A day of mourning for Kodak and SOPA/PIPA NOW REVISED.:
Was life easier back in the days when you just had to be good at your job?
Is protection from rank piracy really that difficult to conceive?
Notice: Edited at 3:14 on 1/19/2012 to include a counterpoint. Please read.
"Like most things in life the internet is a trade-off. A compromise. We give up some privacy in return for "connectedness." We give up some traditional protections of ownership to be able to conversely grab stuff that we want "with no consequences." At least that's the way it seems. I'm profoundly disturbed by what's happening in regard to laws that protect intellectual property and content versus the "need" to freely steal whatever we want, whenever and wherever we want it, but I might be sitting on a different side of the table than most people. You see, I write books and I create photographs that have value and which can be sold to people for actual 20th century style money. But my paradigm works only if most people play by the rules. And it seems, more and more, that they don't." (end of original content).
I wrote a long column about how the SOPA and PIPA laws would be better than nothing for content creators. I was wrong. I've been taken to school by dozens of bright and impassioned people who understand the technical aspects of the web in far greater detail than me. I have also had phone calls from two IP lawyers who are personal friends who calmly talked me through the pros and cons of what I was thinking and what I had written. Not to mention my photographer peers who just waded right in with no gloves on...
I was wrong. I decided to take down what I had written this morning and leave up the thoughtful examples that one of our readers sent to me, by way of e-mail. I have come to agree that "the ends don't always justify the means."
I want to thank everyone for their patience and politeness in this, very rare, instance in which I was obviously thinking incorrectly. I am glad, with my new knowledge and guidance, that the legislation got killed. Chastened by my own lack of depth. And fearful that my attorney friends will send me big invoices (which I will not pay since I did not solicit their advice...). I am truly gratified to have such compassionate and thoughtful friends as readers of the blog.
Now I'll just get back to writing about photography. Seriously, Thanks.
Counterpoint by a long time reader of VSL. For balance.
How about an alternate point of view from one of our well informed readers? Okay. I've redacted his name and contact info at his request.
"I am big fan of your blog about photography and read each post. Even
calling me a hobbyist photographer would be generous, yet your writing
about the issues surrounding professional photography always engage
and inform me. That is why I was so dismayed to see you defend
SOPA/PIPA in your recent blog posting. You see, while I might be a
hobbyist photographer, I am expert on the internet and specifically
software on the internet. I have been working in that sphere for 16
years and can assure you my opposition (and most peoples opposition)
to SOPA/PIPA is not due to our desire to make all content "free".
Rather, I am a strong proponent of copyright and IP protection, but I
am strong opponent of poorly written laws that are both technically
and legally idiotic.
From a technical perspective, the very idea of "foreign" vs "domestic"
website is ludicrous and impossible to define. For instance,
blogspot.com (which I'm sure you recognize) is hosted via google using data centers around the globe. A person in Belgium accessing your
website maybe accessing that data via a data center in Brussels,
Chicago, or both and would never know the difference. You are the
person uploading content to this website yet you have no ability to
know if your website is "foreign" or "domestic' and neither does a
judge, google who hosts your site, or anyone visiting it.
Let me give you an example of the kind of use case that us in the
technology business are so worried about:
1. You, disgusted with Google over their stance on SOPA/PIPA, decide
to leave the freely available blogspot hosting service, and recreate
your website as is (without the blogger header) by using your own ISP,
which you pay for.
2. You want to be able to provide the same level of service as your
previous blog (ads for your books, speedy loading, rss feeds), so you
pay your ISP for a content network, and search engine optimization,
and you take your new site live. (thus making it a foreign site)
3. Further, now that you have all this infrastructure, you decide to
start selling your books yourself through your site, and get a
contract with a payment processor and create a little web store.
4. Everything is going swimmingly, you have easily paid for your
infrastructure and more!
5. On your website you post a link to another website that contains
public domain photographs.
6. That website then posts a copyrighted photograph. (You are now
facilitating infringement)
7. A competitor of yours files a SOPA "private right of action"
against your site and gets a ruling in their favor (without your
presence or defense).
8. Your competitor can now cause your amazon ads and payment processor
to stop doing business with you, destroying your new found revenue
stream, and you have no recourse to fix this problem. Further, even
if you prove that you didn't infringe copyright, your competitor is
immune from civil action for invoking this law.
Notice in that use case, never did you actually violate any copyright.
If you think this is far fetched, it is because you have not worked
in the internet technology world. I can assure you that actions very
similar to this are already happening under the similarly bad, yet
less poorly written DMCA. The same coalition came out (with less
effective protesting) against that bill because of how easy it would
be to abuse and how poorly it understood the technical problems it
faced. Nearly every complaint brought against the DMCA before it
passed have come true.
That is why we are fighting SOPA/PIPA so hard now. It isn't because
we want content creators (you do realize that software people are
content creators as well?) to be digital sharecroppers making money
for google without compensation. It is because these laws end up being
the weapons that litigious companies use to blackmail small technology
companies and small content creators. They hinder content creation
and technical innovation, all to support large content companies that
do little advance the actual content creators or the American people
as a whole.
Thank you,"
My day of mourning for the passing of Kodak.
Kodak filed for bankruptcy today. I suppose it was inevitable given their track record of dis-innovation over the last decade. But I come here today not to bury Kodak but to praise them. They were the iPhone of their day, bringing quick and pain-free imaging to the masses while making glorious products for the Olympian gods of the photography of their time.
When the company emerges from bankruptcy they'll be not much more than a high end supplier of big inkjet machines that make printed brochures and prints from photos. I guess they don't get that the next big revolution is to finally, truly go "paperless." Paperless was one of the early promises of digital. It's just taken a bit longer to get there than we thought. And Kodak is charging right into.....the paper market. Inkjets spewing on paper at a time when even my generation is flowing to the screen and the cloud.
Ah well. At least we'll have fond memories of Instamatic Cameras on 1960's family vacations. Our first tentative steps as baby photographers with Tri-X and D-76. Our first flirtations with color via Kodachrome. Our self assured steps into business with large and medium format Ektachromes. And even our "step off the cliffs" into digital with the DCS series of cameras.
I'll never forget the darkness and quiet as I rolled countless rolls of 35mm film onto unforgiving metal reels for development. I'll always savor the memory of a gorgeous face looking back at me from the black and white magic of an Ektalure print in the development tray. A tray filled with Dektol.
Likewise, I won't forget their enormous financial and ethical support of the efforts of the ASMP and the PPof A to train, educate and guide generations of professional photographers into profitable businesses. I won't forget the free film they gave me for a trip to Rome or the samples of new products they routinely handed out for our use.
I won't forget the things I learned in the books they published. From my Kodak Photo Data Guide with incredibly valuable (to film and large format photographers) charts and graphs for using filters, computing reciprocity, calculating depth of field and so much more. I remember when the Kodak Photo Data Guide was a bible among practitioners young and old. The same with the Darkroom Data Guide with it's matrix of times and temperatures and developer dilutions.
They were the software and firmware and back end of all our businesses. And they rarely let us down or allowed a bad product to hit the market. Not a lot of "rev 1.99's"
Kodak made Rochester, N.Y. not only a nice place to live (by all accounts) but also a cultural hub and a locus for all things photographic. They gave back. To photographers and Photography. And I think we all need to be thankful for the incredible foundation they built upon which we stand today.
Who will step up and take their place in the digital age?
©2010 Kirk Tuck. Please do not re-post without attribution. Please use the Amazon Links on the site to help me finance this site.
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