What level of infringement is the unsolicited act of a making facebook archive? Soft turning to medium? But, if anything Rickard’s taking his concentration of photo-pellets and sprinkling it over shark-infested waters. The likelihood of a hard-core infringement perhaps is then multiplied. You’ve concentrated the risk in the place where risk is highest. It’s the potential of further, more damaging infringement from unknown parties that we’re all concerned about, not the well-intended blog-like infringement that Rickard himself has commited.

To what extent, Rickard, are you complicit for what potentially can happen to the images in FB?

(btw, sorry for any ambiguous minced modifiers. Your wife’s sister isn’t lame, I was referring to the 3-11 times of her. )

person a, the artist, posts their work on their website, or is published in a magazine or book.

person b, the admirer, takes the work off the website or scans from the book or magazine and puts it on their blog which is owned entirely by a corporation, or posts it on a social network, without asking permission from the photographer.

person c, the opportunist, sees the image from person b and takes the photo and starts using it for himself.

person d, the corporation, takes the image because person b and c clicked on something that said they had full rights to publish person a’s work even though person a knows nothing about it. person d (corporation) starts using screen grabs of their social network which includes copies of person a’s work.

person a finds out person d is pilfering their photography to use for advertisements which promote their social network (let’s say they are google or facebook). person a is horrified, angry, feels used, hires an attorney. after several back and forths, months and years of litigation and HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS later, person a finally receives a settlement from person d which doesn’t even cover all of their attorney fees.

in short, this shit ain’t cool.

“What if I don’t want my work showing up next to shitty web advertisements?”

Again, Doug said he’d take down whatever people ask him to.

many thanks for visiting the blog and leaving such a detailed response. I’m sorry that your wife’s sister was labelled as ‘lame’!

a couple of thoughts…

- it might be worth having some of this explanation, and maybe a list of ‘partner’ photographers and writers, on the ASX site. This would lend the site more weight and make observations like the ones that I have made redundant.
- regarding being ‘liberal’ with posting photographers images on facebook – I still think thats something you shouldn’t be doing. Its not too hard (and its also ethically correct) to contact the copyright holders and ask for permission before doing so.

cheers

ben

Here are some areas to shed a bit of light. You can get some insight into my approach and thinking.

On the ASX site, most of the content is older, as you have noticed… with a few exceptions, Paul Graham’s essays, Shelby Adams essays, my essays (probably 30 or so there), etc. but it is spreading out into other areas rapidly. It is becoming much, much more. Certainly, I have no interest in reposting current blog posts from others… it would not make for great publishing to say the least, everyone is doing this already with links to each other and it is a bit boring, at least for me. My only voice on my site is with a different approach – read the essay here to get a guage on this:

http://www.americansuburbx.com/2008/09/todd-hido-new-work.html

More on the poetic lines. I will bring some of this style of writing to Foam Magazine (nl) and some other publications in the upcoming months.

Here are some of the sources for content on ASX and also some comments on areas of concern for some of you on this thread:

- http://findarticles.com/

(“Find Articles” his is actually a major source for ASX. I noticed that there was such rich content in these open source magazine article archives, mainly from the early 90′s and into 2000′s, old print mags, and I started to put them together to allow fresh eyes to read them. I do make these quite “shiny” with editing, etc. and incorporation of imagery and I post only what I think has “weight” and also fits into the ASX narrative)

- Content with active and explicit partnerships (I will name just a few of them – Gil Blank, JH Engstrom, Bruno Chalifour, Martin Jaeggi, Shelby Lee Adams, Todd Hido, Paul Schiek, Robert Hirsch, Bruce Jackson, Roswell Angier, Danny Lyon, John Divola, Ed Templeton, Scot Sothern, Tanyth Berkeley, also many of the major photobook publishers) is also a very large portion of the content. There are so many people in the industry that are thrilled about the site, I can’t even begin to list them all. The readership is at roughly 100,000+ visitors per month to the main site and growing rapidly and everyone who has been in contact with me view this as a win for themselves as individuals and for others as viewers. As you pointed out, AD Coleman did not and I removed his essay immediately. There was one other individiual and then literally this thread here that you posted. That’s it – over the course of a year. Other than that, everyone has gone crazy over the site and wanted to be part of it, even waiting in a waiting list to be part of it.

- Photographers own portfolio sites with interviews and essays that have run (I usually reach out to the photographer to see if they want to run those). Many photographers run all of their publication content essays, interviews, etc on their own site)

- Facebook galleries are often a joint effort (Pieter Hugo, Mike Brodie, Todd Hido, Shelby Adams, All of the Bill Charles Represents photographers: Stephen Shore, Larry Sultan, etc.,) and many are not. I am a bit liberal in this area with the “Canon” as Bryan F. referred to them. I have no interest in commercial photographers and for the most part journalists – these are the largest stakeholders in the area of web licensing for their imagery. As fine art photographers, most of the photographers in the FB galleries are not concerned over FB advertising dollars or “clicks per view” on their photographs for lo-res viewing of the images – their revenue is coming in massive fashion 95%+ from print sales in galleries, the web lo-res galleries are the least of their concern. To date none have asked to be removed or deleted. Magnum artists are gone as I rethought this and they DO have a concern over web viewing. As a side note, these galleries on FB are parallel to the use of these images on individual blogs across the web, but in more concentrated fashion. Blogs also have ads, as does Google Images if you do a search, etc. FB is just a place that made sense to do this, as a companion to the ASX site…

Other sources:

- PDF’s for essays that Google posts in their entirety – do a search on Google for Diane Arbus for example and you will find Google’s own trawler versions, HTML and PDF’s, Google Docs, etc

- Essays and images directly from galleries and gallerists who represent the photographers. Again, they are not concerned over ASX and viewers diving with fresh eyes on to their artists. They are concerned with selling prints. Many galleries are able to provide approval for image use and essays.

Hope this helps. Obviously, we disagree in some areas but this may help shed some light into questions that you have above (your disclaimer area).

I didn’t want to get too wrapped up directly in a lengthy debate on the shifting landscape of the web and copyright but wanted to get some info posted for you guys to talk about further. Have at it!

(P.S. – The blonde in the banner up top, that is my wife’s sister. The photograph looked to be cold, superficial and raw, “Star-80′ish” with an edge… much the way that I view America itself – superficial, desperate for stardom and with an edge. I added in the other icons purely to connotate this very “American” vibe. I did not want a “highbrow/Academia” feel to the banner and title even though the content was going to be weighty. The visual look had to be edgy and a bit “in your face” to counterbalance the weighty diatribe. I may refresh the banner up top at some point… )

Best,

Doug Rickard

What would be more appropriate would be a wikipedia style open source, collaborative amongst the photography community for archiving this type of work.

http://www.smartplanet.com/technology/blog/rethinking-healthcare/big-mother-gets-her-shot-at-cutting-health-costs/1023/

subsequent article here

http://www.smartplanet.com/technology/blog/thinking-tech/how-to-protect-your-copyrighted-images-on-the-web/3684/#comments

Platforming it to facebook, without mention of its property issues, is even more of a affront to any kind of real sophistication. Maybe we can all agree that we need to ween people off of facebook rather than giving them more reason to suck heavily on it.

Where does one start in a place like ASX anyway? It’s one of those everything-you-need-to-know-about-photography is here, so you should read this whole thing if you wanna play photoball online, and be cool, and X-y, whatever that is. Ironically, in the about section Rickard lauds the sites heavy-editedness; and its clear now that this might just be a disclaimer in euphemistic double-speak for his “editing” of other people’s content.

No need for any of that.

And you do know that Facebook sells advertising against the pages, right? What if I don’t want my work showing up next to shitty web advertisements?

And what if I did this with all the original content that’s published right now on blogs? Could I take Jorg Colberg’s essays and post them verbatim on LPV? Or what about just downloading the Fraction essays and re-uploading them to the LPV Facebook page?

For whatever reason, there seems to be this impression that work from the “canon” is pretty much fair game as if these photographers and writers are dead or simply don’t care.

I mean, that Graham essay was written just a couple months ago. It hasn’t exactly been buried in some archive somewhere.

Clearly, I post photos around the web and don’t always get permission. For the LPV blog, we always contact the photographers. Tumblr is a bit of a different story, but I think there’s a clear difference between one off photographs and entire galleries.

But Facebook is an absolute no no. Not now, not in the future, not ever. They are doing everything they possibly can to make it the only place you go for content on the web.

If you don’t understand how corrosive Facebook is becoming then you’re not paying close enough attention to the internet. And if we simply are lulled into complacency by laziness and convenience, we’re going to lose many of the things that make the internet frickin awesome.