Featured Post

Pinned Post, A Policy Note:

I have made a decision to keep this blog virus free from this point forward, at least until the smoke clears. This is not a judgement about ...

Saturday, July 16, 2016

Intellectual Property Rights

Here's an amusing thing.

Missy Mwac, who is a boring idiot who fancies herself terribly funny, got another snotty piece placed on PetaPixel, this one about stealing photos. The money quote, for our purposes, is:

Take a look at the image.
Ask yourself, “Did I take this?”
If the answer is yes, do whatever you’d like with it.
If the answer is no, walk away…
It doesn’t freakin’ belong to you.

Because I am an unpleasant person, and because I know hipster shitheads like this all too well, I peeked directly at her blog. Lookee here, posted on June 8, we find this post. Which includes this picture:



Wow. Missy Mwac, snotty hipster, shoots The Walking Dead? Or, maybe, she actually neither took that picture nor walked away. Indeed, her web site is littered with stolen pictures, but since they're all used ironically, I guess it's OK. Or maybe it's OK because someone else stole the pictures first?

Anyways.

I've talked at some length about how screwed up the intellectual property rights around photography are. Here, for instance, and here.

Be that as it may, photographers seem to be almost universally in favor of strong intellectual property rights for photographs, rights which favor the photographer very very strongly, and that is indeed the current state of the law. These same photographers, often, will happily steal photos for meme purposes, or other "ironic" uses. Many of them probably download movies or music to which they actually have very little right under the law. Some of them probably use cracked copies of Photoshop. But steal someone's boring sunset photo, and feel my wrath! I saw this in the software industry as well, people who literally create intellectual property for a living would routinely steal other kinds of intellectual property.

People are hypocrites. Surprise!

4 comments:

  1. Typical "gen Y" attitude. I work in legal in a so-called creative industry and it's the same story every day: plagiarism dressed up as creativity, masked as satire or parody. Aside from the fact that what is produced simply isn't funny (except perhaps to the freshman humor of the creator's idiot friends and colleagues), in the jurisdiction where I work there isn't a true copyright exception for parody anyway (at least not if you plan to commercially gain from it).

    ReplyDelete
  2. I clicked on some of the links attached and found that she doesn't refute anything you mention, she just takes offense to being called a snooty hipster. Well, mostly the hipster part bothers her. Lol

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Wow, she noticed? And responded, somewhere? Bizarre.

      I wonder how are feels about being called a shithead. Or, let's be realistic, it is entirely possible that someone else called her a snotty hipster.

      Delete
  3. An year ago I printed online ten photobooks containing a project of mine, for some friends. One of them worked in a pub that had a small exposition of photobooks for sale and asked me to leave one copy on display. The other were all very nice, vey good works. A week ago I learned that someone stole mine. Just mine. I was flattered. But I think I would be upset if someone appropriated one of my works from my online gallery. Don't kniw why. I'm strange.

    ReplyDelete