If you want to appreciate the photo, the photographer has a gallery on their site you can visit and freely view. The photos are definitely gorgeous. But we're not talking about appreciating the photos. We're talking about hosting the photo yourself or using it commercially.

Making these photos is very expensive. If someone pays so much for a photo, they'll surely want exclusive rights. Why would I pay tens of thousands of dollars for a photo I'd like to use commercially, and then share it with others for free? It's better to have the licensing be cheaper, and have lots of people be able to pay for the photo.

This is like saying "bands should give their music away for free, because the record label already paid to record it."

Say he can take a really nice photo. To take this photo he has a number of expenses, he needs a certain amount of training, he needs to take a certain number of bad pictures before finding the good one.

Now right now he makes a living selling 1,00 copies of this photo to various organizations and publications.

Now say he can't do that. He can only sell it once. Two things happen. First is, to make the same amount of money, which is enough to cover his expenses and his failed photos, he needs to charge 100 times as much money. A $400 photo is now a $40,000 photo. The second things is, while before there were maybe 1,000 people willing to pay $400 for the photo, right now there might not be anyone willing to pay $40,000 for it.

There would especially be nobody willing to pay $40,000 for it when they know that as soon as someone else paid the $40,000 for it, they could get it for free.

In fact, even the people who had a budget to $400 for it before might not be so eager, because most of the photos they would get are now free. They just have to wait for someone else to get it first.

So this guy, who before was making an alright living taking photos, and a couple times a year getting a great photo that can sell a hundred copies, now has no means of supporting his photography.

Previously he could take photos that 100 people would be willing to pay $400 for and get by. These are very high quality photos. Maybe the majority nobody cares about. But if he can only sell them once, he can't afford it, and nobody can afford to buy it. Because of this he can't afford to take it, and the picture never exists.

Right now, de facto, anything that's released on the internet, licensed or not, is going to be there forever. Copyright's existence doesn't change that. For the commons this is a good thing. He can take legal action against people who are using his works without license, but he isn't targeting blogs and international sites and other places he can't reach.

Because of this scenario he is able to produce his works, and at the same time his work will be available across the globe. The only places targeted are companies who are trying to make money and think his work might be a free way to do this.

This isn't "So your blogger has been found using Alex's photographs" or "So your art project has been found using Alex's photographs". It's company.

If we are in some communist utopia where the companies using those photographs for free are also giving their goods away for free, then I don't think he would care.

But if an airline uses your photograph to advertise without credit and still charges you full fare to fly, and profits off them, why is that right? Shouldn't those profits go to the commons too?

You haven't a clue how much those photos cost if you had to pay the full price for their creation. Think a trip to a foreign country + plus some seriously expensive macro lenses, lights and a very good camera. Plus the photographer likely would want some salary as well.

That means those images are going to cost at least 10k, which is likely too much for e.g BugsBeGone to use one for their website. The price would of course come down if more people could share the images, from which the natural conclusion is to allow all people to share the image, provided they pay a fee for the right to do so.

>at the cost of its peoples' freedom of expression?

This is copyright, not patents. The existence of these photos doesn't in any way prevent you from taking whatever photos you want to take, nor limit how you can edit yours. Sure you can't take his photos, but you couldn't do that without copyright either because they wouldn't exist in the first place.

I think this is a false question, as you never had the rights to the work of others in the first place.

That's fairly inefficient in several aspects, and by "inefficient," I mean that it's not likely to lead to artists creating the works that people want to consume.

First, this reduces the artist to only producing works that a single entity (person, company), or a small group of entities, wants to commission. If a thousand people each want a picture of a wasp $10-worth, that's very different from two sponsors each paying $5,000 for that image, and everyone else paying zero.

Second, it makes it nearly impossible for an artist to create work "on spec" and then collect payment on it later. Again, the artist is taking a ton of risk since he/she is looking for a massive payment from one or two patrons, vs. small payments from many consumers. Also, how is a photographer to advertise his or her work online, if anyone can just copy the image to their hard drive?

Third, it restricts authors to only extracting value from their art at the time of creation. If a photo becomes wildly popular a year or two after it was created and sold the first time, then the author can't get paid for it.

Fourth, as a potential patron who is a rational actor, I have a strong incentive to comb the Internet for a free photo before I pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to commission a new one. Won't this stifle the funding for creation of new works of art?