Ohhh, the humanity

Earlier this month when I did a presentation at the middle school for career day and one of the items that I really wanted to discuss was about copyright. Talking about copyright in the sense of photography is really pretty boring. Until you you sprinkle it with dollars and sense. I used songs as my inroad to the conversation.

To begin, everyone that creates something is automatically protected by copyright laws at the time of creation. To use something they could relate to, I asked everyone if they had an iPod or MP3 player. Then I asked them how many songs they have. I heard from a few to hundreds of songs. Then I posed the question to see if they paid for every one of those songs.......if not, they they took someone else's creation and it was a copyright violation. No different than if someone took your pictures, poem or short story, without paying for it.

For some, they got it. Most really didn't care.

With that in mind. Here is a story from the Washington Post about photo usage by corporations and copyright.

Keep in mind, that the photography industry needs to bear there are two camps of use. Commercial and editorial.

The presentation was pretty fun and I can't wait until next year.