The recent spat on Facebook resulting from a tag being posted in a group with “the wrong URL” and being removed has forced me to finally come out of the woodwork and post this. I stand by everything you are about to read everything I put here I put of my own free volition and right to an opinion. If you don’t agree with my opinion then good on you for having an opinion, however, if your difference of opinion blinds you to the point that you cannot make a reasonable point and resort to name-calling etc etc (general diva behaviour) then please feel free to just stick your head up your arse now and fuck off as it will save me time doing it later.

First off, I have to say that I have no problem with the actions the managers of the group in question. They made a judgement call based on the evidence they had to hand. Remember it is not for the owners/managers/staff of online groups to keep up with every little change in the licensing world.

This brings me to my point.

Licensing art is not feasible

Yup you heard me, IT WON’T WORK!

Let me clarify that slightly. With the tools at our disposal, at this particular point in time, there is no realistic way to police the use of almost anything online. There is no foolproof way to track an image online. No clever little piece of code that is able to track an image throughout it’s life, through all of it’s changes, updates, inclusion, replications or even simple things such as saving it as something else!

If there was such a thing why would there be a need for copyrightinfringements@ email addresses? Since the earliest days of image licensing in the tagging community especially there has always been the notion of “self-policing” where the high up company ask the help of their customers to enforce and report breaches of copyright, or deal with them in-house when the rules are just clearly misinterpreted, misunderstood or a mistake has happened. This makes sense, to a point. The simple “You have the wrong URL on your tag” and it gets removed is one of the main stays of sensible policing of image use on the internet. Education and re-enforcement of the rules regarding copyright and bingo, one happy bunch of people able to use some cool artwork.

The problem begins to appear when the wonderful, fluid nature of the internet comes into play. Consider the following:-

Artist X moves from one website to another. There’s no real need for them to do it but it just strikes them that they’d like a change. Nothing wrong with that right? Of course not! Artist X makes a very nice blog post on the old site telling everyone they’ve moved, they advertise the new site, they post on Facebook. In short they do everything they can to point people in the direction of the new site. A job well done. There are more updates that follow asking license holders to list the new URL on all new tags. No need to change old ones, just from this point on use the new one. SIMPLE!

But then the ripples spread out. Owner of forum X doesn’t see the blog post, they don’t see the Facebook post, why? For any number of reasons. Remember that there have been stories of people who missed their family members being diagnosed with terminal cancer because “they didn’t see it on Facebook”. While I’m not convinced its true I know I’ve missed a fair few bits of news because someone wrote me on Facebook.

The owner sees a tag with an old URL on it. Now we have a problem. What do they do? Should we delete it as it is wrong? Should we let it go as it might be an old tag? Should we have a major conversation with the person who’d tag it is as to when it was made? That’s if they even made it and didn’t get it as a “present” from another tagger. Where do you draw the line? What is the right course of action? IS there a right course of action?

The ultimate question I ask to all of that is…

When did it become YOUR responsibility to protect the art of your favourite artists?

When the licensing companies started way back when the main promise of those companies was the protection of the rights of artists (and taggers honest) on the Internet. Yes it was a bit bad back then, much of the Internet was (still is). The companies did help to spread the word and make more people aware of what copyright was, how it affected them and how much it affected the artists. But is that really fulfilling their side of those promises?

A lot of people have been burned by the licensing companies, artwork is artwork but there will always be the financial side to all of a licensing companies ideals. Some artists will sell more than others, obvious really, but does that mean it’s worth more? Does that mean it’s worth advertising less? Does that mean it’s less relevent? If you want money to run your company and not end up broke then the answer is YES! Licensing Companies make money. Look at Getty Images! The richest man on the planet wants in and wants in big!

The problem is this man has the money to do it. When Getty Images suspect a copyright infringement it’s rarely a cease and desist that is sent out.

Getty Images has caused controversy for its aggressive pursuit of copyright enforcement on behalf of its photographers. Rather than pursue a policy of sending out “cease and desist” notices, Getty typically mails out a demand letter claiming substantial sums of damages to owners of websites which it believes are using their images in infringement of their photographers’ copyright

Wikipedia

Just think how easy it would be to police tagging art if all you had to do was send a legal notice for a pile of money? The problem is that kind of tactic takes money…Money that licensing companies don’t have access to.

So, what is it I’m saying? Go ahead take tubes/artwork and use them willy nilly, don’t give a hoot about copyright, don’t panic it’s not like they can catch you anyway? errrrrrrrrrr NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

What I’m saying is… As an independent artist I stood as much chance of catching someone sharing my artwork or using it illegally as any of the companies out there past and present. The most any of us can do right now is sit and type our names into Google and see if anything comes up, then send out DMCA notices if needs be. The only thing that companies can/will be doing is the exact same only on the artists behalf. There are plenty of ways to sell tubes and licenses to use the artwork that are completely automated and easy to use. They have been used since the early days of licensing! If the companies are taking a cut of the sales to pay for listing, selling, marketting and protection and they aren’t really doing the listing, selling and marketting apart from the nice automated work done for them, and they aren”t doing any better of a job of protection than one person and Google, WHY ARE THEY GETTING ARTISTS TO BE WITH THEM?

I finish not by making a real big point but to encourage artists to go independent, if you don’t want the hassle there are plenty of other alternatives that will make you way more and take less drama, work on your behalf (listed below). Fans of artists, try and show them that you will be there whatever they do, but save yourself and them from the companies that promise the earth and deliver nothing.

• IStockPhoto
• Getty Images
• Fotolia