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This is an Orphan Work too

Feb 22. 2010
10:02
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sylviefodor
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Ladislav Bielik, The Bare-chested Man in Front of the Occupier‘s Tank, August 1968

BySylvie FodorThe combination of groundbreaking technology and badly crafted legislation, could make any search of photographs, and by implication their authors, completely redundant.

Last week I received a phone call from the photo editor of a photo magazine in France: Le Magazine Littéraire. The photo researcher was desperately looking for the author of a photograph. Easy to google: just search for the name of the photographer “Bielik”. The picture appears at the top of the search in several formats: a beautiful and dramatic picture, showing a man baring his chest to a Soviet tank. This picture is world famous. It was published in several newspapers in the West, won several awards and became one of those symbolic photographs illustrating an historical event. The name of the photographer, however, Ladislav Bielik, remained unknown until his son, Peter Bielik, set out to establish the truth and won a copyright case in 2005. The full story can be found here: http://spectator.sme.sk/articles/view/16982

The photograph and the exhibition around it came to the CEPIC Congress in Malta in June 2008, just 40 years after the dramatic events. It was easy to give Peter’s contact details to the French magazine. Shortly afterwards, I received a grateful message of thanks: “Chère Madame, thank you for your help in finding the rights’ holders of Ladislav Bielik. I’ve been searching for several days and it was so moving to talk to him directly on the phone.”

Why am I telling this story? What is so special about providing the contact details of a photographer and making a photo researcher beam with joy?
Because the same week, I read about this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0D4avXwMmM
(new user-friendly features for online magazine Wired)

And this:
http://copyrightaction.com/forum/uk-gov-nationalises-orphans-and-bans-no...
(introduction of Orphan Works usage rights in the impending Digital Economy Bill in the UK)

The combination of both groundbreaking technology and badly crafted legislation, could make any search of photographs, and by implication their authors, completely redundant.

In the “old” word of print, there is at least one reward for picture researchers to carry out a search until they get success: this is the only way for them to get a high resolution image of print quality. In the new brave digital world, lower quality images are good enough to be used on blogs, websites and, increasingly, in online magazines. Why waste time, effort and phone calls to make enquiries? Yet it may get worse: if the Orphan Works legislation described in the article above becomes reality, there will be no further incentive left to search until you find. If picture researchers already have the picture in good enough quality, a so-called “diligent search” would suffice (i.e. in the real world a few phone calls as a sign of good will). Ladislav Bielik died over two decades ago when the Iron Curtain was still in place and rights’ holders could not be easily found in a foreign country with a different language. According to (unfortunately) widespread wisdom on the internet, it follows that in these difficult circumstances the authors do not care about their works, so it is fine to use them for free.

Like Wired, magazines are increasingly going online. Will they also offer a “share” picture option? Share it! Your picture is everywhere on the net, you are famous and you have lost control. There is of course technology around to solve these issues: for example CEPIC Members Picscout and ImageRights offer protection. Technological protection has a price though, while copyright protection is completely free. Content providers do not have a high level of income and prices on the internet have steadily gone down. Technological solutions are not enough if they are not backed by sound legislation. What is the use of any technology if the work is free to use as follows from US (and now UK) legislation? Technology should help enforce the law, not make up for its deficiencies.

We need a global solution. It should start with sound legal protection and end with technology to enforce the law. And if I wrote this article, it is because we believe that this global solution exists. Follow this blog, this site and our activities!

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