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Comment by ninth_ant | Hacker News Reader

From my read, poor communication come contributed strongly to this mess.

The authors reply to band management was overly long winded when he just needed to stress that he didn’t want his work being used by random commercial uses, and that he offered them 100 to charity.

Instead of that he demanded money to charity from the band itself (!?) and put the strongest emphasis (to my read) seemed to be about his rights. This unnecessarily amplified the aggression, and triggered the band to exercise their rights with the banning.

Everyone within their rights, everyone loses.

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Offering to "explain the current state of the law" to someone in a giant email seems like a really poor way to resolve conflict. The pseudo-lawyer language seems almost designed to infuriate.

Isn't pseudo though as he is also a lawyer. He may be far too used to writing like that.

Yeah I don't get why he went the charity route at all. It's completely out of left field, and makes the situation in which there was clearly already a misunderstanding even more confusing. Is this a common means of payment for licensing creative works? (when not explicitly part of a charity auction or something)

I assume the author thinks that this makes him look unselfish, i.e. he is merely concerned about the principle of the matter and his artistic integrity rather than the money itself. But it actually comes across as overly self-righteous, and feels like he's just being difficult for no real reason since he doesn't even stand to gain anything from it.

He likely wanted to donate the photo to the sponsors. But he wanted to do it in a manner as to not lower the value of the photo, and also highlight that it was his IP. If he did not mention his 500 Euro price tag, the company would assume that next time it's only worth 100.

Unfortunately, it was worded to make it sound like, "I took a photo of you. Your can either pay me 500 Euros or pay someone else 100 Euros."

Saying something like this:

> While, in general, I might allow fans or even the musicians [themselves] to use my work, this does not change the fact that I hold the right to authorize or deny the use.

to a band and not expecting to get banned from all future events is pretty amazing.

I am aware the law is (probably? Depends on, eg, free admission and contracts etc) on the photographer's side, if the photog wants to be a dick about the subject of the photo sharing it on instagram, there's lots of photographers in the world.

Anarchist band got triggered by the IP lawyer talk. Photographer got triggered by the idea of "exposure". Both sides misunderstood the opposite side. They could have used different words.

The guy comes across as a nut and it's no surprise the band doesn't want to deal with him.

In my younger years I was very much a part of the "scene" and made a good go at booking and promoting metal bands, particularly European ones here in the US.

After a very short time I realized that it's very much a pit of vipers and an endless source of drama. Everyone puts on a front of being very cool but in almost all cases it's just that. It doesn't matter if it's bands, promoters, photographers, fans, etc., anyone who is even the slightest bit invested in it is likely to screw you over or air some irrelevant feud out in public. I don't go near any of it anymore (except the occasional Meshuggah or Ihsahn show) and remain a fan in private, with headphones on.

As right as the guy is, he totally didn't go about any of this the right way and neither did the band.

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