Who Owns Your Photographs?
By: Daniel
Amazons’ announcement of their removal of DPReview, (Digital Photography Review) today, has a lot of photographers and those interested in photography concerned about what happens with digital media and files. DPReview was started in 1998 and is/was a website about the review of digital photography, and unfortunately it was owned by Amazon. It was a place where someone could ask a question and get an unbiased answer, or an answer from someone who was using that particular camera, lens, or some other form of photo equipment. Today if you want a review of a camera for example, people will often look on YouTube. However, most of the reviewers on that platform are sponsored by a particular camera or equipment company and you won’t get an unbiased opinion. Or they simply read the specs on the box. For most professional photographers that’s not a problem, we usually belong to professional organizations which will let us borrow a camera or lens for testing purposes to see if we want to purchase it. For a beginning photographer that’s not always something that’s available to them. Some camera stores will have equipment you can rent; but if you live in small town USA that may not be an option. Amazons’ closing of this site, without any notice to those who used it, is troubling and brings up questions beyond this particular issue.
Who actually owns and/or controls digital photographs? You could say “well I do. I store them in external hard drives or on the cloud or both—often in several external hard drives to ensure that a copy will always exist.” What about clients? They have digital media of themselves, their family, their recreational activities, kids, etc., that you photographed for them, and they purchased. Most, probably store them on the cloud—this huge server in someone’s basement. But if you think about it someone else owns the space where that media is stored; along with the software necessary to access that information. And like Amazon that entity could decide they no longer want to provide that service. You have no way of retrieving images from a cloud that no longer exists. And some years from now the images on a thumb drive, or an external hard drive, or cloud, might not be retrievable because the device and or software to do so no longer exists. Think about what happened to Betamax, and the original “floppy disk”. A copyright is worthless in that event. Or if you can retrieve stored images, it could cost you a fortune.
Not many people buy prints from photographers today. I encourage my clients to buy prints from me. Of course, I’ll provide them with digital media, however, I’m not as trusting of big “business” brother as I am of prints on the wall or in an album. Unless they burn up in a fire, or get thrown away, those prints will be available for generations to come—if our world lasts that long. Unlike digital media you own those prints, your family owns those prints. I know it’s easier to store digital media, but you don’t own them once they’re stored in a hard drive or on the cloud, or any digital device. If Microsoft changes their operating system down the road or Apple changes theirs and the new software no longer talks to the system your images are stored in, good luck retrieving them. It’s kind of like bitcoin, and other cryptocurrency, if you can’t hold it in your hands, it may not exist.
I realize digital cameras have led to digital images and people want digital images because it’s easy to share them with friends, family, classmates and others. But at the same time give some thought to prints—something you can hold in your hands, and you own. We live in a society where our predecessors left us with more visible memories than we’ll most likely leave our children and grandchildren if we give away ownership to images that capture a moment in time that will never occur again. Give some thought as to who actually owns your photographs.
Daniel
