Photographer’s Rant About Corporate Profits and You
Key quote:
“In reality, what is happening on the web is the transfer of the authors’ labour to large corporations for nothing. Anti-copyright lobbyists have become either unwitting allies, or shills, for big business.”
UK photojournalist Sion Touhig writes in Register: How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer .
He says basically because of all the free photographs now available on the web, many of which he thinks devalues real photojournalism, there is no way photojournalists can make a living. There is a lot of ranting here, but this truth also about free photographs:
Most of them will be on Flickr (owned by Yahoo!), MySpace (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) or the major corporate image portals. Neither Flickr nor MySpace exist to commercially leverage images, but clients now go there trawling for free content, so they don’t have to pay a photographer for it. It has caused a crash in the unit cost of any images which aren’t given away and which are licensed for profit.
So as a consequence, the only entities that are now able to make decent profits from photography are large corporations – because only those corporations have the infrastructure to aggregate images into massive hubs.
Of his is own profession he writes:
It’s a volume and service business now to such an extent that you could argue that the individual image has been rendered almost worthless. People either won’t pay for images, or will only pay a small fee – as little as 50 pence a time for images offered by iStockphoto, an image library owned by Getty Images. All this commodified ‘off the peg’ stock imagery has infected the attitudes of editors commissioning ‘live’ photography. These commissioning editors now see photographers as widget makers, and the cheaper the widget, the better.
With mass rip-offs on the Web and the unit value of images crashing, photographers can no longer make a living independently from their work, and so are driven towards working for these corporations to earn a living. As digital content becomes more commodified, the more certain it is that only big business can profit from it, thanks to their economies of scale.
And to put the final nail in the coffin, along comes “citizens journalism”.
He adds:
Amateurism isn’t intrinsically harmful, but it’s now a factor in penalizing and impoverishing creatives who choose to pursue authorship as their sole, full time, economic function. Instead, we’re expected to work for charity.
“Crowdsourcing” is the latest buzzword, but under our present economic system its simply globalisation in practice – being the same force which drove 19th Century artisans into factories to sell their labour power to the factory boss. In this case, the lowest cost producer – the amateur photographer throwing their images onto the Web, to be ‘content mined’ – is also the consumer. The amateur will buy a newspaper or magazine simply for the thrill of being in print. It’s the same model that mine owners used when they paid their workers in ‘company money’.
Pure profit, zero labour cost.
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