Saturday, February 19, 2011

Legal Lesson Learned: Copywriter Pays $4,000 for $10 Photo

Legal Lesson Learned: Copywriter Pays $4,000 for $10 Photo | Webcopyplus Web Copywriter Blog

[excerpt]

Why would copywriters at Webcopyplus pay $4,000 for a digital photo that retails for about $10? Well, frankly, we screwed up. It's an expensive lesson on copyright laws that we wish to share with other marketers, so you don't make the same mistake.

Our web copywriters were under the impression that images on the Web without any copyright notices were "public domain" and therefore free to use. Naive? Yes. A notion limited to our copywriting firm? Definitely not. It likely has to do with the fact that works no longer need a copyright notice to have copyright protection (you can read about the Berne Convention Implementation Act, which the US adopted in 1988).

Designers, writers, developers, marketers, business owners, and ironically even photographers, use photos from the Web without permission. Sites like Google make it so convenient. Enter your keywords, do an image search, and you've got an endless photo library ripe for the picking. Woman laughing delivers 5.2 million photos. Business man offers 423 million photos. And the keyword kids brings up a whopping 778 million images. You can find pretty well anything, too, from ABBA to zombies.

The Copyright Crime

While we maintained an active stock photo account for our blog with access to an array of suitable photos, one of our copywriters grabbed a photo from the Web. The image: a colour 400 x 300 pixel beach shot with some greenery in the foreground. A nice shot, but nothing spectacular.

We posted it on a client's tourism blog to add zest to a promotional article — done. Sip some caffeine, get a little Twitter action, and then dive into the next copywriting project. Photo forgotten. That was in May, 2010.

The Lawyer's Letter

Fast forward a few months, we got a call from the client a couple of days before Christmas, and he wasn't feeling overly festive. He received a formal letter from a lawyer with the following introduction: "Cease and desist demand and offer to settle copyright infringement claim, and digital millennium copyright act claim, subject to Rule 408, Federal Rules of Evidence."

Apparently copyright infringement involving images that are registered with the U.S. Copyright Office allows for statutory damages of up to $30,000, or $150,000 if it can be demonstrated it was a willful act.

The Lawyer's Demands:

the rest at...

http://ow.ly/3ZBcI


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Thursday, February 17, 2011

Canadian Museums Association attacks artists' fees

February 2011

 

Canadian Museums Association attacks artists' fees

 

C-32 hearing


The Canadian Museums Association told a parliamentary committee on Tuesday they would like to see the Exhibition Right "abolished". Jon Tupper, President of the CMA, also asked to be exempt from paying artist fees for things such as reproductions in catalogues, in slides for public lectures and online.

 

Canadian museums are the main source of copyright income for visual artists. An amendment proposed by Bill C-32 to open fair dealing to education appears to have been perceived by the museum community as an invitation to stop paying the fees that artists such as Jack Chambers fought so hard for. Although they claim their budgets are too tight, for most public galleries artists' fees represent a small portion of their budget. When faced with similar arguments back in the 1970's, artist Tony Urquhart suggested to a Montreal museum director that instead of hosting twenty contemporary exhibits in a year, he host nineteen and use the last budget to pay the artists.

 

Tupper insisted that museums should not have to pay artists fees for artwork which they own but recognized that more and more museums do not have the funds to purchase artwork. In Ontario alone, 98 percent of art collections are acquired by donation, meaning that visual artists would not receive any payment for these works if the CMA's recommendations were followed.

 

"The principle of compensating artists for the public presentation of their work has been enshrined in two Canadian laws for over twenty years," said CARFAC president Gerald Beaulieu. "Clearly our parliamentarians have supported this notion because it is sound and just public policy."

 

What do you think about the Canadian Museum Association's statement?  

 

Post your comments to our Facebook group or send them to communications@carfac.ca
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Friday, February 11, 2011

Schools Must Validate Artistic Expression - Creativity is a key part of the educated mind.

Schools Must Validate Artistic Expression

Creativity is a key part of the educated mind.

[excerpt]

I heard a great story recently about a six-year-old girl in a drawing lesson. The teacher said this little girl hardly ever paid attention in class, but during this lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated.

She asked the girl, "What are you drawing?" And the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." The teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." The girl said, "They will in a minute."

[...]

...we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said that all children are born artists. The trick is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately: We don't grow into creativity; we grow out of it. Or, rather, we get educated out of it. Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

[...]

We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope they are. Our task is to educate our whole being so they can face this future. We may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.

By Sir Ken Robinson http://sirkenrobinson.com/skr/ an international leader in creativity, innovation, and educational reform and author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative. This article is based on a talk he gave at the 2006 TED conference.

- - - -

For twelve years, he was Professor of Education at the University of Warwick in the UK and is now Professor Emeritus. He has received honorary degrees from the Open University and the Central School of Speech and Drama; Birmingham City University, Rhode Island School of Design, Ringling College of Art and Design and the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. He has been honored with the Athena Award of the Rhode Island School of Design for services to the arts and education; the Peabody Medal for contributions to the arts and culture in the United States, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Royal Society of Arts for outstanding contributions to cultural relations between the United Kingdom and the United States. In 2005 he was named as one of Time/Fortune/CNN's Principal Voices. In 2003, he received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for his services to the arts. He speaks to audiences throughout the world on the creative challenges facing business and education in the new global economies.




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Wednesday, February 09, 2011

Why Paywalls Are Bad Business

Why Paywalls Are Bad Business

09 Feb 2011 12:57 pm

by Zoe Pollock

Felix Salmon predicts that the NYT will lose to sites like the Huffington Post:

more at:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2011/02/why-paywalls-are-bad-business.html

Original post:

Tom McGeveran asks an important question, in his analysis of the AOL-HuffPo deal:

What is it about the environment of traditional journalism that makes it so that readers are more likely to interact with the Huffington Post reblog of a New York Times article than they are with the article itself?

The answer to this question, I think, is also a key part of the reason why the NYT paywall is a bad idea.

more at:

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/02/08/why-the-nyt-will-lose-to-huffpo/


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Tuesday, February 01, 2011

Interview: USA Today social media editor Michelle Kessler on the evolving newsroom, measuring success

Interview: USA Today social media editor Michelle Kessler on the evolving newsroom, measuring success

http://socialmediatoday.com/trevorjonas/264923/interview-usa-today-social-media-editor-michelle-kessler-evolving-newsroom-measur?utm_source=smt_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter

[excerpt]

The impact of social media on the media and publishing industries has been well documented. Newspapers and magazines are increasing their focus online, which means an investment in social media channels as well as the company website.

I recently asked USA Today's new social media editor,  Michelle Kessler, a few questions about the evolving state of the newsroom and how social media is impacting news gathering and reporting.

Jonas: You recently became social media editor at USA Today. How is the role currently defined and what, specifically, are you responsible for?

Kessler: My job is to help reporters and editors use social media to connect with readers and sources.  That includes everything from training to maintaining feeds to helping sign partnerships.

[...]

Jonas: Generally speaking, how are your reporters and editors using social media to connect with readers and sources? What's the benefit? Or put another way, how are you tracking success?

Kessler: USA TODAY has a large social media presence, including multiple official Facebook pages and Twitter feeds. (Examples are here, here, and here.)  In addition, many of our reporters and editors are extremely active on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites.

Social networking is just a new way of talking to people, which is what reporters have always done.  It's often easier to ping someone on Facebook, or make a connection on LinkedIn, than it is to chase someone down over the phone.  Twitter can be an extremely efficient way to share news or ask a question to a large audience.

And these sites also make it easier for readers to talk to us.  For example, we monitor every Twitter comment that mentions  @usatoday, and respond when appropriate. Last night we asked for our readers' take on the State of the Union address, and ran a few of the most interesting comments here.

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