6 ms·

I hope everyone understands, including the authors themselves, that each author in this back-and-forth is correct. The right to give and the right to charge are

• bcrescimanno 15y ago
  Not to digress too much from your original comment (which I completely agree with) but I think there's a certain "smugness" that I see associated with people who release anything as free--as if somehow the act of benevolence has put them on a plane above those who choose not to. I think that's unfortunate for multiple reasons; not the least of which is that people should be commended for sharing things under free / open licenses and I'm far less inclined to do so if they get all smug about it (this applies whether the "things" in question are software, photographs, writings, music, film, etc). I agree with both authors; but I find this particular article far more obnoxious than the one to which its responding--again, because it comes across quite smug.
  • aspir 15y ago
    I feel the same as you. Giving (music, money, software), is extremely personal, and one that shouldn't be done lightly, or out of pressure from others. Personally, I'd love to be able to release a beneficial OSS software tool or commit a valuable patch to a project, but I'm not a good enough developer. Yet, I feel like a second class citizen in the development community because I haven't
    • kstenerud 15y ago
      It is your own feeling of inadequacy that prevents you from contributing. That's also likely a major contributing factor to why you feel the author is being smug. The only thing preventing you from excellence is your fear. You don't have to be "worthy" to make something good; you just need the ambition to set high goals, the drive and tenacity to meet those goals, and the thick skin to shrug off the inevitable judgments of others. All great men are called crazy at one point or another, and all great men have doubted themselves. Why should you be any different?
    • Drbble 15y ago
      Contribute documentation or bug reports. These are as valuable as code.
      • tommorris 15y ago
        Or contribute how it is hard to contribute. If contributing to OSS is hard, then OSS communities may be able to make it easier. For instance, I'm involved in Wikipedia heavily and have always thought that it would be worth contributing to MediaWiki: at the very least being willing to beta test new stuff and write tests and so on. It's a big legacy hairball type project, but the community have made it easier to contribute by documenting the process of getting a working environment setup, by better documenting the process of submitting bugs and patches to bugzilla, by marking a bunch of bugs as suitable for newbies, by the new maintenance/dev scripts and by having a newbie developers liaison person. If you want to get involved in an open source project but feel inadequate, try and politely work with them to nudge them into making it easier for new developers to contribute. Document the process of getting a working environment setup, including getting things like Vagrant setup if needed. Most projects will welcome attempts to try and make it easier for new developers. And, well, if they don't, then find a better project. ;-) (If you think your coding really does suck, we've got an encyclopedia with lots of loose ends that need tying up. Just sayin'.)
  • Barnabas 15y ago
    Matthew 6:1-4
  • mrgoldenbrown 15y ago
    I feel that any sense of smugness in this article is more than outshone by the sense of entitlement in the original. The second post acknowledges reality (that many good quality photos are available for free) while the first post seems to whine about the consequences of that reality (when free photos are so widely available, why should you be surprised/angry when someone asks you for your photos for free?)
    • sethg 15y ago
      Why shouldn’t the first photographer have a “sense of entitlement”? He’s entitled! He has the right to set prices for his work, and the rest of us have the right to pay, negotiate a better price, or walk away from the deal. But going up to someone and saying “you should give this away” is not negotiating for a better price; it’s practically an insult. It’s like walking into a car dealership, seeing that the sticker price is $10,000, and telling the salespeople that they really should let it go for $3,000. Also note the difference between “I want to give my work away” and “you ought to give your work away”.
      • dchest 15y ago
        Please don't make car analogies when speaking about copyright. Copyright and selling cars are unrelated concepts, and this analogy has been beaten to death.
      • timwiseman 15y ago
        It largely depends on the context the "you should give this away" is said in. If say a well known media organization says, "You should let me use this photo for free, because I will give you credit and that might help you get business later" that is negotiating. The creator of the photo may or may not like the terms, but it is an offer of something of value for something of value. At worst, if the photographer is already well known, it is a bad offer that is wasting his time, but it is never insulting. If someone who studies economics says to a new photographer, "You should stop selling photos and sell the service of creating new photos on order due to the marginal prices involved and current market situation. Give your old ones away to build up reputation." This is not an insult, but advice (whether or not it is good advice is a different question). He is entitled to set the asking price for his work, but that is all.
• synth 15y ago
  "I give my work away for free because it makes other people smile and I like that" is not a rebuttal to "people shouldn't be taking other people's work for free if the author doesn't want them to". If anything it's just a smug attempt at being holier-than-thou.
  • tikhonj 15y ago
    Of course you're also misrepresenting the other guy's argument: he wasn't arguing against "intellectual property theft" (what a loaded term!); rather, he was arguing against people's asking for the photograph for free. Moreover, his particular argument (ignoring the larger issue) was fairly obviously flawed and overbearing.
    • synth 15y ago
      If we put on our blinders and ignore the larger issue, asking an artist for free stuff is rather condescending. As Mueller says, why should magazines, advertisers, websites or corporations expect or ask for free work? (Let's not pretend it's anything other than this) If the artist didn't already put it on a Creative Commens license or similar (or has indicated that he is willing to give non-commercial licenses to people who ask), then flat out asking artists for free stuff to further your own company is tantamount to asking for a free lunch. In this narrow sense, Tristan's "giving things away for free makes me and people all over the world happy" post is not an argument against that either. It's just a feel-good argument for using a CC-type license in the first place, which was never the issue.
      • tikhonj 15y ago
        It might just be a difference in cultures, but in my experience if you, for example, ask a sys-admin for Linux help, they are more than happy to spend time on it. There is no stigma about asking for this sort of help even though you're basically asking a professional to work for free (at least in the Linux communities I'm familiar with). I've seen people spend hours helping others debug some issues. Also, most programmers I know (admittedly all are at least open source enthusiasts) are all more than happy to provide you with little scripts. They are not only willing to allow you to use their code, but also usually happy to support that code for free to some extent (people are usually happy to help you get it set up, at the very least). I've mostly seen this on smaller programs and scripts, but those are not much different in scope from a single photograph.
• bad_user 15y ago
  What you are saying is true, however for products for which supply exceeds demand and which can be easily copied, then charging for such products does not work so well. For example, in the early days of our industry, many people buying licensed software were doing so because copying on floppy disks was error prone and packaged software was getting distributed on storage of higher quality. Licensed software also worked as expected, while software copied from friends had all sorts of "surprises". Plus it came with a useful manual, which was great prior to the Internet. Our economy is based on scarcity. If scarcity is only artificial, then the model breaks down. You simply can't appeal to people's feelings, not after decades of teaching people to embrace individualism.
  • aspir 15y ago
    This isn't going to be popular on this board, but:: Your statement is why the writers of the US constitution mandated creative protection[0]. To prevent instances of piracy because users don't feel like they should pay for something made that could be duplicated. Your argument goes back to mine-- by pirating works, you're making the decision for the owner/creator whether to release that work freely or to charge. That's not your right, no matter what economic model you believe. [0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause
    • bad_user 15y ago
      I'm an author and I'd like to agree with you, however there's constitutional rights and then there's human nature. If your constitution disallowed unlicensed sex, take a guess on which one would prevail - human nature or your constitution. Also, read again why that clause is in the constitution - "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". They clearly didn't have Disney in mind or the ever expanding "limited Times" that makes the public domain a legally obsolete concept.
    • timwiseman 15y ago
      I respectfully suspect you are misunderstanding history. First, the Copyright Clause permits, but does not mandate, certain forms of creative protection for a limited time. Second, the clause itself states its goal. It was to encourage more creation, "preventing piracy" was a means to an end, not an end in itself. And finally, there is good reason to think that regarding copyright in particular the target was never meant to be users at all, but other commercial grade publishers and competing authors. (It was prohibitively difficult in that era for an end user to make a copy of any substantial creative work so it likely wasn't even considered. I suspect, given some of Jefferson's comments in particular, that many of the Framers would have been against trying to apply copyright laws to end users had they realized it would eventually be an issue).
• joelthelion 15y ago
  Unfortunately, the "right to charge" is something that is almost unenforceable in the day of the internet. If you base your business model on this idea, you will spend a lot of time fighting a losing battle against the fact that information is freely exchangeable around the whole world.
  • potatolicious 15y ago
    Photographers don't sell copies of the photograph to the general public. I don't think most photographers are actively trying to fight, say, you printing out the photo and hanging it up on your wall. The original blog post was about licensing works - major magazines and publications wanting to use the photo. This is entirely enforceable - these magazines and publications are headed by companies that one can actually discover and sue. The "right to charge" is alive and well, in the same way the GPL is enforceable.
• funkah 15y ago
  This author is partially refuting the original, though. It's not just saying "I give away my photos", it's also saying that it is unrealistic to expect to make money from photography because so many people have a camera and the tools to publish their photographs. I don't really agree with this because the skill and artistic inclination of the photographer is still a critical factor in how the photo turns out. But it is an argument against the original article, make no mistake there.
  • _delirium 15y ago
    That's true, but I think part of the problem that's happened over the last 10 years is that a lot of people have realized that they don't really need the top-quality work, and now have an option not to buy it. A simplified view: 30 years ago, there were amateur photographers who, for small amounts of money or free, could get you a snapshot of 0/10 through 3/10 quality; and there were professional photographers, who for a large fee would take 9/10 or 10/10 quality photographs. You went with them because the free/amateur photography was just not good enough. But you didn't really need 9/10 quality; maybe 6/10 would be perfectly adequate for your needs. Now, you can buy low-cost or sometimes even free 6/10 photography. This causes lost work for the 10/10-quality photographers, but it's work that in some sense never really valued their product fully in the first place, but previously bought it because there was no "good enough" lower-quality/cost alternative. Now they only get the work of people who really, absolutely want 10/10 quality work and are willing to pay for it, which is a much smaller market.
    • pm90 15y ago
      That's a really good analysis. I will add just one thing : what you said is precisely the reason why there is so much complaining. The photographers who can take a 10/10 photograph probably put in an extraordinary amount of time and money to learn their skills, and since the market is (greatly) reduced, they feel it is unfair that they are not being sufficiently compensated for all the work that they put in.
• yangez 15y ago
  This is not entirely accurate. The original "this photograph is not free" article wasn't an attempt to prevent his own images from being copied. It was an attempt to influence OTHER photographers not to give away their photos for free. I've worked for a long time in the photography industry. In my experience there are two things that justifiably piss photographers off in a very major way: 1. Getting their photo ripped off without permission, because it loses them money. 2. Seeing a publication use another photographer's photo for free (even with permission), because it loses EVERYBODY money. If good photographers are constantly giving photos away and not charging, professional photography prices and value naturally goes down. It's kind of a tragedy of the commons - photographers who DO give away work get more recognition, but they lower the overall value of their industry.
  • aspir 15y ago
    Personally, I agree with you 100%, especially since I run BD for a firm that does a lot of client work. The only conciliation that I can offer is that I've never had a good experience with anyone who hard balls price, rather than quality -- in any industry, at any price. There will always be a point where the amateurs can't deliver like a professional can, particularly with photography -- that stuffs tough.
  • jsavimbi 15y ago
    > It was an attempt to influence OTHER photographers not to give away their photos for free. At some point, photographers will need to understand that their work is not that unique and that the wealth created by the community through sharing is much greater than that derived by a single artist through the licensing and sale of their work.
    • vilya 15y ago
      Which I'm sure will be a great comfort to them when they're struggling to feed themselves, because they've donated all that wealth to the "community". Would you apply the same argument to your own line of work?
      • 15y ago
• mohsen 15y ago
  I don't think this is a fair comparison. From what I've understood by reading both posts is that each writer comes from a different background(I can't think of a better word right now) and that's what's causing this difference of opinion. The first writer is making a living from photography as stated at the bottom of his post: "John B. Mueller is a photographer based in Ventura County, California." The second writer seems to be doing this as a hobby. At least I'm assuming so since he's been taking photos for 27 years and claims that he has not made any money from it. So I really don't think that this is a fair comparison.
• dchest 15y ago
  The right to give and the right to charge are inherently personal decisions that only the owner of the photo can make. It's not that simple. There are two "rights" here: 1) the right to publish a photo, and 2) the ability to restrict other people's freedom to copy the photo. The first one is simple -- you can choose to publish your photos, or you can choose to keep them for yourself and never publish. The second one -- the ability to restrict other people's actions on further distribution -- is a personal decision only for a limited amount of time, and only in certain circumstances and for certain works. Even if your personal decision is not to let me publish photos shot by you in my "Silly photographs" magazine, I will be able to do so once you die + 70 years (according to my country laws). Why is this? Because every author's work belongs to public once author publishes it. The author is just given a temporary monopoly on it. This was intended to make authors produce more such works; for example, here's what US Constitution says: [Congress shall have the power] to promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
  • earbitscom 15y ago
    Well then, it would seem that, if you agree with our Constitution, it is that simple.
• njharman 15y ago
  > The right to give and the right to charge are inherently personal decisions Actually, in the U.S.A. the right to restrict others from "using" "your" "intellectual property" is granted by the government and only for limited times (in theory). The default natural state is that everyone has the right to share, reuse, etc everyone's intangible creative works.
  • hetman 15y ago
    The right is not the same thing as the ability. Since rights are enforced by a civil authority, it would suggest to me the only "natural" rights are the ones granted by said authority.
    • dchest 15y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_and_legal_rights