The Most Exasperating Thing About LIFE.com

(Posted this morning on PDN: Getty and Time Inc. Launch LIFE.com)

The folks who run LIFE.com decided early on to make the photos on the site free for "personal, non-commercial use." Effectively, personal blogs can publish any of millions of professional photos (including the whole Getty Images wire) free of charge without worrying about legal trouble.

As media services like the Associated Press and The New York Times crack down on Internet publishers who take copyrighted material without permission, Getty Images is encouraging content sharing. This is a gift to amateur publishers and fits with the spirit of the free, open Internet.

It also means the value of an unlimited, worldwide, editorial license for a professional news picture has just fallen to $0.

We exaggerate, but only slightly. At a press briefing last week, we asked if professional web sites (such as PDN) can republish LIFE.com photos for free. We can't. (LIFE.com's public relations people offered us an assortment of photos to use with our coverage, however.) Personal blogs, unlike commercial sites, have free run of the place. This is a pointless distinction. Individual blogs are just as valid and popular (and, every once in a while, lucrative) as professionally run Web sites. If we spot a cool Getty Images photo of an exploding volcano and want to share it with everybody, we can legally post it on a personal blog or on Facebook, but not here on PDNPulse. Does that may any sense? Should some blogs be obligated to pay, and others not?

These questions are mostly academic. Under the free sharing model advanced by LIFE.com, no one is going to pay to license photographs online.

Comments

[David Baron]

"If we spot a cool Getty Images photo of an exploding volcano and want to share it with everybody, we can legally post it on a personal blog or on Facebook, but not here on PDNPulse. Does that may any sense? Should some blogs be obligated to pay, and others not?"

Arrrgh!!!!!! Daryl. PDN is a commercial website. You sell advertising on your site. Ask yourself the question: When I contribute to this blog, am I deriving income? If the answer is yes, then you need to compensate those who also contribute--the photographers, graphic designers, writers, etc. If you don't get this, then we truly have something to worry about.

Getty and Life have made a very big mistake, however, maybe this will shed some light on Commercial versus Personal Blog use. The sole criterion that makes the distinction between the two should be advertising sales. As soon as you start selling advertising on your blog, you need to pay for the content that populates it!

Sites like Gawker are the absolute worst perpetrators of ripping off artists. It's shameless. Everyone is making money but the artist.

[Branimir Kvartuc]

I think this move is part of an evolution to "pay for embed" where the cost will be determined by traffic.

[Daryl Lang]

Thanks for the thoughtful comment, David. I wasn't trying to make the argument that PDNPulse has the right to grab free photos, just that LIFE.com has established a bad double standard.

The advertising rule you suggest makes sense. On the other hand, there are plenty of blogs that exist as commercial vehicles but don't sell advertising. The Livebooks blog comes to mind. http://blog.livebooks.com/ They're one of the more careful photo blogs in terms of attribution and getting permission from photographers.

Also, I think Gawker legally licenses photos from Getty these days, though I may be wrong.

[Ken Brown]

PDNPulse is a commercial site that makes money off the content it shows. Personal blogs don't make any money. It seems to me that Life.com doesn't want to give commercial sites (like PDNPulse) free content. And why should they? If PDNPulse is going to make money off the images Life.com hosts, why shouldn't Life.com make money, too?

"Personal blogs, unlike commercial sites, have free run of the place. This is a pointless distinction. Individual blogs are just as valid and popular (and, every once in a while, lucrative) as professionally run Web sites."

Seems like a distinction to me. If the site is "lucrative" then by definition it's commercial/professional, not personal.

[Daryl Lang]

A reader makes no distinction between a blog that's run for fun and a blog that's run for profit.

Imagine a professional editor trying to argue for an online photo budget, when his/her managers can go on Digg and find dozens of no-budget personal photo blogs that generate thousands of impressions by repackaging photos lifted from other sites without permission.

[Ken Brown]

True, but that's more of a problem for the editor than for Life.com. When that happens it's time to educate the managers about licensing. Yeah, I wouldn't want to be the guy that has to do that but it's one of the things that's hurting this industry now. Everyone wants to make money for free.

I get what you're saying though (showing a manager a photo you want to license and he/she can see it used on another site for free) but it wasn't really clear in your original post.

[Jason A. Frizzelle]

Actually Ken that is Life.com's problem. The fact is that the public operates under the delusion that wire services are non-profits providing content out of the kindness of their hearts. The fact is that once a budget dries up it's gone forever. Media sites are dropping subscriptions to these organizations and/or cutting the amount of money they put into them. These organizations WILL lose money. So YES it is Life.com's problem.

[Ken Brown]

Read my post. I didn't say it wasn't Life.com's problem. But if this is the way the organizations are going to play, the photo editor can, what? Throw in the towel? Or figure out a way to solve THEIR problem of getting content onto their site?

These organizations will suffer from their mistakes and eventually go away. Let's not assume photo editors and commercial bloggers HAVE to go down with them.

[Jason A. Frizzelle]

If media organizations go away so will the bloggers. Where do you think the information comes from? The frustrating thing for media companies is that they are paying for people to "play" journalist. The money they pay for content is being spent to make it available for free to bloggers. They should be outraged and boycott companies that want to give away the content in this way.

Let's face it blogs are just ripping off content that someone else put time and effort into. If blogs want to be taken seriously then level the playing field for the whole industry. Charge the bloggers and make them accountable for a change. That will make them think about how journalism really works and maybe just maybe they'll put some time and effort into it and produce original professional reporting that doesn't start and end with an opinionated agenda.

[Ken Brown]

I don't think blogging will go away but it's face will definitely change because of the points you made. Those organizations are the managerial middle men that allow blogs to exist in the form they do.

I entirely agree with your second paragraph. All in all, I think we're just in a messy transition period. For instance, by the mid 1920's there were thousands of registered car manufacturers in the United States. That number certainly thinned out. We're just in that phase in the blogging world and have quite a ways to go.

[Amanda]

Pissy pissy pissy PDN.

[Culprit]

The blurb on PDNewswire's email reads: "The site is designed to make money from online advertising and print-on-demand services." That's right, Getty and Time are trying to make money for themselves, because in this business it's eat or be eaten. They aren't interested in the long-term well-being of photographers when they're struggling to stay afloat in the short term without having to shut down or file Chapter 11.

My guess is their beancounters have done the math and have determined that it's more profitable to charge the few commercial customers for usage; while with personal users, more money will be generated through advertising and printing.

It's all about money, and in this economy even more about short-term survival than long-term, because you logically need the first in order to even think about the second.

Pro photographers who are crying about it will just have to wait tables or shoot weddings until the dust settles and see if they want to be part of the new equilibrium or not. The amateurs who give away their stuff for free just for the excitement of seeing their names in print sure aren't complaining.