An interesting read: How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer. Also scratches the surface of how copyright theft affects proffessional photojournalists.
Cry me a river. It's called Globalization and it's nothing new. We are all affected by it. One simply needs to increase his or her skills and rise above it OR go to something different. As to the theft, that's nothing new. Newspapers are always getting mad at radio and TV programs for reading their stuff on air. There's been plenty of court action throughout history. You either evolve or you die. As to big business and the photo industry, that was highly foreseeable. Geez, I saw this the second I bought my first digital camera, which used 3.5 floppy disks, some 9-11 years ago and I'm not Albert Einstein. What next? A former 8-track tape store owner crying about how digital music killed his business? It sounds like someone finally went to big-person school and learned the meaning of capitalism. I guess it's a new concept to his corner of the world.
What an absolute preposterous conclusion that leveling the playing field between big corporation media outlets and the 'ma and pa' webmasters/sites helps to catapult the success of the corporation. The exact opposite is the actual truth. Spending a few thousand dollars for a single picture to monopolize certain traffic needs is nothing but a drop in the hat for the corporations yet almost impossible for the M&P's even if only a few times a year. Now If the author of this ludicrous propaganda piece wants some cheese with his lack of vision and inability to adjust to an evolving market place, then he sure provided plenty of whine. Maybe he needs to stop thinking of what worked in the past and move into the present. Quit trying to sell a single photo for thousands of dollars once and instead sell it for pennies to hundreds of thousands of sites.
While that is true, I can also see his point. You need to consider that although he mentions stock photo's, he's actually speaking more about "War" amd "news event" photo's which are primarily sold to large news agencies (not the focus of most webmasters) - I think the point he was trying to make is that all the stock photo sites etc has created the expectation (even amongst media companies) that you should be able to get things on the cheap, causing the value of any tipe of photo to decrease. Selling to hundreds of thousands of sites is also easier said than done. Most likely there might only be a few sites that want to use the subject matter. You will also have to compete with hundreds of thousands of other photographers to get your work sold... while it's possible it's much more difficult to sell a 100 images at $1, than it is selling one or two photos at $50.
War and current news photos are reproduced exponentially just as stock photos are spread virally. Think of this, advertising via the ppc model (think a few measly pennies spread throughout the vastness that is the web) served up to benefit not only the advertiser(in this case the photographer) but cheap enough to make it worth the publishers time. Of course all we get is stock photo sites that charge webmasters a nominal fee for pure schiet, and 'photojournalist' looking to sell some photos for an egregious price. Why would anyone 'steal' pictures in this case????