Article 13: Copyright Protection

Posted on 9/20/2018 by Jim Pickerell | Printable Version | Comments (1)

All photographers around the world who are trying to control and earn money from their work should watch, very carefully, what the European Parliament does with Article 13 of its Copyright Directive. The final EU decision could greatly benefit all photographers whether they live in the EU or not. Tech industry leaders, like Google and YouTube, strongly oppose this legislation, because it could force them to use automated content filtering systems to insure that copyrighted material is not being distributed without permission on their platforms. The law states that digital companies should put "effective content recognition systems" in place.

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Copyright © 2018 Jim Pickerell. The above article may not be copied, reproduced, excerpted or distributed in any manner without written permission from the author. All requests should be submitted to Selling Stock at 10319 Westlake Drive, Suite 162, Bethesda, MD 20817, phone 301-461-7627, e-mail: wvz@fpcubgbf.pbz

Jim Pickerell is founder of www.selling-stock.com, an online newsletter that publishes daily. He is also available for personal telephone consultations on pricing and other matters related to stock photography. He occasionally acts as an expert witness on matters related to stock photography. For his current curriculum vitae go to: http://www.jimpickerell.com/Curriculum-Vitae.aspx.

Comments

Piotr Jaczewski Posted Sep 24, 2018
As a creator and someone who earn on photography, but mainly as IT specialist, I can tell you that this legislation is total BS. It won't protect any of your work, but you will have a lot of problems with it in personal and professional life.

Reason for this is simple, such filtering will be very hard and virtually impossible in the real world. Even best filters working now on a limited amount of data are very ineffective, there's no option to tell with 100% accuracy that we have exact same photography and not similar photos shot by two photographers in similar conditions. And there's no and there will be no central database of photographs, what will make this even harder. This law may be only for some big players in the industry, in a similar way like it's now on youtube for example. Where they can provide a library of their assets to the service provider for filtering. But this works bad and have problems with it on 100% legal content. Because filters are dumb.

For example, imagine your shot of Eiffel Tower (or any other landmark) with clear sky in the back - how many shots look similar? Thousands, hundreds of thousands? Do you know how such filters will work? They will block all of them. So, this law designed and inspired by a small group of big fish in industry, will lead to a block of your content, with you won't be able to upload to Instagram, FB, or whatever service you may think. Don't count on contacting support of any of those services, it's now almost not possible, not to mention a large flood of support requests from other desperate users.

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