The crowd was around 450-750 people. But the church claims it was more like 2,500, and it Photoshopped in the proof. Except the proof is about as convincing as your thetan's origin story. In reality, there were no people in the right-hand side of the photo. There was actually a line of rented trees set up to block the view of people not so friendly to Scientology (see the photo below), as well as police blocking off a four-block radius for the event. And it's not just that the picture was doctored, it's that it was done quite poorly. They added people right on top of the trees in the altered section.

The big problem turns out to be metadata -- or, rather, the absence of it. Google's Tim Bray explains the concept in a usefully calm post looking at the new UK orphan regulations:

It turns out that electronic photograph files contain not just the pixels that form the image, but also textual fields containing "metadata", information about the picture. This is generally referred to as Exif, and it identifies some or all of: the camera, lens, date, location (if there's a GPS), size, aperture, and lots of other arcane photographic details. Plus, crucially, the name of the creator.

But this overlooks a number of points. Just because the metadata is absent from photos stored on certain sites does not mean that publishers will be able to claim that they couldn't find the creators as a result. Remember, they must carry out a diligent search, and simply looking at the metadata clearly doesn't qualify. In addition, they will need to look widely elsewhere in order to check whether there is an identifiable creator.

One obvious way to do that is using a search engine. For example, I downloaded the image that Bray uses in his post, and which he discovered had lost its metadata, even on his own site. Then I used Google's image search, which lets you upload images about which you want information. It not only found Bray's original, but also the page on which it is used. Now, it might be argued that Bray's site is quite well known, and therefore not representative, but this trivial experiment does suggest a relatively simple way to address the photographers' concerns.

Provided photographers store somewhere online an image along with their contact details, it is almost certain that Google and other search engines will find it. So an obvious way to avoid having their creations orphaned is to place them in some kind of image repository. This might be set up by photographers' associations for their members, or by independent companies offering a dedicated service. The price of storage is so low now that such a repository would cost very little to use, even for thousands of photos. The availability of images with attribution details would ensure that even a relatively cursory search will locate the owner of the work, thus blocking its use as an orphan.

Ironically, then, it may well be that Google, so often the object of hatred for photographers that see it as feeding parasitically off their work by providing easy access to their online images, will also offer them with the easiest way to avoid the problems with orphan works.

But there's another important issue here. The real threat to photographers and their livelihoods is not the UK's new orphan works legislation; it is the unauthorized stripping away of metadata from uploaded photos. Instead of attacking the new law, photographers should be fighting for full metadata to be retained wherever and however they upload their pictures, at least as an option. That seems entirely justified -- unlike the current moves to brand a reasonable framework to liberate millions of "hostage works" as an attempt to "abolish copyright".

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American Photographic Artists (APA) is joining the 15 plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Google. By joining the suit, APA alleges the “Google Book Search” program violates the copyrights of numerous photographers and other visual artists. The lead plaintiffs include: The American Society of Media Photographers, Graphic Artists Guild, Picture Archive Council of America, North American Nature Photography Association, Professional Photographers of America, National Press Photographers Association, Leif Skoogfors , Al Satterwhite , Morton Beebe , Ed Kashi , John Schmelzer , Simms Taback and Gail Kuenstler Taback Living Trust, Leland Bobbe , John Francis, Ficara, and David W. Moser.

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Copyright protection and licensing images are two elements that ensure the sustainability of a professional photographer’s career,” notes APA National President, Theresa Raffetto. “APA membership consists of professional photographers who rely on these elements and is why APA advocates fearlessly for copyright protection. Holding Google Books responsible for their flagrant copyright infringement is something APA has been working on and we’re pleased to continue this fight in conjunction with the other plaintiffs.”

• Fake Dragonball attacks seem to be a growing trend in staged photography these days. Even if you haven't seen the Dragonball anime that inspired these photos, the concept of being able to blow up stuff via telekinesis is a pretty widespread meme nowadays. [url]
• Vadering is another fad where you make it look like you're a Sith lord choking various people. I find your lack of faith disturbing.... [url]
• Owling was a spin-off of the more popular meme of planking. Unfortunately, it didn't catch on and elucidate how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie roll Tootsie pop.[url]

Photographer, blogger, and photographers rights’ activist Carlos Miller has made headlines quite a few times over the past few years with his legal rumbles with authorities over photography in public places. Miller, who often instigates the disputes for the purpose of bringing photographers’ rights into the spotlight, recently had another big confrontation with authorities in Miami (it’s not the first time it has happened).

According to Miller, his friend was photographing Dade County Courthouse from the rail platform and he was photographing his friend... Miller says that they were spotted by a security guard and warned over a loudspeaker to stop shooting photographs. When they didn’t put their cameras away, security guards arrived to confront them.

An e-mail disclosed during the trial showed the police had been monitoring Miller's Facebook page and had sent out a notice warning officers in charge of evicting the Occupy Miami protestors that Miller was planning to cover the process.

Since 9/11, there’s been an incredible number of incidents where photographers are being interfered with and arrested for doing nothing other than taking pictures or recording video in public places.

It’s not just news photographers who should be concerned with this. I think every citizen should be concerned. Tourists taking pictures are being told by police, security guards and sometimes other citizens, “Sorry, you can’t take a picture here.” When asked why, they say, “Well, don’t you remember 9/11?”

Q. After photographers were stopped from photographing the police clearing Occupy Wall Street protestors from Zuccotti Park, you and representatives of a media coalition including The Times, met with the police commissioner Ray Kelly. What happened at that meeting?

A. It was on Nov. 23. I asked the commissioner if he would reissue the “finest message” from 1999 that dealt with the police cooperating with the press. He did that. It was read at 10 consecutive roll calls in every single station house and precinct.

• Family portraits aren't usually made from collages, but when family members are spread out all over the globe, combining Skype video stills will have to suffice. Rear projectors would be a bit better for this.... [url]
• People riding bikes without bikes are just floating above the street. It's just so easy to photoshop things out of a picture nowadays. [url]
• New moms often enjoy taking a lot of photos of their babies, but some moms also like to see their kid fly. Maybe in a few years, these "floating people" pictures will look like a dated image filter. [url]
• Let sleeping babies sleep.. and then take pictures of them in creative ways. Try this at home. [url]
• What can you do with a leaf blower and some good indoor lighting? Take some cool pictures or insert joke here. [url]

No, I still have the feeling. You're there for the dining experience with your companion, not to take photos of food. They publish food photos without your consent, which is taking intellectual property away from the restaurant. And also, generally, the photographs are terrible.

1. Police across the country continue to arrest photographers on completely bogus charges -- despite courts (and the Justice Department) making it clear that this is legal activity. In at least some cases, it appears that they are then willing to lie about it in court.
2. Similarly, this demonstrates the importance of being able to photograph and film police while on duty, to provide evidence when there is wrongdoing. That the "wrongdoing" involved incorrectly arresting other photographers only serves to make this point even stronger.

Anyway, AFP got caught with a hand in the cookie jar and will have to pay.

Wild is an entomologist by trade, who built a photography business alongside his scientific work. The photo that was copied is a fairly straightforward snapshot of an ant:

There can be little doubt that the illustration is directly copied from the photo. But the question is, what creative contribution did Wild make himself? As he says in the blog post:

The sketch could never have existed without my original image nor without my taxonomic expertise in identifying the species. I received no acknowledgement for my part. Somebody else got paid for my efforts, and I got… an excuse to write a blog post, I suppose. What I mean is, I feel like a chump.

But Wild's work could never have existed without the ant itself, and it seems like the primary purpose of the image is simply to document the appearance of the species. Facts aren't covered by copyright, and that's not just a legal nuance, it's a reflection of common sense: just because we observe and collect factual information about the world—even if we are the first to do so—doesn't mean we deserve any control over that information. We may expect to receive a certain amount of recognition, and we may certainly seek to capitalize on the information ourselves (since we are probably in an advantageous position to do so), but we don't get perpetual credit or payment. Knowledge cannot be owned.

What was copied from the photograph was simply the knowledge of what the ant looks like, and indeed the photo contained very little beyond that to begin with. It's a catalogue-style shot in terms of framing and composition, and the few arguably creative choices—the surface the ant is standing on, the depth of field—were not copied at all in the illustration. The only thing that was copied is the photograph's subject, which Wild didn't create. Perhaps it would have been nice if the illustration included a credit to the original photo, but the simple fact is that knowledge about our world is always going to spread beyond such concerns, and that's no reason to feel hard done by.

So I don't think this is really a question of copying art so much as repeating facts—but even from an artistic perspective, Wild goes on to show that he's still open to other thoughts on the matter:

Artists and photographers are, deep down, 90% unoriginal. We borrow each others’ ideas. We forget where they came from. We copy, transpose, modify, build on, and find inspiration from diverse other people. Much of our unoriginality is acceptably divergent, and this is a good thing. Art could not exist at all were all forms of copying verboten.

That's a very refreshing statement. He then says he thinks this instance crossed a line, but his mind isn't entirely made up. I hope that, on further consideration, he'll realize that this is something even more basic than artistic inspiration—it's a proliferation of knowledge about the natural world, and one that shouldn't make him feel like a chump at all.

She points out where the current obsession with ownership is taking her field:

If we lock up this industry, we will lose something powerful, something essential, something that brought me to quilting in the first place: freedom.

Freedom to play with fabric. Freedom to experiment with different shapes and layouts. Freedom to play with new techniques and materials. We can lose the freedom to create.

Because if you have to check with 5 different fabric designers and the quilt pattern designer AND the free motion quilting designer in order to make your quilt, how likely are you to do it? Even the idea of asking, even words like "licensing," are enough to send many people packing. Off to find another hobby the lawyers haven't ruined yet.

It's really a wonderfully rich post, which touches on many aspects of copyright and creativity, and I urge you to read it -- along with the forthright comments (already there are 142 of them.) It provides another example, alongside the fashion industry, of a field that is currently flourishing without copyright, but that is under threat from those who have bought into the story that assigning ownership to something as insubstantial as ideas somehow promotes creativity, when in fact all it does is to shut it down through a creeping, paralyzing fear of infringement, as Day so vividly describes.

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As Van Kuyk tells it, he grabbed his camera and began taking photos of the occurrence. After being told to move away from the scene, Van Kuyk distanced himself but continued to take photos, he said. However, an officer soon after demanded Van Kuyk to stop taking photos, he said.

“He was pushing me, and I kept taking pictures and he didn’t like it, and he…got real aggressive and threw me to the ground,” Van Kuyk said.

When his girlfriend, Meghan Feighan, tried to pick up the camera, she was arrested and held for nearly 18 hours, he said. Van Kuyk was arrested and held for nearly 24 hours.

the dictates of good eyes and common sense lead inexorably to the conclusion that there is no substantial similarity between Plaintiff’s works and the allegedly infringing compositions

"The District Court improperly dismissed my law suit because it did not apply the copyright law correctly," it reads, adding that the previous decision "exhibited a lack of intrinsic comprehension of art, and its expression or intended expression." Gordon claims that the court ignored the copyrightable elements of her work and that its judgement rested on the content rather than the stylistic decisions of her photographs: "the District Court’s focus on the similarity in subject matter, which was only part of my artistic choice, was a great error."

Naively, then, you might expect him to be a typical artistic fat-cat who regards every act of piracy of his photos as a personal insult that in a just world would be avenged by amputation of limbs and life incarceration at the minimum. Actually, he uses Creative Commons licensing for all his work, and has just written a wonderful post with the self-explanatory title "Five Reasons Why I Don't Care if My Stuff is Pirated - A New Way of Thinking", pointed out to us by Paul Newport, where he states:

All of my stuff is pirated. Everything from my HDR Video Tutorial to eBooks to Apps. Fine. It's all there on PirateBay and MegaUpload and all that stuff. Here are the reasons why I don't mind

Finally, Ratcliff gives one central reason why he's not really that worried about piracy:

Last, and most important, as soon as I opened everything up, our business has grown and grown.

In other words, everything that Ratcliff says in his extremely wise post about photography also applies to music and films. But whereas he accepts the need for "A New Way of Thinking" as he puts it, and can even see that piracy is beneficial to him in many ways, the copyright industries cling to their traditional perspectives, and insist on fighting this "scourge" with ever-greater ferocity in the face of their continuing failure to expunge it – with huge collateral damage to the rest of us, as SOPA and PIPA make clear.

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• If you want the subjects of your photos to look really small, take a picture of them next to a really big coin. Remember: it's not counterfeiting if you make coins the size of a coffee table... [url]
• Tilt-shift photographic effects can be created in a few different ways -- to fabricate images of a crowd of people, looking like ants. Someday this is what The Sims will look like. [url]
• If you think photography is easy, get ready to be mocked. If you like seeing photos with really bad composition and cheesy photoshop effects, youarenotaphotographer is the blog for you. [url]
• Who knew that photos of pregnant women could become an internet meme like planking? Thankfully, there don't seem to be any photos of pregnant women planking. [url]
• To discover more interesting photography-related content, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  
By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.

In this case, the dictates of good eyes and common sense lead inexorably to the conclusion that there is no substantial similarity between Plaintiff’s works and the allegedly infringing compositions of McGinley. Although the Court declines to conduct an exhaustive inventory of the 150 allegedly infringing images, a representative sample illustrates and confirms this result.

But there the similarity ends. The Gordon Image is black and white and vertical, while the McGinley Image is in full color and horizontal. The Gordon figure is clothed in a short-sleeve T-shirt, dark pants, and tennis shoes; his hair is closely shorn. The McGinley figure is clothed in a longsleeve shirt and shorts and is barefoot; his hair is medium-length. Plaintiff attempts to obscure these “peripheral” differences by cropping and rotating the Gordon Image and converting the McGinley image to black and white. (Pl.’s Opp’n 18.) But not even these alterations can reconcile the “total concept and overall feel” of the two images. The Gordon figure is muscular and taut, with not one but both arms splayed in a gesture of virile triumph. The look on his face is intent, perhaps even defiant. The McGinley figure is slender and his posture relaxed, with both legs floating apart rather than clenched together. His head drapes to one shoulder and a dreamy look inhabits his face as he falls through the frame. Thus, the overall feel of the McGinley Image is that of a passive figure simply surrendering to gravity, while the overall feel of the Gordon Image derives from a dynamic figure jumping into the frame. No dissection of the images is required to discern the “utter lack of similarity” between the two.

Moreover, the substance of the expert affidavits simply underscores the infirmity of Plaintiff’s infringement claim. Several experts profess a belief that Plaintiff should prevail in this action while disavowing any familiarity with copyright law. (See Pl.’s Opp’n, Ex. B, Aff. of Dan Cameron, June 27, 2011, ¶ 4 (“I do not pretend to understand all the legal complexities of Ms. Gordon’s case”); id., Ex. F, Aff. of Volker Diehl, June 29, 2011, ¶ 9 (“I am unfamiliar with laws surrounding this issue, in particular the laws of the United States as it pertains to such causes of action”).) Another opines on the contours of “fine art ethics” (id., Ex. D, Aff. of Heather Holden, June 24, 2011, ¶ 12) and acknowledges that art expertise “may be needed” to discern the relationship between the images at issue (id., Ex. D., Holden Aff., ¶ 11). What is clear from the foregoing expert testimony is not that Plaintiff should prevail in this action, but that the remedy for the instant dispute lies in the court of public or expert opinion and not the federal district court.

Plaintiff's apparent theory of infringement would assert copyright interests in virtually any figure with outstretched arms, any interracial kiss, or any nude female torso. Such a conception of copyright law has no basis in statute, case law, or common sense, and its application would serve to undermine rather than promote the most basic forms of artistic expression.

One might have hoped that Plaintiff - an artist - would have understood as much, or that her attorneys, presumably familiar with the basic tenets of copyright and intellectual property law, would have recognized the futility of this action before embarking on a long, costly, and ultimately wasteful course of litigation in a court of law.

Andy took something that wasn’t his and he didn’t have any license or right to take it. Digital or physical, that’s theft. Your argument that Jay Maisel still has the original is true, so Andy stole a copy. It’s still not his. The image is recognizable as the original. All rights to that image belong with the copyright holder, whether original or duplicated.

Saying that all art is derivative in some way is very nebulous.

At first glance, David Hobby looks like just another casualty of the decline of print media: A longtime staff photographer for the Baltimore Sun, he was one of many employees who accepted a buyout in 2008 as part of broad staff reductions at the distressed newspaper.

Yet last month he embarked on a sold-out, cross-country tour that will visit 29 cities. Approximately $1 million in tickets have been sold for the privilege of hearing Hobby and famed magazine photographer Joe McNally speak about their craft. Hobby's blog, Strobist, on which he teaches amateurs the lighting techniques used by professionals, welcomed 2 million unique visitors last year.

McNally doesn't see anything demeaning in sharing his insights with thousands of amateurs; rather, he says he's come to enjoy teaching. "If you encounter passion, you have to counter it with your own passion," he says. "Even if, at the end of the day, you feel they're not going to go out the next day and climb the Empire State Building."

That sentiment is alien to the old guard in the professional photography world, where, Hobby says, "there's a lot of information-hoarding, and [a sense that] if I teach this person how to do this, he'll become my competition." Once the dust settles from all the change he's helped bring about, Hobby thinks there will still be legitimate careers for professional photographers. "You'll have fewer rock stars, and a much larger middle class," he says, a group of photographers who will find ways to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack.

For properties under the protective jurisdiction of FPS, there are currently no general security regulations prohibiting exterior photography of any federally owned or leased building, absent a written local rule or regulation established by a Court Security Committee or Facility Security Committee. Furthermore, it is important to understand that this regulation does not prohibit photography by individuals of the exterior of federally owned or leased facilities from publicly accessible spaces such as streets, sidewalks, parks and plazas.... Absent reasonable suspicion or probable cause, law enforcement and security personnel and (sic) must allow individuals to photograph the exterior of federally owned or leased facilities from publicly accessible space.

The World Erotic Art Museum in Miami is trying to sue me for a minimum of $2 million for posting photographs that I took in their Museum on Flickr.

Below is most of the complaint that the museum's attorney has filed against me this morning in Federal Court. In the complaint they accuse me of violating their policy stated at their entrance saying that the museum prohibits professional or flash photography.

I saw no sign when I visited the museum.

However, I took no flash photographs in the museum, and Flickr (where I posted the images) is strictly defined as a non-commercial photosharing site. I have not sold any images of that I took at the museum and I have not profited one cent on any the images that I posted on Flickr. What's more the complaint says "at no time did Plaintiff or Plaintiff's agents give express or implied permission or authorization to Defendant to take the photographs." This is a bald faced lie. One of the employees at the museum in fact approached both me, and my friend Mo, who were taking photos to talk to us about them. He specifically asked me if I was making a book and I said no. He said fine and we continued photographing in the museum at the time.

Further Flickr explicitly describes itself as a non-commercial site. This is not professional photography.

[...]

Further the museum filed a DMCA request fraudulently and had flickr remove many images that they do not in fact own copyright to. In fact most of the images that they had flickr remove they do not own copyright on.

While WEAM allows media and photographers to enter the premise and take photographs, it's with the unspoken and unwritten understanding that no one would ever post anything explicit--especially not visuals involving penetration--online. By posting 334 photos--which Wilzig claims the museum was not aware he took--Hawk failed to respect this understanding and gave WEAM no choice: They had to do what "no one else had the money or guts to do."

Wilzig explained that she feels that by posting his photographs on Flickr, Hawk put WEAM at risk of "exposing [its] art work to young people" and made it appear as if he somehow represented the museum. This meant that WEAM had to stop what Wilzig describes as an "unsavory character" and the way to do it was to make an impression.

So the museum, on its attorney's advice, threatened Hawk with a $2 million lawsuit.

According to Wilzig, this was not done in an intent to make a profit off the situation, but because it was important to let Hawk know that WEAM was serious about pursuing the matter. Wilzig says that there is currently negotiation between WEAM's legal representation and Hawk--who was unable to comment on this whole matter as he was busy seeking legal advice--regarding how to settle the whole mess.