Copyright: Bane or Boon to my Profession
Being a photographer in the digital era has a lot of advantages and disadvantages. Some of the advantages including images can be produced quickly and shared to the public easily. The disadvantage is that since it is easy to share pictures to the public, it can facilitate people to violate the law by stealing photography work. Furthermore, the data contained in the pictures was changed too or the pictures was modified as if the person had made the images themselves. It is done for a variety of purposes, such as popularity and commercial purposes.
For me as a photojournalist, copyright is very important for my profession. Copyright protect the work of a photographer from acts of plagiarism, photo theft, and the most important thing, it is to protect the rights of the photographer. These rights are very important to the reputation of being a photographer. Copyright relates to the protection of economic rights or the right to obtain material benefits from a photography work; and moral right that it is related to the society’s recognition of the photographer as the owner of the work. According to World Intellectual Property Organization, economic rights allow the rights owner to derive financial reward from the use of his works by others, whereas moral rights allow the author to take certain actions to preserve the personal link between himself and the work.
Certainly, many photographers have experienced this. Their pictures posted on social media were used by some accounts without any permission or even without mentioning the photographer name. In Indonesia, a photo of my friend was stolen for a political campaign. The problem is, when the photographer wants to bring it to the court, it will be very troublesome, time-consuming, and the results aren’t necessarily as expected.
Things get complicated when the violation is done by a mainstream media. As an example, photojournalist Daniel Morel uploaded photos of the Haiti earthquake to Twitter in 2010. Then the AFP news agency used the earthquake photos to various AFP networks on the grounds allowed in Twitter’s rules and regulations. Daniel Morel who learned of this later sued AFP. Morel won and AFP was asked to pay $ 275,000 by the court.
As a conclusion, in my opinion, both photographers and visual content users must understand copyright. In addition, everyone has to be aware that every image uploaded on social media has its creator that is protected by the copyright. As a common rule says, if you did not take the picture, it means someone was pressing the shutter count.
— Denty Piawai Nastitie —
A Journalist based in Jakarta, Indonesia
Student of Diploma in Visual Journalism — The Asian Center for Journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University.
