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Comment by cwisecarver | Hacker News Reader

No, it's not, if you RTFA you would see that you're paying for their time and talent. The photographer still holds the copyright to those photos because they took them. Some photographers will be happy to license or even sell the rights but that's going to be a significant extra charge. It's the difference between buying a print of the Mona Lisa and buying the Mona Lisa. That digital file is their negative and you could very easily take that into Photoshop, make it look like it was painted by a clown and then put it up on your website with the photographer credit. You can do that if you want but you're going to pay for the privilege.

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My employer pays for my time and talent. Freelancing programmers are paid for their time and talent. I, however, assign copyright over my works to my employer, because that's part of the terms of my employment. If photographers want to extort $25 for a .jpg, that's fine, but let's not pretend it's anything more.

I'd rather buy my own camera and learn to take photos properly than pay $25 per digital copy, it would be more fun.

Contract, for-hire photographers aren't employees. Freelance programmers give up their copyright willingly. Just because you negotiated badly doesn't mean photographers have to as well.

Go buy your own camera and learn to take photos properly! I would encourage everyone to do that. The exact moment that you grasp mastery of photography will be the day that you understand why photographers don't give up their copyright or hand over digital files to you.

> Freelance programmers give up their copyright willingly.

No, they give them up because that's _the entire point of hiring a freelancer_. It sounds absurd to pay someone to create something but not actually get that thing for yourself. That's what the money is in exchange for.

> No, they give them up because that's _the entire point of hiring a freelancer_.

Not really. My clients are paying for results, and part of those results include a license to use the code I write forever.

But I never give up the copyright. I frequently re-use techniques, libraries, modules, etc across clients, and in fact would be stupid not to.

>> I'd rather buy my own camera and learn to take photos properly than pay $25 per digital copy, it would be more fun.

Taking photos for yourself is always fun.

Taking photos for other people for money is not nearly as fun as you think it is, especially if your customers don't respect what you do and think that they could do your job by buying a camera.

I'm not a pro photographer, but I've definitely had my share of customers who'd constantly complain about how much we were charging them because they thought that by reading a manual, they could do what we do.

Good luck with that. Got a few years?

The photographer still holds the copyright to those photos because they took them.

That's only by custom. Legally the photographer holds the copyright as soon as they take the photo, but they could just as easily assign full copyright to the person hiring them as a matter of course.

Most photos of people at weddings, family portraits, etc have little commercial value, except to the people who are in the photos. So you can see how this feels like double/triple/n-times charging, as it has suddenly become a monopoly backed by federal copyright law.

It's even more confusing. The photographer does indeed hold the copyright, unless assigned to someone else. However, the subject has the right to say how their likeness is used. For any commercial usage the photographer must assign rights and the model must sign a model release.

As someone who had a wedding photography business, my standard contract had a "client agrees to allow photographer to use client's likeness for promotion of photographer's business."* clause.

I'd go over the contract term-by-term with a client before they signed, and I never had anyone request to cross it out.

* paraphrasing, of course.

you could very easily take that into Photoshop, make it look like it was painted by a clown and then put it up on your website with the photographer credit

I don't see how this matters. If you wanted to lie and discredit the photographer, you could just take your own photo, do the same exact thing, and claim the photographer took it.

I do understand the economic incentive for the photographer to keep the digital copies, of course.

I didn't mean that it would be a malicious act. People have varying degrees of taste about photography. I might think a picture looks great the way I photoshopped it because it's my nephew and my monitor is calibrated incorrectly. Someone else might see it and think that there are dodge halos everywhere and all detail in the skin is lost because they tried to remove blemishes but instead removed all detail.

They might think they've done a nice thing but they haven't. I've also seen wedding pictures show up in newspaper ads because it was the best picture that the person had of themselves.

Hoomans don't understand or respect copyright, in general. When it's a big corporation it's one thing. When it's a guy/gal carrying forty pounds of gear around in their 15 year old car trying to make your memories last forever when they've got 1/500th of a second to get it right for ~$40/hr the copyright belongs to them. People should understand it.

Edited for gender neutrality.

If you hire a programmer to do some work for you, who owns copyright to result of the labor?

I just had to look into this for myself. If it's not spelled out in the contract, generally the contractor owns the IP.

The default case, yes. Here we are arguing of what the correct way of doing things should be. It is widely accepted in programming contracts to transfer the copyright to the client and in photography contracts it is otherwise.

bradly's case, like darkarmani pointed out is a communication issue. His wife assumed that since she is paying for the shoot she would own the resultant work. The photographer probably though otherwise and had a contract to back this up. For a contract to be considered legal there must be a "meeting of the minds" and clearly it didn't happen here. I blame the photographer here, because they usually have their own contract templates that they know well. They should correct any asymmetric of information that may result. Having the client hire a lawyer to examine the photo contract would be more expensive than hiring a photographer in the first place.

TL;DR If photographers don't want lawyers fees cutting into their service fees, they should be upfront about what they are peddling.

>The default case, yes.

Which I believe is what the parent was asking about.

Or people could read the contracts they sign.

aleyan, If you hire a programmer to do some work for you, that programmer will own the copyright to what he/she wrote. That is why it is a good idea to stipulate in a contract that the work will be done as "work for hire" so you own the copyright. The default is the writer owns the copyright.

Why is it ok for the photog. to keep copyright on a work for hire?

Why is it OK? Because most people agree to it when they sign the contract.

You can have a contract where they pass the copyright over to you, but most photographers wouldn't sign that contract without raising the price significantly.

Because it's not a work for hire when an independent contractor makes the work, unless there's a written agreement that it will be a work for hire.

> That digital file is their negative and you could very easily take that into Photoshop, make it look like it was painted by a clown and then put it up on your website with the photographer credit. You can do that if you want but you're going to pay for the privilege.

This is inane. What photographer would give you the priviledge of publicly showing "defaced" work as theirs? Can't you do this anyway be mis-attributing?

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