the copyright notice on it, and accepted that his blog was not quite as pretty as he pleased.  Because he didn’t do that, we can make a fairly solid inference that Mike was more concerned with the appearance of his website (which generates advertising revenue) than he was with promoting the sleepy little website of this Australian photographer.  Mike’s argument here is suspiciously like that of most of the people who steal my images, who claim that a) everything on the internet is free for the taking, b) I can’t sue them because they’re far away, and c) I should be grateful for the exposure, anyway.

That’s fine.  I don’t have a problem with Mike making money from TOP (and, in fact, I’d like it quite a lot if Mike were able to earn a handsome living from it).  But Mike’s argument here boils down to “Don’t these guys realize that by putting a copyright notice on their images, these guys are making it hard for me to use their images for free to make money with my website, and as a result I can’t use my power and influence to push some traffic to their website?”

And I would think that this argument would cause considerable cognitive dissonance.