Simon Crofts

Undermining Digital Britain

A photographer yesterday, after reading the Digital Economy Bill

Parliament is currently considering a new law called the Digital Economy Bill which is supposed to help create a ‘ Digital Britain ‘. Unfortunately, the draft legislation seems instead aimed at making it difficult for photographers or other visual content creators to show their pictures online or distribute digital copies of their images. Hardly conducive to promoting the internet or an efficient digital economy.

The fly in the ointment is in the orphan works* provisions. These seems to have been badly thought through and hastily thrown together with inadequate consultation.

The Government’s idea is to take control of licensing and pricing of orphan works away from copyright holders and give it instead to one or more central licensing bodies. The proposal is awful news for image creators because:-

• It doesn’t just affect orphan works. Although in theory the provisions only apply to ‘orphan works’, with new methods of distributing images digitally both on the web and from computer to computer, orphan works are a huge and increasing pool of imagery. They are influential enough to seriously affect the price of imagery for the whole market. Because market pricing will inevitably move towards the lowest common denominator set by the central licensing body, this will undermine the determination of prices for imagery as a whole.

• It will reward theft and dishonesty. Very many of the orphan works are created by theft of imagery, with the deliberate stripping out of information about the copyright holder. The new system seems to be aimed at encouraging and rewarding such illegal behaviour.

• Copyright will no longer be copyright. The proposal strikes at the heart of that cornerstone of creativity – the right of the content creator to control and license the making of copies of their ‘babies’. There is a good reason why it is called copyright!

• Nobody knows what this bit of the Bill really means. Given the importance of all this for creatives, the new provisions are extraordinarily vague – it tries to sweep the issue under the carpet by allowing the Secretary of State to adopt more or less whatever provisions he wants on the matter, without any supervision from Parliament.

• It will undermine the freedom of the internet. The Bill will stifle creators’ ability to place images online without disruptive watermarking or to deliver images in digital form to clients, achieving exactly the opposite of the intended effect of promoting the digital economy. Once digital copies are out there, the image creator will lose control of their images and the right to sell them at a price determined by the open market. Our reaction will be to make sure that images don’t get ‘out there’.

• They will give away images with no account of their actual value. Some images are much more valuable than others. Some images have a reproduction value for certain uses of perhaps £1, other images may be licensed for the same uses for hundreds or even thousands of pounds due to their quality, their rarity, their creativity, their exclusivity, or the extent of effort and cost that has gone into producing the image. A centrally determined price will be totally unable to take proper account of these subjective market influences.

• No right of moral objection to the use of your property. A copyright holder might not even want to license his image out at all – for example, if it to be used to promote a racist organisation such as the BNP. We will lose the ultimate right to say ‘no’ to the use of our images in ways we find morally objectionable.

• Last nail in the coffin for content creators. The position of image creators has already been seriously undermined by the development of a free culture in the digital economy, widespread image theft, widespread availability of images online for free or nominal payment (eg. ‘creative commons’ images on Flickr), and the difficulties faced by the client bases such as media organisations trying and failing to make money from the online content, which has led to the near-disappearance of the market for editorial imagery. All this ultimately has an effect on the quality of content provided to the British media. In the end, good quality content needs to be paid for, not stolen.

The Bill should be aiming to promote a balanced digital economy, not a system of legalised digital theft. Not surprisingly, the Bill is causing a storm of objection among photographers and other visual content creators.

* Orphan works are images where the person wanting to use an image doesn’t know, or pretends not to know, who the image creator was.

Is there Intelligent Life on Earth?

Two things to tell. First, it’s my birthday today

Second, I see my photo essay on the Lviv Ballet has appeared on The Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine’s website as a slideshow here. The series was published as a photo essay in the autumn print issue of the magazine.

One of the other photographer’s featured in More Intelligent Life’s past galleries is Simon Roberts, whose work I really admire, his Arctic Blues series is also featured there (many of which are included in his Motherland book, of course I have invested in a copy of it).

East Europe Photos launched

I’ve created a new resource allowing my archive to be searched online. Since most of the images are one way or another connected with Eastern Europe, I’ve called it East Europe Photos, and the URL is at www.easteuropephotos.com. There are currently around 7000 searchable images, including a number of photo stories, but also a lot of travel photography. Unlike most stock travel agencies, there isn’t too much of the standard tourist views – there are plenty of other places where that sort of thing can be sourced. But for a more quirky view of the locations covered, you may find it worth a look.

There are pictures from all over, but particularly good coverage of:

Industry around Russia, Ukraine, Poland including steel, bottling, energy, banking, road construction, clothes manufacture, transport, trams and buses, ballet in Ukraine and Poland – and locations such as Krakow, Kiev, Moscow, St Petersburg, southern Ukraine including the Crimea, Riga, Warsaw, Prague, the Swedish, Danish and Finnish coasts, Berlin, the German coasts including Rugen and the Frisian Islands, and so on.

More Peterburgers

The week I spent there gave me the opportunity to visit a number of families with a range of problems. I take my hat off to this lady, who was bringing up her three hyperactive sons single-handedly. They had suffered from serious health problems caused by an allergy, but were beginning to recover with some social support and once the source of the allergy was idenitified. The family was incredibly active, with boxes full of interesting items – a cat’s skull, items of natural history collected in the countryside, collections of scientific interest. Music was a key part of their life. The mother deserved a medal for keeping the boys occupied. The eldest son will soon be starting to study art at Peterburg’s world-renowned Hermitage.

Another family, another boy. He was very happy to pose with his toys – and the cat wanted some of the action too:

In Petersburg, like everywhere else the world over, family relations can be difficult sometimes:

I visited a hostel where children are able to stay whil their family are having problems – for example, while parents are in hospital and unable to care for the children. But some were there simply because they were able to get on with their parents.

A couple of the childrens’ homes had been recently renovated.

And some homes hadn’t seen renovation for a while.

This had nothing to do with the families I visited, except that it was near their building. But I liked this building. The legend on the side reads “Let’s preserve the natural environment”:-

Propiska in St Petersburg

I recently visited St. Petersburg, where I was working with EveryChild charity, taking pictures of St Peterburg families who have problems. What struck me most was how many social problems stem from the identity card and registration system (which used to be know as the ‘propiska’). The Russian government use it as a way of controlling the population by stopping economic migrants moving to St Petersburg or Moscow where much of the big money is to be made.

What it means is that there are two classes of society – those that have a Petersburg propiska, and those that don’t. The latter are illegal immigrants in their own country, with no rights to social welfare, education, medical care or a job.

So many of Russia’s problems stem from this old Soviet system of keeping control of the population by requiring registration and an internal passport – an identity card.

Interview in Practical Photography

Just a quick heads up that this month’s issue of Practical Photography magazine has an article about my photography. The issue is a ‘low light special’, so the interview with me is about taking pictures in the fast-moving, dim interior backstage during the ballet. Here’s a preview:-

For I’m a jolly good Fellow!

I was delighted to get a call from the Royal Photographic Society telling me that I had been elected a Fellow.

At last I’m a ‘proper’ photographer!