Photos Images and the Law

Voightander Camera

For my next blog paranoia post I'm looking at the issue of images, photos and pictures. Everyone has surely heard the phrase pictures speak a thousand words, and that to make a article interesting you need an image or two just to distract the eyes for a little. But I'm not an artist, and whilst I do take photos I don't have a whole stock of them ready to use. So like most lazy writers I tend to rely on the internet to find relevant pictures. But I'm vaguely aware that this may not be the right thing to do and whats more I do feel for the original artist. They have gone out of there way to create the work and it is clearly of high quality as I am prepared to use it for my own purposes, yet I have no idea what the etiquette is for taking someones work and reusing it. So in this post I intend to explore those in a little more detail. Also to note my sincere apologies to the artists responsible for the 3 pictures
I have already used. Once this post has been published I will go back and amend appropriately.

Law

Unknown students in jail

Copyright is the most obvious legal issue with photos since the Berne convention all images are copyright protected which prevents an image being used without permission or adapting the image without permission, even re-creation of an image is prohibited. There is no mistake that even small independent personal blogs are covered by copyright laws, so any image I use must be published with permission, otherwise the law may be on my back.

Its not a case of whether the image is free or if its been paid for, the issue is ensuring that you have permission to use the image, you can find a free image that you are aloud to publish or you can pay for an image and then use it for a non-agreed purpose.

Then there are laws relating to image rights of an individual, where even if you have a copyright agreement, you don't necessarily have permission from the person in the image. But that is the best left for a future post and in the meantime i won't publish pictures of people (ignoring the 2 students above). Likewise companies have laws protecting their images too so anything covering trademarks also off limits for the time being. I've also just read that certain buildings are covered by trademark too, so no pictures of buildings either. There doesn't seem to be much left for the poor well intentioned blogger.

There is however a term that keeps cropping up and that is :-

"In the public Domain"

The concept of a public domain is that if something is available to everyone then it is owned by everyone and controlled by no one. So doesn't this imply that if an image is on a free search engine then it is a free image and in the public domain. Well actually no it doesn't, images on the internet are widely available but still retain ownership.

Dollars

Free images

Yet despite all of this there are free images allover the internet, and some artists declare that the image is free to use, either by everyone in all circumstances or by providing some conditions. Whilst i can see there is some benefit of this in the case of an aspiring artist or a company wanting to draw attention to itself, i'm not certain how you can be sure that the image you have is truly a legal image.

Creative commons images

I have discovered one source of free image, Creative commons Images. Creative commons is a not for profit foundation who have created copyright licences which allow artists to licence their work for use by others at no charge. Some of the licences still contain restrictions and if you breach them your still liable under copyright laws, but essentially these creative commons licences give you the opportunity to gain permission from the artist to use an artwork.

But even these images are not without issue, the Creative commons organisation it not party to the agreement and there is no way to be sure that just because a website says the image has a license there is no way to ensure the original artist has authorized it. Creative commons also doesn't get you around image rights and trademark issues. But short of taking lots of poor quality camera phone pictures this seems like my best option. All of the images for this post have been taken from wikimedia.org which hosts both creative commons and public domain images.

Orphaned images

One last thing to note is this rather controversial term, Orphaned Image. Its controversial because its a relatively new concept that is seen by some to completely undermine the copyright laws described above, from my limited understanding the concept essentially implies that it is ok to use images that have been orphaned, in so much as that the original owner is no longer traceable, and in this sense the image is now commonly owned. Whats more it provides a level of defense for individuals and organisations as it appears that all you have to do to declare an imaged orphaned is to make an effort, to identify the owner. If you can't then go ahead and publish. Whats more it seems that you can then assume ownership of that image and re-sell it. It all seems somewhat underhand to me for the moment so I intend to steer clear until I have some time for more research.

Reasons not to write a blog 1

Writing a blog is not as simple as just churning out lots of interesting well researched, topical content. No you have to be aware of the risk that it exposes the publisher to.

As this whole blogging idea is relatively new to me I thought I would start by writing a series of blogs regarding the risks involved in blogging. It was originally only going to be a single post but it turns out that there are either a lot of risks, or at least a lot of things to get paranoid about. So here goes with my first note of caution.

Reach

I'm not famous, I'm not a journalist, I don't have a background in publicity or any sort of controlled public persona. Yet I do rely on my reputation entirely to live my life, i rely on it to get involved in the local community, I've built a respectable one (i hope) with my neighbours, and at work it is key to delivering the job that I have. Day in Day out i use my position and reputation to carry the decisions that i take and to help broker agreements and build relationships. Integrity is key to that reputation and any threat to that integrity could have quick and broad consequences.

Personality

Relationships build up over time and as you work more closely with someone you know more about them and understand more about what makes them tick. You give each other little bits of information that help build trust and make yourselves mutually comfortable in each others company, and this makes it easy to take decisions and to agree on principal. A blog lingering in the background is not always helpful to developing relationships.

Professionalism 

Think of the first time you meet a contact, you would introduce yourself by saying "Hi, I'm Paul I have 4 children and live on a farm, I hate shoplifters and have a rather unique view on prisons!" Yet , a blog post has no interaction with the reader and has no context as what the reader may want to know so essentially you risk losing control of how much your contacts know about your persona. Furthermore even with established contact a blog could cause problems. Take for example that you have built up a friendship with someone over time and got to know more about them and they you. You know their favourite sporting team you know they are a fan of Aqua, you know they are very good at their job and that they live in the Cotswold's, But then you find out that they believe in fairies. This new piece of information is in contrast to the rest of their personality and it brings into doubt there world view. Now if you'd found that out in conversation you could explore it in conversation and make it fit in with your view of that person. But simply reading it on a blog post gives no explanation of character and isn't set against everything else you know about the individual so it distracts from the job in hand.

Undermining

I'm aware of some associates who write blogs and some who publish or administer forums of some kind. Sometimes they work sometimes they don't sometimes they are of interest others not. But on more than a few occasions i have seen on-line content being used as the subject of an office joke, most of the time just idle tittle tattle but on occasion i have seen them used as a way to start undermining conversations where the subject matter of the blog, be it a particular series of books or a geeky hobby. The subject matter appears to be unimportant it is merely used as a conversation opener, "have you seen that Bob writes a blog about the x362 toner cartridge" Then the conversation goes on to air any grievances about the individual. The behaviour can be quite undermining, but I'm not convinced it has anything really to do with the blog and if the content were not published it would just surface in a different manner, but the fact remains that publishing content gives people an extra tool should they want to use it.

Mitigation

As every good project manager should im going to conclude by a brief summary of mitigating the risks. It does seem that reputational risk is quite an issue it is certainly a concern for me. I haven't even fully explored the potential impacts here. However, in reality the risk is just a manifestation of a real life equivalent, it just lays open that risk to a potentially wider audience, and removes mechanisms to control that risk. But ultimately the blogger is in control of what is published an awareness of ones reputation can and should effect what is published, even if it makes for a slightly duller blog. Being open with your personality will help, letting people know who you are in real life should reduce the likely hood of conflicts with your on-line life. Ultimately you have to be very careful about what you publish and be ready to defend it where needed.

Blog 101

With a bit of luck and a trailing wind I'm hoping to write a regular blog. Not sure how it will develop but the aim is  to use my time on the Much Maligned Metropolitan line to put my wandering thoughts to paper. Its a tricky thing to start, and I make no pretence of being a writer or any sort of publisher. So why am I writing one, the simplest t answer is that I often have thoughts that are too detailed for twitter and require some exploration to understand why I have reached that conclusion. I find that in implicit in the act of writing is a discipline which forces the mind to formulate ones thoughts a little better and then to commit them to public scrutiny not only allows thoughts to be tested, but ensures ones own view is resilient and at least a little thought through.

So I am writing this as a voyage of self discovery and mostly for my self. If you like what I write or have a view which can add to the conversation id love for you to join me. I appreciate this makes me sound like some sort of naval gazing self aggrandising hippy, and maybe there is some truth to that, but i guess we'll wait and see.

I guess the next question is what to write about? Quite often the best blogs with the highest readership have a narrative and a rich set of core principals, which hold the work together. Unfortunately for me I don't have those for these posts, maybe Ill find one as I write but barring in mind I'm not on a mission to gain huge readership, my goals for the blog will be slightly different. It would be easy for me to describe the blog in a whatever comes to mind sort of a way. But that also wouldn't be true, there are lots of things that go through my mind that would not make interesting reading and I do want to grip your attention and the plan is to formulate well put together blogs. The honest answer is that I don't know what to expect from this blog and that's part of the reason for doing it.Who knows in a years time I may have an idea that drives it forward, but maybe not.

What I can tell you is what i'm interested in and where my thoughts are likely to go in the early days. I'll explore all of these topics more broadly in my next few posts.

• Atheism - I am one, and there are many implications to being an atheist in today's society 
• Religion - I'm fascinated by the stuff, I don't understand it, but i'm fascinated by its history. All religions are stunning in there very existence and there are lots we can learn from how they have evolved.
• History - this mostly comes from a love of historical fiction novels, and I know little about genuine historical fact.
• Maths - the things people can do with 10 different figures is stunning. I'm not some sort of mathematical boffin but I'm particularly interested in natural sequences and the economics of reality. Think Fibonacci meets John Stewart Mill. meets
• Technology - I work in the technology industry, and there is so much to it that its inevitable that the occasional tech blog will be forthcoming especially accessibility and CRM technology
• Sport - Im not fanatical about any particular sport or team but I do enjoy the thrill of it. Essentially if I can find a knowledgeable source to get me started I can be equally enthralled by curling as I can a American football. But with a particular following for Leyton Orient
• Society - In its widest sense society and how we move forward is important, So politics, Charities, Equality, Poverty that sort of thing

Well that's about it to start with, the plan is to quietly write a blog about each of the above subject areas to get me started then I'll start looking for feedback. 

*I should say here that I'm dyslexic and my spelling is atrocious. I will attempt to fix as many mistakes as possible, but the mos important thing is that the blogs are interesting and readable, the odd mistake does not distract from that experience for too many a people, So if terrible spelling offends I can only apologise, but i'm not going to lose much sleep over it.