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PhotoRESEARCHER |
PhotoRESEARCHER Newsletter for August Week Three ## 443C |
KEY WORDS: | Trust | Supermarkets | Commerce | Internet Theft | Copyright Law | Steal | Investors | Bill Gates | Stock Agency | Photographer-Friendly | Industry Consolidation | Corporate Giants | Restrictive Contracts | Business Model | Coke or Pepsi | Stock Marketing | Market Share | Production | Distribution | Researchers | Corporate Agencies | Analog Files | Non-Digital Images | Historical Archives | Independent Photographers | Uninspiring | NEWSWORDS: | Step Back, Thank You | Mistaking Value With
Price | Magnum Snubs Olympics | Ouch! | On Edge | Fox
In The Hen House | Lexington Ave. Population Increase
| Overflow | Site Stealers | Welcome to PhotoRESEARCHER Newsletter, a monthly newsletter from PhotoDaily, PhotoSource International. http://www.photoresearchnews.com/ To sign up for our photoRESEARCHER Newsletter, visit us online at: (If you do not wish to receive the PhotoRESEARCHER Newsletter, please
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Trust On The Internet
Advance Notes: How much worry should we
devote to photo thievery on the Internet?
There’s an element of human nature involved here: Trust.
I can remember when we first got here to the farm. The nearest grocery was (still is) the Horse Creek Store. Fred Nelson would stand behind the counter and retrieve the products you wanted from the shelves. It’s not that he didn’t trust his customers. It was always done that way. A few years later when supermarkets were becoming widespread, I asked Fred if he thought customers would walk out of the supermarkets with products in their pockets without paying.
Fred’s response, "Well, there might be some of that."
As we all know now, yes, a few people, it turns out, will do that. Maybe 2% -maybe 5% - of the population. Nevertheless, at the Horse Creek Store you now gather your own items from the shelves. And the supermarket service model, used everywhere from huge groceries to hardware stores, has benefited both customers and owners. Customers retrieve the products themselves, and thereby far more customers can be taken care of per day. Businesses have learned to factor the minor loss from thievery into the cost of the products and volume sales.
This model places an element of trust in the customer. It says, "I trust you (most of you!) enough that you won’t walk out of my store without paying." It absorbs the modest occurrence of thievery.
The Internet will also eventually settle into a comfortable balance built on sensible commerce. (You pays for what you gits.) Why not put energy toward serving the 95% of customers who are going to be trustworthy, rather than the 5% who won’t be?
You might say, "Well photos are different. They are easy to steal. No one is watching."
Perhaps, but small items ranging from chewing gum to shampoo are easy to steal. However, most people, including kids, are basically honest. They don't steal. Stealing, besides being immoral, has disadvantages that outweigh the benefits.
When we hear of Internet theft, you’ll find that most of the perpetrators of Internet theft cases fall into the "immature hot shot" age category. Another small percentage of guilty parties are people ignorant of copyright law. The final percentage consists of people who live life trying to get away with getting something for nothing. But is it worth our time to track them down and shake a finger at them? (That’s about the only reward we’re going to realize.)
I would advise going about our business without agitation, knowing that human nature is on our side. The majority of people traveling the Internet landscape are not going to steal, either because they are moral -- or it is too inconvenient!
Rohn Engh, veteran stock photographer and publisher of “PhotoRESEARCHER Newsletter,” has provided on-line targeted information for photobuyers, photo researchers and editors for two decades. No other newsletter brings photobuyers such up-to-the minute, practical information from an experienced picture professional intimately familiar with both sides of the stock photo desk. For more info: http://www.photosource.com/photobuyer/.
Dennis Frates |
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Agency Consolidation -- Is It Working?
While the new corporate masters of the stock industry (the big agencies) have squeezed photographers ever harder, legions of photographers have slipped through their fingers. Image-makers have been driven from the sour corporate teat, and many new opportunities have arisen to fill the needs of both picture-maker and picture-researcher and buyer. Mark Getty of Getty Images is surprised and annoyed that his investors don’t value his stock agency as highly as he does. Bill Gates has finally told Corbis he’s tired of them spending a rumored fifty million of his lunch money every year and they’d better start paying their own way. In my opinion, it appears that the very agencies who sold out to these guys (and didn’t share a dime of their multimillion dollar merger checks with the very photographers that made them rich), were in fact doing a better job than the behemoths they believed they couldn’t compete with. Oh well, now that our former stock agency "partners" have cashed their retirement checks, and the corporations are struggling with order-by-number, all-digital business models with no customer service, smart researchers and photographers are forming new alliances. The new start-ups, as well as older established agencies that didn’t get picked off by corporate vultures, may well prove to be as photobuyer – and photographer-friendly as the expatriates claimed to be but never really were. I believe the light at the end of the tunnel just got two f-stops brighter. As I reflect upon the merger-mania of the 1990’s, I note two rationalizations the big guns were feeding us to justify stock industry consolidation. First is what the biz-boys call "synergy," that the new big company is more than just the combination of the smaller companies it swallowed up. Second is "market power," or the ability to restrict consumer choices. Synergy never happened. Photographers who assimilated from smaller agencies into the corporate giants generally found themselves bound by more restrictive contracts, getting a smaller piece of the pie, having fewer images marketed and being less satisfied overall. Many photo researchers and buyers found the new corporations less user-friendly than the smaller agencies they’d previously dealt with. This tends to prove that a 100% digital business model with sketchy or nonexistent customer service doesn’t always work for an industry whose prices are almost always based on negotiation. Market power appears to be consolidated by Corbis and Getty, but to a negative effect for both picture-makers and photo researchers and buyers. WHO CARES? With the two big agencies marketing virtually the same thing to the same clients, big-agency stock has become a lot like the cola wars. Coke or Pepsi, who cares? They’re both brown sugar water that costs the same. Corporate agency stock marketing now comes down to market share, and they can afford to cut prices to gain market share because they have no investment in production. The stock agency business is an industry that gets its product for free and can set prices at will without regard to cost of production. Consolidation of market power has not only limited the avenues of distribution of photographers’ work, but it has also brought about fewer choices for researchers and picture users. The big corporate agencies don’t care to deliver images that aren’t digitized, they detest maintaining analog files, have few methods to research non-digital images, and they’ve made historical archives practically unavailable. This is not the way to grow an industry. These guys just aren’t getting it, and as more and more researchers and buyers turn to independent photographers, and as more and more photographers leave the big agencies for more challenging work, the big agencies are going to find their product is uninspiring, sometimes incestual, stale, and eventually will be less profitable.
CHANGES Each month we report to you moves among, within and between: publishing houses, stock agencies, photobuyers, photo researchers, ad agencies, and design firms.
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS (198 Madison Ave 9th Fl, New York, NY 10016) former contact, phone and e-mail: Judi DeSouter, Art Editor, 212 726-6327, judi.desouter@oup.com; current contact, phone and e-mail: Robert Carangelo, Head of Design, 212 726-6370, Robert.carangelo@oup.com.
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Watch
for developments in the field of stock photography in
PhotoResearcher's Newsletter Note: If the URL is long, it may extend to two lines. In that case - clicking on it won't work. Instead, "copy and paste" the URL.
MISTAKING VALUE WITH PRICE The Art of Business: Price Wars - How can you compete -- and profit -- in an industry gone price-mad? http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/25753.html MAGNUM SNUBS OLYMPICS - Magnum Photos president Stuart Franklin says a contract to photograph the site of London's 2012 Olympic Park is 'absolutely unsignable'. http://www.bjp-online.com/public/showPage.html?page=460641 OUCH! Are Your Business Practices Hurting Other Photographers?
http://rising.blackstar.com/are-your-business ON EDGE Restroom photographer puts UH women on edge.
Women at the University of Houston are urged to be cautious while in
public restrooms after two incidents of improper photography were reported. LEXINGTON AVE. POPULATION INCREASE. Survey Shows Three Out of Five Advertising and Marketing Executives Plan to Increase Hiring: Nearly Half Say Their Firms Have Enhanced Recruiting Efforts - Demand for advertising and marketing talent is expected to remain strong in the coming year, driven in part by the need for professionals with online expertise. http://www.creativepro.com/story/news/25755.html OVERFLOW Digital camera market grows 27%, DSLRs up 75% - http://www.dpreview.com/news/0708/07080302cipashiph1.asp SITE STEALERS Please don't steal this Web content
- " Lorelle VanFossen makes her living from writing, and when people
take it because they are ignorant of copyright laws--or think that because
it's on the Internet, it's free--it makes me really mad. It's stealing
content, in my mind." http://news.com.com/Please+dont+steal+this
TRAVELERS
ABROAD
Pamela York Shawn McGrath Claudio Bacinello
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Easy Desktop Postal Service If you shop on the internet for your U.S. stamps, mailers,
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Helen Schwartz
Does this symbol need to be displayed on all your photos for you to be protected? In other words, if someone uses a photo without the permission of the photographer, but the photo does not contain a copyright notice, is that person still guilty of infringing? The answer is yes. Someone who uses a photo they see in a publication,
without getting the photographer’s permission (let alone
paying him or her), is violating copyright, whether or not
there’s a copyright notice on the photo. Under current
law, photos are protected by copyright whether or not the
photographer puts a copyright notice on them. However, the
fact that a photo does not have a copyright notice on it may
result in a lower damages award, under copyright law’s
"innocent infringer" defense.
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