Who Owns Your Pictures?

<quote>I haven’t read the British legislation, but what it apparently does is...</quote>

I wonder if this admission might suggest both the cause of this controversy and a way to resolve it?

I've not had chance to properly read all the relevant data, but essentially this clarifies in law the basic mode of operation most picture desks have been running in for a while. Attempt to find author for a bit, give up, publish and wait, pay on prompt, however they might get to skip that last part which isn't great.

Now, if you're embedding the EXIF data you're a step up, because the image desks are aware of the EXIF data. They'll look to see if there's anything in there and away they go, however if they're being reused online most people won't bother with that so you're probably out of luck, and you've probably got little to no come back.

There's many services that try be good guys with the EXIF info, so if you're a photographer and you give a crap about your rights of ownership, use those instead. I stopped using Facebook a while back for photography as I'd noticed it stripping the EXIF data (as well as butchering the compression on a number of shots), same for Twitter. Flickr I was surprised about, but 500px seem to preserve a lot of the EXIF data on upload.

This could either be really dramatic or not very dramatic at all, it depends on how it ends up getting used in court, which will take a while to shake out.

In general, if you have a metric shitload of money, you own them.

If you're a normal person, you're on your own. Copyright really only seems to be effective if you've got a team of lawyers.

To a casual reader, this new legislation appears obviously beneficial. The number of orphaned creative works is large and constantly growing, particularly with the Internet's cultural emphasis on anonymity.

Articles opposing the change seem to assume that "diligent search" is code for "give up unless the EXIF contains full contact info", which is not at all a reasonable interpretation.

In general this law appears to be a force for good, and should throw a bunch of images that the authors don't really care about into the public domain. Should make for an interesting dataset in the future.

He basically said himself why it's like this:

It's a good idea to remove some metadata and/or re-encode images that users upload, but it's not so easy to selectively preserve metadata.

Re-encoding (with side-effect of removal of all metadata) stops several attacks that are based on embedding executable code in specially crafted images (browser filetype sniffing leading to XSS, unsanitized filenames causing execution of PHP-in-GIF, etc.)

It helps performance: some users will have images that are encoded incredibly poorly, have massive ICC profiles embedded (which are also a compatibility problem) and almost never have the specific pixel size you want.

And most common tools make it incredibly easy to lose all metadata, but to preserve only specific bits you need to go extra mile.

So the default is drop creator information.

I don't understand why this law is needed. If the work is truly orphaned then no one will come after you. Therefore the law is only about the case where it's not really orphaned.

That seems like it completely removes any incentive to obey any kind of copyright on photographs. Just use any photograph you want. When asked, claim you did a diligent search and nothing came up. Take the picture down. No punishment.

How is that not a recipe for massively screwing photographers?

Without the law orphaned works are still orphaned and safe to use. If you do a truly diligent search and figure out the work is truly orphaned. But, if your search wasn't diligent enough and the owner finds out you get sued as seems proper.

Why is this law needed?

So who exactly started this Exif meme? The legislation doesn't mention exif and I wouldn't consider only looking at exif and not finding any as the end of a diligent search.

It's a lovely bit of framing though, so who came up with it?

Finally, a practical need for steganography.

The bigger problem will be with pictures that are copied without your knowledge and discovered on someone else's site. Chances are the EXIF will be stripped and there will be no way to trace it back to you.

A few years ago -- and, continuing into today -- there were numerous security concerns around EXIF data. This included not just GPS data and personal security (and/or privacy), but also other identifiers including device serial number (and manufacturer/model) and the ability to cross-reference same between pictures, picture sources, and potentially purchase history. (Depending where and how you purchased, the serial number may be correlated with your credit card or other payment account.)

Now, for the latter: If you are publishing controversial photography, the last thing you may want is to have said photos traced back to your identity. For the sake of this argument, I'm going to assume you are one of the forces for good. Omniscient data sourcing is not always desirable.

In this specific UK case, and with a rather light and superficial reading of some news accounts combined with past reporting and experience, what I see are organizations who have been called out both publicly (bad publicity) and financially for blatantly copying and publishing photographs for which they made no effort to acquire rights. (There is an existing system for this, which they simply ignored and refused to respect until dragged into court -- formal, and that of public opinion.)

I speculate that these entities know that many major distribution platforms now strip metadata. And, that they are working to take advantage of this through the current legislation and sought definition of "orphan works".

I think those distribution platforms themselves may also be complicit. We've seen how Facebook has repeatedly attempted to use its users' photographs wholesale and without individual notification/approval for its own gain. (E.g. The "we can and will use your photographs in advertising" controversy, amended after much vocal blowback to include a (difficult to find) opt-out setting.)

Personally, I think that the pragmatic route people may find themselves taking in the face of such legislation passing is to watermark with copyright notification anything and everything they may care about, before uploading it to any public source. If it is subsequently reused and this is of sufficient concern, the original upload including date/time can be cited in demonstrating that subsequent, ungranted reuse that is missing said notification must result from deliberate (and illegal) editing to remove said notification.

This will be ugly and doesn't fix anonymity issue, but so be it. (And deliberately publishing without copyright information has always weakened the stand of a creator subsequently defending copyright. In many of these cases, public communication of the photographic content (or other imagery) may continue to be more important to the creator than maintenance of copyright privileges.)

TL;DR: Meta-data (EXIF, et al.) used to be more commonly retained. This causes numerous issues particularly around security and privacy. Stripping it became de facto policy amongst many major distribution platforms.

Numerous, influential agencies seek to make a buck any way they can and to leverage or compete with near real-time peer-to-peer sharing and "news". Also to leverage and/or compete with peer-to-peer interests (i.e. inject noteworthy advertising). They see an avenue to using these materials without legal and financial repercussions.