[WikiEN-l] Copyright question

[Carcharoth]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 2:47 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/7/18 Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>:

<snip>

>> You may want to look through the
>> BAPLA list and see if any charities or non-profit organisations are
>> there - there might well be, as I've never looked through the whole
>> list, but I suspect that even those ones would be selling their
>> images, not distributing them for free reuse (or they would be doing a
>> combination of free distribution and sales). The closest you might
>> come would be "non-commercial use" (e.g. museums), but that, as has
>> been made clear at Commons, is insufficiently free.
>
> BAPLA's stated ambitions appear to be to become the monopoly cartel
> for images in the UK - the RIAA or MPAA, with similar morals and
> ethics.

Where do you get that impression? They are a trade association.

Did you look through the list?

http://www.bapla.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=16&Itemid=45

You may also want to look at the sister organisations:

"PACA in the USA and CEPIC across Europe".

Picture Archive Council of America:

http://www.pacaoffice.org/

"PACA, the Picture Archive Council of America, is the trade
organization in North America that represents the vital interests of
stock archives of every size, from individual photographers to large
corporations, who license images for commercial reproduction. Founded
in 1951, its membership includes over 100 companies in North America
and over 50 international members."

Co-ordination of European Picture Agencies Press Stock Heritage:

http://www.cepic.org/

"CEPIC is a European Economic Interest Group (E.E.I.G) not for profit
representing the interests of picture associations, agencies and
libraries in Europe, in total 1.053 picture agencies and libraries in
Europe, from the smallest to the largest, the sole trader and the
global company, covering all aspects of photography, news, stock,
heritage. CEPIC organises each year an Agent Congress, enabling agents
from all over the world to meet. "

It's a big industry (though many of the picture libraries are
vanishingly small and many get swallowed up by the giants). I think
most of it is photographers taking contemporary pictures and selling
them (remember this is mostly stock photography, news photography is
something different - Commons is interesting in that it combines news
photography and stock photography). Note the reference to "news,
stock, heritage" in the CEPIC description. The bit of interest here is
"heritage", though the very oldest of the news photography is now
falling into the public domain.

How much of the worldwide sales of images consists of sales from scans
of archives of public domain and historical material (or, for example,
the commercial sale of US-PD material, such as NASA and Library of
Congress), I don't know, but that is only part of the industry. The
main part is living photographers selling their photographs (news and
stock). The heritage or archival side of things, the historical photos
and scans of pictures in old books, makes up a chunk of it, but how
much I don't know if anyone knows. The different sources and
provenances for such images (and the sometimes uncertain status of
archives) complicates things as well.

Carcharoth