The Dictatorship of Social Media
March 14th, 2013
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
This isn’t an anti-American, anti-government or anti-big business rant, it’s simply a plea for fairer play.
We continually stress the need for our photographers to add good and relevant keywords to their images, what we in the trade call the metadata. There are several reasons for this, and by far the most important to us is that without sensible, accurate keywords the most wonderful photograph in the world will never be found and therefore never sold.
The second most important reason is that once the picture sets off on its pilgrimage around the world it will be carrying with it its own passport or ID card, so that everyone who encounters it will know who it is and where it came from. If you have a home to go to you’ll never be an orphan.
Yet the British government is contemplating passing legislation on “orphan works” that could enable the use of a photographer’s intellectual property without prior permission and without a full and diligent search for the copyright holder. In “Digital Opportunity“, a report by Professor Ian Hargreaves, orphan works are defined as ‘works to which access is effectively barred because the copyright holder cannot be traced’.
No problem for our plucky little photographs. They’re armed with their passports and ID cards from the Fortunate Kingdom of Metadataland.
But what if, on their travels around the world, they venture into the Despotic Dictatorship of Facebookistan? Or the Democratic People’s Republic of Twitterbia? Or the Confederated States of Flickrania? Or any of the SocMed Pact empires?
Also no problem — for Facebookistan, Twitterbia and Flickrania, that is. They will automatically strip the photographs of their identity. The Fortunate Kingdom of Metadataland passport will be routinely removed and destroyed. Our photographs’ individuality will be erased. They are then free to carry on their journey without let or hindrance, but now descamisados; rootless, unidentifiable and orphaned.
This is what will happen if you upload a photograph to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr, as well as to Pictify, Photobucket and a host of other websites. Your metadata, your EXIF data and everything else that identifies the image will be discarded. It will become an Orphan Work.
Send a picture to the BBC after a winsome presenter pleads with you to upload your funniest animal photographs and you’ll find that suddenly the world’s cuddliest corporation will own your image outright in perpetuity without recompense.
Why?
Because they can, I guess. If you can steal, and the law permits you to get away with it, then it would be dumb not to steal.
According to a study by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), major social networks like Facebook, Twitter or Flickr remove copyright information and other useful embedded data from pictures posted by their users.
Some sites don’t automatically deprive images of their data. Google+ and Tumblr come away with less blood on their hands. fotoLibra even ADDS to your metadata, to make it safer still.
Remember the fuss in December when Instagram altered its terms & conditions so that on January 16th the one billion images uploaded to their site would become their absolute property, with no recompense to the photographers? The outcry was massive, and grudgingly they had to back down. But no apology was ever forthcoming and their lawyers were still screaming and spitting defiance and denying malfeasance after the deadline had been and gone.
Have a look at IPTC’s photo metadata test results for Social Media sites. I’m afraid they don’t surprise me one bit.
There must be some affordable way of embedding metadata in a digital image which would destroy that image if it were removed or tampered with.
It’ll have to wait for a better coder than me.
My feeling is that, on the other hand, social media are losing a source of value by disrespecting metadata though; far from stripping it, they could add a heck of a lot of value to the images they process by adding to, and helping users add to, the metadata attached to them. That might be an easier sell, too.
Gwyn
you’ll be pleased to know that we are the case Gwyn
Guess what embedded IDs preserve and which look up your metadata … more to come but ping me for more info
Best Rob
There is, use steganography.
That’s how the Digimarc® watermarks work.
Multiple redundant copies of the data embedded in the insignificant bits of the pixels.
So that editing and resizing doesn’t destroy the ID.
Of course it’s patented, and costs money to use, but it may save you money eventually.
Software (like Thumbs+ image viewer) can look for those watermarks when opening the image.
So there is no excuse for not tracing you, if the data is in the image not the metadata.
Of course they might choose not to look for it, that’s another story.
Paul E ? .. LOL
spot on .. P
Exactly what is being proposed to the CHSG : Metadata stripping Committee .. will they listen I hear you ask ?
Combo of persistent Ids and Stegano… not necessarily Digimarc though …
Now Gwyn sounds like something you have heard of before ..
Rob
As far as I can tell, WordPress (not included here) seems not to strip images of their metadata when they are saved to desktop.
Alex
We’ll have to wait for the details of the proposed legislation to see just how frightening the proposals really are. But there is one thing I don’t understand: if “orphan works” are defined as ‘works to which access is effectively barred because the copyright holder cannot be traced’, then how can one decide if a work is “orphan” without a full and diligent search for the copyright holder? And surely, if somebody steals a photo from a social media site, then that image should be traceable back to that social media site to see who posted it in the first place? Often, you don’t even need to be that diligent: an image search using TinEye should show up at least some of the websites using that image, and hopefully at least some of those will be legitimate uses of the image, making clear who the copyright holder is.
Maybe someone could clarify.
In jpeg files the metadata travels in a side-car file and can without much effort be stripped from the image. My understanding is that once you transform your images to DNG format, the metadata is incorporated to the image file and cannot be stripped out. Is my understanding correct?
RGDS
When you put a photo on any social media site you should always put a large Water mark on the pic IE Photo Tone Parry Copyrighted (c)in bold Black or White Writing.
This is something I feel the Government should not be contemplating. If you create it, it’s yours, if not, trace the owner and get permission. (unless it’s from a freebie site of course) or if you’re a blogger and authors are more than happy for you to promote them using their book art, then that’s fine.
But until a legislation is in place to protect all Metadata concerning photographs etc, then the only way around it is to only deal with sites such as Google and Tumblr who would not deprive images of their Metadata, which I would find to be quite limiting but…
The only other difficult way round this is, if by chance the owner of the work sees or is informed of their works being used without their knowledge, get in touch with whoever is using it (if poss) and prove that it’s their’s, which I’m sure they can but, who has the time for such a task? What is one to do if all traces of ownership will be erased once it’s out there into the Web? And it appears like nothing is going to be done? There’s no firm control over what you put out. It’s like a songwriter not making a single dime of royalties no matter how many times their song gets covered?!
This article takes me back to something I once heard, going back eleven years. About someone who wrote a book and took all the pictures. Those same pictures ended up in another book on the other side of the world. A friend of the writer miraculously came across these other books that were written in different languages. (obviously he told his book-friend about this) and in the end, the writer successfully sued the person for using his artwork and making money from it.
Now in this case the man’s pictures were traceable, (they were on his website) and, the person who used his pictures was just too lazy to get in touch or even to ask for some other original stuff. If something like this could happen then, how about now?
Nice article Gwyn.
Google were talking about removing or lowering the search ranking of file sharing sites on their search engine. Effectively meaning such sites come lower down the list than more “legit” sites. Their criteria? The number of “take down” warnings a site gets.
Sounds good, until one realises that the main offender for “take down” notices is YouTube, and that is part of Google. I don’t see Google lowering YouTube’s ranking, do you?
Such is the lack of respect social and Internet media has for people’s intellectual property.
I give up! Years ago when my main website was fresh and new many people stole it. Yes, copied it into their sites or blogs in its entirety, all of my hard work. I became exhausted policing them and slapping their wrists, threatening law suits I could never afford. Now I have to police my images as well, which is why I only us Fotolibra, and save all of my ‘not so good’ images for social network sites. Do I care if anyone sees my work? Yes. Do I care if anyone steals my work? Yes. I’ll checkout the watermark info and see how it works, but I expet the ‘big boys’ will find a way around whatever we do to protect our images. I’m not a pessimist, just a realist.
Thanks for informative Orphan Work ITPC post, Gwyn.
On twitter, fittingly, I’ve shared link to photo metadata test results for social media.
All the best – Ann
What about incorporating copyright declaration into the photographic image before uploading to Facebook etc?
I’m phyisically drained at having to go though the continuous procedure of photomechanic to embed my soul into my images before posting them online. Trawling through twitter, my band and music imagery hasten seen repeatedly on header banners and profile photos, I’ve managed to retrieve one payment from a hotel chain using an image without permission and went to Spain only to find one of my images in the centre of a well known former premier league football player..
Apologies.. iPad playing up and submitted the unfinished post above.. The digital age has opened the lid on pandora s box and it’s overflowing and will surely never close again. Like Toni, I don’t have the finances to pursue these people and have reigned myself to the fact that we are more and more powerless to do anything about it, particularly when images are fatten being used internationally..