There is quite a bit in the press in the UK right now about the new copyright law passed by Parliament.  The government say that the bill will streamline and clarify the use of imagery where the photographer cannot be identified or contacted.  Photographers are worried that the bill will leave them up protected by large corporations who are prepared to use images without paying for them.

Firstly, I think it is important to say that these issues of improper use of copyrighted images has been going on for some time and the internet and digital capture has only made things harder.  S is it right to look at ways to simplify or clarify the law?  Well I would agree, that yes something needs to be done.  Is this bill the way ahead?  Well I am sure there will be many photographers with a great many opinions, but there is a real consensus that over all these changes may be damaging.

One of the issues is the rights pertaining to ‘unpublished’ works.  This will technically mean that any image or document made before 1989 can be used by anyone wishing to use it, with or without permission.  Further to that if a company does publish the document they will then effectively get the copyright (or publishing rights) for 25 years.  This could mean they can sell these documents without the consent of the originator.  Pretty scary stuff.  It seems that a lot of the lobbying for this change has come from places like ‘Google’, who stand to potentially raise a lot of revenue from this.

Another is termed as ‘Orphan works’ and is related to the use of documents (including photographs) where the reasonable steps made to identify the originator fail.  The document can then be used without any recompense to the originator.  Most professional photographers apply what is called meta data to their images and in basic terms is hidden in the image, the details of the image including who, what, where, when and how the image was made.  Who took the image and the contact details of the photographer.  This sounds great but most images on facebook simply do not have this info.  In some cases the uploading of imagery to certain sites can remove this metadata too so that all the important information is lost.

What is reasonable?  Who decides?  The work ‘diligent search’ is present but what does that mean in legal terms?  It is what I refer to as a cuddly word, it lacks real definition.  It will probably take court action from a number of cases to make this clear.

So where does that leave us?  The image used in the blog entry is obviously OTT, but will we see more of this kind of approach in an attempt to protect our property, because in simple terms this is the fact.  These images represent income for some people, bread and butter, income and as such it would seem that there is just too much opportunity for abusing this bill.

What do you think?  I would love to hear from you.