By Lars Ingvar Boksjo:
I’ve checked out a number of services to show some of my pictures to a wider audience. But I always found that it is very easy to download the picture file on the computer for whatever use. It’s not that I don’t think that you should be able to store what’s on the web locally, but I also feel that photographers have the same right to control further sharing and publicizing of their work as musicians, filmmakers and writers.
Some sites offer right click protection so that the visitor can’t download the photograph directly, but that don’t prevent him or her from saving the page in its entirety. If you do that then you can find the pictures in the downloaded files folder. Firefox is a good tool for that…
Other sites, like Photoshelter has themes that serves up the pictures via a script and only leaves the thumbnails human readable. But then again you can take screenshots and many photographers wants to present high res files to make them look good on those shiny 5K screens and screen captures of those will be of very high quality.
Needless to say: At this point it’s easy to remove copyright information in the metadata of the file… And an “orphan” is born!
I think that the contents, all of it, of webpages should be downloadable for reference and further discourse but that that also has to stay under the traditional restriction for citations and such. I also think that all creators of all kinds IP should be treated equally.
Your thoughts?
Lars Ingvar Boksjo: Photography 