We meet here in Prague to find and
see partners, to plan for the year ahead, to make deals at the tables
and to take stock of where our industry is and will be. Headlines since
we last met have been dominated by news from Corbis, Getty and
Jupitermedia by talk of business models, royalty-free, rights managed,
subscription, images for a dollar or a hundred thousand dollars, amazing
new search engines, portals.
The view emerging from Prague
will, I hope, help us better to see the world today, retrieve yesterday
and reveal tomorrow. Cepic is a thousand members strong and here are met
400 companies and 800 delegates from fifty countries to help us in this
task.
A Look Back
Words of
Thanks
* * * * *
This year’s keynote session is to
debate "Has the past got a future?" and one of the most immediate
threats to this was the Freeney patent and even as I travelled here I
heard the good news that British justice had found for Corbis and Getty,
the defendants in the case which was one of patent infringement, and
thus found for us all.
Mostly we worry about copyright.
The law of copyright and neighbouring rights is continually evolving.
One of Cepic’s main tasks is to spread awareness of this and represent
our case to the European Union and the World Intellectual Property
Organisation. But copyright can be capricious and this should not force
us into extremes.
The English newspaper "The
Observer" asks, "What if the law required that before you took a
photograph of anyone or anything you had to ask permission? How
impoverished the world will be." The Observer adds, "If the big
multimedia organisations get their way, control of intellectual property
will become even tighter." Here, clearly, is the need to balance freedom
of the press, personality rights, and the public interest. For example,
if museums control and prohibit reproduction of images in their
collection, then surely law would make their copyright perpetual. As
that is not the intention how is the economic need of the museum to be
protected? If football clubs and stars and the man in the street and the
owners of property control the rights involved and charge or prohibit at
will, photographers and publishers will be at risk, especially as the
laws are different throughout Europe. We need a return to sanity where
the right to photograph is robustly interpreted in the public interest.
Cepic aims to produce a guide to current practice in the various EU
countries.
Let us remember the message of
Rachel Carson’s "The Silent Spring" and work for a world where the
polluting signs of "No photography" will disappear. Photography shapes
our world and our perception of it and the archives of our members are
the collective memory of Europe and a keystone of our information
society.
If the photography of today is
under threat, what of that of yesterday?
Digitisation and the sense of
permanence that virtual reality brings are gifts from the gods to beware
of. Where at first it was believed that digital libraries would be
economic, there is a dawning realisation that operating digital
libraries may well be more expensive than the hard copy versions and
clearly so when legacy files must be retained as well.
Other threats to our business and
to our culture include:
>>> Storage media which won’t work with new
hardware
>>> Format problems where image files won’t
work with processing software.
>>> Image quality does not meet ever-higher
expectations.
>>> Digital preservation needs continuing
active management.
>>> The costs of storing digitally is
higher than storing analogue. Recent research in the US suggests that
the cost of storage in 2003 per digital photograph was US$0.47 for a 32
MB file against US$0.003 for a 35mm negative.
>>> Owners, producers, keepers and users of
digital pictures are rarely the same, and all may have conflicting
requirements and expectations of the same image.
>>> Metadata, at present the main way of
image retrieval, has no common language or standards and will continue
to evolve.
>>> Lost images. Many now never leave the
camera as deletion is so easy. Corbis puts archives deep underground.
When will these be seen again? Small agencies disappear and 50 million
pictures sent back to photographers may share the same fate.
"Photographic history does not lie
because it is light that wrote it on the plate," wrote a late 19th
century author and The British Journal of Photography in 1888 called for
the creation of large historical archives of photography in the
conviction that, in the space of a century, images would be the most
necessary and precious means of representing and interpreting events.
Why is all this so important? Because it has been truly said, "to assess
the future it is important to understand the past forget and it will
happen again".
With all this churn around us, we
still must remember our heritage, use our knowledge, our technology and
this conference in golden Prague to protect our copyright. Let’s
remember that the most published movie is "It’s a Wonderful Life".
Because he did not renew copyright in the 1950s, director Frank Capra
has lost half a million dollars to date. There is a lesson for us all
there.
* * * * *
The honorary
CEPIC Committee and our Administrator personally organise Congress. This
is a huge task for which I am most grateful and particularly for the
tireless work of Sylvie Fodor who has just celebrated her tenth year
with us. We are most grateful to Georg Hodek of isifa and Eva Hodek of
Prague House of Photography who bravely suggested Prague as a venue when
they were still mopping up the floods.
Yet the organisation of
CEPIC Congress includes a lot of people who work in the shadow but
without whom the event would never have happened. Our special thanks at
this point to Katerina Skalicka of isifa image service, who with
great efficiency organised all the contacts in Prague and solved any
incoming langage misunderstanding issues, to Jan Lipar manager of
Gastro-Žofin
who organises the catering in Prague. Our thanks to the Goethe
Institut and to the Film Academy in Prague, the FAMU, who
provided us additional rooms. Last but not least, our thanks also to all
our speakers at the Thursday Opening Panel and in the various Seminars
who so generously give up of their time.
We are grateful as always to
Katrin Goepel whose AKG offices house our administration in Berlin, to
our national associations, their members and our supporting members, in
all some thousand agents, libraries and museums. We need more national
associations to be formed in the member states newly joined to the EU
and as many supporting members to further our work as are prepared to
pay the small annual fee.
