I’m not for a complete eradication of copyright, but even if I was, or the brunt of your article was aimed at such a scheme, then your conclusion doesn’t make any sense. The corporations can hardly make property out of your work, if the lack of copyright protection means that there is no intellectual “property.” Again, that is not what I or most of the movements you refer to by name are aiming for.

In a less radical scheme which “weakens” copyright, then it will weaken it all around, again affecting the companies as well.

There are movements, and I am certainly a supporter of many of them, aiming for radical reform of copyright (radical shortening of the length of protection, freeing orphaned works, supporting open source and open access initiatives, and re-creating a culture of intellectual sharing that is withering all around us in an age when creative work is being commodified more than it ever has), and the building of legal and communal frameworks that make it easier for those who create “works” of a creative nature to have more choices when they release their work.

The Royalty Fee issue you are talking about has nothing to do with copyright reforms. It is a broad license, and as you describe it, it sucks if you want to profit by your labor. The choice to issue such a license is that of the corporation. The choice to agree to such a license is that of the contributor. If the contributor of a work is willing (there is no coercion here) to release their work under such a broad license, then that is their own choice.

If they give it away completely, or release it under a CC license, that is also their choice and I admire them for making that contribution—especially if they have calculated that there is no company willing to pay an amount or offer a license that they believe worthy of their work.

Several of the entries of this blog (mostly anedoctes from my life in East Asia) for example, released as they are under a CC license, have been scraped and posted on a number of aggregation news sites. These sites have created nothing, but have selected blog entries they liked, sometimes added a picture (modification is permitted by the CC license for this site), and always have added advertisements. Those companies profit from my generosity, that is, they make ad revenue from my postings because I chose to release this whole blog under a generous CC license. Does that make me an unwitting ally of big business? Am I responsible for the fact that good writers cannot sell their stories to paying websites because these websites can now scrape their stories off of CC blogs?

Or to put it in your terms, do I deserve recompense for my labor? Perhaps, but I don’t write on this blog for money, I like the fact that people enjoy reading what I post here, I enjoy the comments and discussions it generates, and I’m delighted when something I say gets picked up somewhere on the web and becomes a topic of discussion or is found to be educational. I enjoy creating and I have the luxury of not having to live off of what I write. If I did try to live off of writing, and found getting good enough pay increasingly difficult because corporations are busy scraping blogs and posting user content the last thing I would do is blame or criticise those who are giving their content away.

I wouldn’t criticise the “the lowest cost producer – the amateur photographer throwing their images onto the Web” or the “amateur [who] will buy a newspaper or magazine simply for the thrill of being in print.” and I wouldn’t criticize the “technology utopians” who are trying to make it easier to share, mix, and create materials without being hindered by a century of copyrighted blockage, dwindling fair use protection, etc.

There have never been any barriers to entry to my profession by the way. All the photographers I know do it because they simply decided to do it, and in business terms its already about as Darwinian as you wanna get, so I have no hangups about being ‘beaten’ by anyone. Ya win some, ya lose some.

The iStockphoto business model is partially because they have to find a price point which can compete with images given away, and also that in some cases they only pass on 25c in the dollar to their contributors anyway. All the images are RF – Royalty Free, which is an extremely broad license which kinda renders the copyright redundant, as the buyer can use the image pretty much in any way they see fit. The images only value then, is their commodity value – a value which is not fully passed onto the authors even then. I don’t know any photographer – amateur or not – who refers to their images as their ‘property’. They refer of course to it as their ‘work’, and if anything, I’m arguing that ALL authors deserve recompense for their labour. But more often than not, media organisations soliciting for User Generated Content have hidden terms which steal the copyright from the contributor. It’s then leveraged for profit – and their newly acquired ownership is rigorously enforced of course, because thay have the financial and legal resources to do so. I don’t.

In terms of adaption, the article may have made me appear to be more of a Luddite than I am. The last blog article I posted:

http://sionphoto.blogs.com/sionphoto/2006/12/newspapers_are_.html

will hopefully provide a more optimistic counterbalance to the Register piece, which was written some time ago and held for a while.

The context is a bit different. However, CC is a great tool and at Kumaru.com we propose it. I wrote about your conversation at: http://forum.kumaru.com:8080/posts/list/45.page

Happy New Year!

IStockphoto (which he offers as an expample of this development) is fully copyright operated too, and has nothing to do with CC or copyleft. It’s just an example of different business models made possible through the advent of the internet.