As I was putting together that previous masterpiece of bloggery (and yes, such things are crafted with great care in the Ashton Garret, lest you think I just throw these things out on a whim) I decided an illustration was in order. Not having a prawn sandwich to hand I turned to Google, as one often does in these situations, for help and there in the first few results was the perfect image. So I nabbed it, drew a crude red circle and line over it and uploaded the results.
Now, that photo isn’t actually of a prawn sandwich. It’s a photo of a plastic replica of a prawn sandwich produced by a company called, logically enough, Replica who “create theatre in the retail environment and provide hyper-realistic food models for health education and drama”. So not only is the photograph somebody’s work, the subject of the photograph is also somebody else’s work. Both of them are covered under copyright. Which I broke.
And here’s the thing. If I’d reproduced the image as is and labeled it as a neat photo of a fake sandwich then I’d be very guilty of copyright infringement as I do not have the right to copy that image. But I didn’t care too hoots about the fakeness of the sandwich and wasn’t that bothered about the merits of the photograph (which, to be frank, needed a bit of work to get the colour balance right). All I wanted was an icon that represented a prawn sandwich, something that, when you saw it, you’d think “prawn sandwich”. To me there was no real difference between my putting the words “prawn” and “sandwich” in a red circle with a line through it and using a photo, except maybe the photo was funnier.
Yes, I’m still guilty of copyright infringement and probably some other stuff but I consider it a lesser crime because my intentions were different. Or to put it another way, if I had reproduced the image as I found it I’d have felt obliged to credit the site I found it on. Having assimilated it into my own work that obligation somehow vanished.
Sticking with photography, a tangental example illuminates. If you take a photograph of someone where they fill the frame you need a model release in order to commercially use that photo. (Okay, not legally in this country but it’s good form, especially if you want to sell worldwide.) If, however, you take a photo of a crowd and someone happens to be in that photo then you don’t have to bother getting them to sign a piece of paper no matter how identifiable they are because the photo isn’t about them. There are degrees and at some point the rights shrink away into meaninglessness.
I should point out that I don’t take any glee from infringing on the rights of plastic food manufacturers nor their photographers. It just struck me, as I was failing to get to sleep, that I’d somehow crossed a line where I would no longer respect their rights and I found that interesting. And I, perhaps foolishly, thought you might find it interesting too.
(And if you’re wondering, yes, this post is very meta.)
I suggest you pop over to Flickr and see if someone has uploaded a phto of a prawn sandwich with a creative commons license that allows derivs and commercial use (you get ad revenue so I think we have to consider this site as commercial) :)
Yeah, I know that but I still didn’t. Perhaps because I don’t think of Flickr as a repository for stock images of sandwiches.
I think I’m developing a theme here in my writing. I’m not so much interested in what people should or shouldn’t do. I’m interested in why they do certain things when logic/morals/etc dictate they should perhaps not do them. And in studying this I’m using myself as a subject. So I’m not suggesting I’m right of even soliciting advice – just observing what I do.
The “commercial” thing is a bit of a conundrum. I wouldn’t consider the ads on this site make it commercial because they barely cover the costs of hosting it, let alone providing an income and I don’t write with the intention of increasing the revenue like more niche specific blogs. If you want to be really pedantic you could say any hosted blog (Blogspot, LiveJournal, MySpace) is a commercial operation because it promoted a commercial organisation. I link to Movable Type which, while I use it for free, is a commercial product. Does that tip the balance? Can of worms best left unopened!
I recall seeing a piece by David Byrne where he mentioned a conversation with Norman Cook about the chap on the cover of You’ve Come A Long Way Baby. Byrne asked Cook whether he had permission to use the image, and Cook replied under UK law if someone smiles for a photograph then that implies consent to appear in the photo.
Apparently that isn’t the case in the US, and it certainly doesn’t apply to prawn sandwiches.
Can prawns smile?
My question is why did you have to include the photo of a prawn sandwich, fake or otherwise? Does this not demonstrate leanings towards the journalistic style being critized in the previous article? In the screen grab linked from the ‘slow news day’ post there are three stock photos of punters filling their tanks, the crazy cats, but I don’t think they added anything to the stories. I know what filling a petrol tank looks likes. I know what a prawn sandwich looks like too. Perhaps a photo of your bog roll would have illustrated the point better – even a before and after shot (no not that!). I mean to show the decrease in the diameter of the roll? That way we’d know exactly not only that the sandwich was bad, but exactly how bad ;-)