CHICAGO – What’s my biggest takeaway from my time here at the 2009 Picture Archive Council of America’s “Best Practices” Symposium? There are a lot of good actors in the digital age.

PACA is a Copyright Alliance member and I’m thrilled about that – it’s run by a great group of people strongly committed to advancing the visual arts industry and community. I met some interesting photographers here, but PACA members by and large are stock photo agencies. They provide an easy way for individual photographers to connect with those looking to license their photos. They also have a tremendous respect for photographers’ rights.

They are participating in a plethora of online experiments aimed at tracking down infringing reproductions of images online but also enabling those wishing to use a photo find the owner of an image. I was stunned to see how far image recognition technology has come. This is fundamentally important to photographers’ rights, and should as it develops help alleviate somewhat the potential harms visual artists could face if orphan works legislation some day becomes law.

The focus of my keynote here was on the long history of copyright and visual artists. Before Gutenberg invented the printing press, illustrations were a critical, and at times dominant, aspect of books. Venetians in the 1500s included prints such as woodcuts in their early version of copyright known as privilegio; a similar system emerged in France. By 1710, when England instituted copyright, maps and charts were included with books. As a collector of antique maps, all I have to do is put maps of various eras next to each other to see the burst in sophistication that occurred throughout Europe once maps were protected under copyright.

In the United States, mapmakers were in the original Copyright Act of 1790, and other visual artists came into copyright law in 1831, well before other industries more commonly associated with copyight such as recorded music, motion pictures and software. (Songwriters did come into copyright in the 1831 act as well, after a brief period of protection in Rhode Island prior to the U.S. Constitution’s ratification.) Look back at old dagguerotypes, and you’ll see the amazing creativity artists were applying in photography nearly two hundred years ago.

Outsiders couldn’t possibly understand the efficiency found in the photo licensing community. I’m getting to know it a bit better by attending conferences such as this one. Yes, some of the licensing agreements can run a little long, but sometimes that is necessary to ensure the rights of the creators. Look at a book contract some time and try to find the provisions that should be dropped to make it shorter; if you care about the author’s rights, you’ll be hard-pressed to find something to cut.

Voluntary licensing works. Period. Every time you open a magazine or book, every time you walk past a poster or an ad on the side of a bus, you’re seeing images that reflect a licensing market at work. Just because technology allows someone to obtain someone else’s creative work without asking for it does not mean we should take away the creator’s rights and instead force the creator to come up with a way to enable that theft through legal means, such as a compulsory license.

Kudos to PACA and its members for looking out for rightsholders.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 9:02 am by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright law, creators, events, licensing, property rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.