Lessons from the Richter Scales-Lane Hartwell imbroglio

The Richter Scales have reposted their "Here Comes Another Bubble" video sans the much-disputed Lane Hartwell photograph of Owen Thomas that they used in the original video without permission and without attribution. Lane has also made a statement:

As the Richter Scales stated in their blog, the video that used my image--without my permission--was viewed just under one million times on YouTube. In the end, the band opted not to work with me toward a fair resolution of the issue. I have to say that I'm very disappointed with the members of the band I negotiated with in good faith.

Lane goes on to say:

I will be sending the band an invoice for their use of my image in the first version of the video. I hope they pay it as I'll use the money to pay my lawyer and donate the rest to KidsWithCameras.org. Kids with Cameras is a nonprofit organization that teaches the art of photography to marginalized children in communities around the world. This was the offer I proposed to the Richter Scales that they chose to disregard.

Thus, it doesn't appear that, in this particular case, attribution in the original video would have put a stop to this controversy before it began. Perhaps if the band had asked in advance. I don't know. When people have requested to use my photographs in a book and, in one case, a PBS documentary I've always said yes for the price of a photo credit. But that's me. And I'm not a professional photographer with a history of having her photos and those of her friends ripped off.

Jonathan at Plagiarism Today has a great recap of the entire imbroglio. Among his lessons learned:

Attribute obsessively: If you use other people's content in any way, attribute, attribute well, and attribute graciously. It is best to follow industry standards here and to start out with the intention of doing so rather than having to go back and do it later, when it is much harder.

And:

Remain calm: When emotions get involved, as they often do with content theft and plagiarism issues, it is easy to lose sight of how important a case really is. Some are more important than they seem, others are less. This case was the latter. It is important to focus less on feelings and more on legal issues and how a case of plagiarism can potentially help or hurt you.

As I noted yesterday, my own feelings were pretty conflicted about this tempest. Lane's DMCA takedown notice that bumped the original video off YouTube seemed somewhat disproportionate to me. On the other hand, the Richter Scales largely hid behind a Fair Use copyright defense. Leaving aside whether Fair Use applied here (it's at best a borderline case); it's just bad manners and bad practice to not give attribution to all the people whose work the group used--as they have now done in the revised video. This case--and many others like it--is far more about proper societal behavior than it is about the nuances of copyright law.

As "Miss Rogue" writes in "Tragedy of the Commons: Lane Hartwell vs Richter Scales:

Since the video was viewed hundreds of thousands of times (prior to takedown), there was a missed opportunity there for the many photographers whose photos were used to make this group famous. In a post titled Credit and "Here Comes Another Bubble", the author explains:

"We did make an effort to credit those people we actively worked with on the video, as well as Billy Joel, which we listed in the comments on YouTube and on our blog. But, given the large number of sources we used, the task of assigning credit for each source seemed impractical."

He goes on to mention Lane Hartwell...without linking to her photos or her Web site. As one commenter said, "Basically if I am reading your post correct, what I hear you saying is, 'Mea Culpa, but we're lazy.'" In actuality, the time one can take to list the photo credits is a fraction of the time it would take to go out and duplicate the work of those artists to make the same presentation.

I'm unsure what good will come out of this whole incident. The problem is that when emotions run high, as they did here, people tend to spend more time fortifying their own positions rather than exploring new ones. However, I can at least hope that it's at least raised a little bit the general awareness around giving proper credit for images and other material from the Web.

[Ninth_Life]

The controversy over content only gets more complicated when looking at the real damages done and the unfairness of any present system. Time and again we see content that has been generated by the general public which is comprised of other copyrighted material. Although these uncredited creations comprise of mostly deviated works, there is usually no material gain by the producers. However, there seems to be a considerable amount of profit being raked in by the presenters of these so called, new works of art. At what point is anybody's intellectual property deemed unworthy of compensation or accreditation, due to popular opinion? We just read a WSJ article about turning people's "web trash" into apparently more creative content. None of the people's mugs and group shots where credited in those. Should they all sue those producers, and WSJ as well?
Thing is, these internet companies like Google and Yahoo have been the only ones really profiting, sometimes greatly, from all this "stolen" content. Yet, nobody ever holds them accountable for consciously doing so. What's more, these companies often set up unsuspecting folks to have their content stolen or somehow otherwise abused, usually without their consent at all. Whenever a problem arises with questionable material, the companies involved all point at the poor users involved. Sometimes they even keep records of what users do and turn them in for it later, when the heat is on. Yahoo's Flickr and other photo sites put protecting user content way behind other efforts of allowing profitable access to what essentially becomes their stock photo catalogs to be monetized at will. Google's YouTube and others do the same. Ironically, they almost all prevent any selling of the content by the owners themselves, while pulling this crap of profiteering through ads.
If someone posts a photo of their car or whatever, and advertisers are allowed to attach an affiliated solicitation for a related product, that is grounds for compensation based on what the rules were set up for to begin with. All the rest of this pride and prejudice goes nowhere in evolving the system we desperately need now to establish clear rules, and to keep the profit monger providers of the platforms in check as well. On the other side, places like Flickr need to put more priority on protecting people's property by placing better ways of presenting it safely and by clearly informing their patrons the risks involved with using thier website. This split personality of an internet divided between a anarchistic free for all and worrying about your rights only when it comes to protecting your own stuff needs to be resolved. People need to grow up now and start showing the respect that they all expect.

[ghaff]

Regarding flickr specifically, I generally like the service but one thing that it doesn't do well is to provide any sort of fine-grained control of who gets to see/download what resolutions. Nor does it provide good security/watermarking features.

But your last point is the one I really agree with. At the end of the day it comes down to people showing respect for the property of others.