The flaw is that no one is going to recreate that photograph from scratch. Any professional who sells photographs is amortizing the cost of his equipment over m

The flaw is that no one is going to recreate that photograph from scratch. Any professional who sells photographs is amortizing the cost of his equipment over many sales. Buyers pay according to what they (and the market) think that particular photograph is worth. The cost of the equipment doesn't really factor into it. It's similar to buying anything on the market - A toaster would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build from scratch (http://www.thetoasterproject.org/ http://www.thetoasterproject.org/), but no one pays that much (not does any manufacturer expect that much) since no one is really going to build one from scratch. The author's argument gets really weird at the end when he claims that if someone misappropriates the image, he would charge the cost of his camera, his laptop, his software - the whole shebang that went into it. It's a very strange way of computing the loss of value to him. The loss of value could be zero (if there was no buyer for that image in the first place - a lot of photographers take excellent images without anyone actually buying or wanting to buy them ever), or it could be many thousands of dollars if it is a piece of art that is highly valued. Basing the value on the cost of the equipment that went into producing it does not do justice to the image either way.