European Parliament TV: Focus on Copyright

Here's the documented shredding of the Cory Doctorow prints 03.32 - 05.22, with a lively chat about copyright and copy-wrong afterward . Be sure not to miss the 'industry and artist representative' who dictates what artists want in complete contradiction of the two artist case studies that precede her.

(At risk of repeating myself - excuse me) I hope the kid in the bedroom does make screensavers or a fansite mash-up out of my images, likewise the blogger when illustrating their articles. I ask them to credit me (BY), (preferably to link), not to charge anyone to access it (NC) and that they share any mash-ups with the same (share alike) license.

To misquote an oft repeated mantra : 'obscurity is my professional enemy, not piracy'.

If you're a magazine, TV company, Advertising agency, ring-fenced online newspaper or other entity (now in existence or to be birthed in the future), and you would like to use my image to enhance your 'paid-for' content, then email me for my usage rates and I'll be happy to quote you.

$26,000 worth of Ltd Edition Recycling.

"$26,000 worth of unsold limited edition prints and signed manuscript pages ready to be recycled /transformed into a new work of art."

On Friday 11th June Jonathan shredded of the unsold prints and signed manuscript pages from Cory Doctorow’s ‘For The Win’ novel. The event was filmed by European Parliament Television and will be aired as part of a program on New Economies of Photography.

More background on this story can be found here. With a longer write-up here.

Given Things away.

I've kind of been putting off writing up a concluding post to the 'Giving Things Away' trial, not for want of sharing it, but because I've been implementing the things that I've learned and in lots of ways moved the whole thing much further forward. Which means I have to now go back and untangle the various strands.

Laziness perhaps, but in my defense, the critic shouldn't mistake my drowning for waving, this 'live trial' is a pragmatic necessity from which I earn a living (call it R and D), not a passing whimsy. The write up I still find harder to justify because my photographer 1.0 brain stills sees talking about and sharing what I do as, at best indulgent vanity and at worst, commercial suicide.

However, in truth and in a Photography 2.0 one line summary, I've learned more and come further in the the last three months than I have over the last three years, the conclusion of which is that sharing what I do as well as the mechanics of how I do it is crucial for my practice, and possibly, for others like me.

Hence, I begin my year looking backwards.

In brief summary: the original 'Trial" consisted of trying to use the internet for what it's really good at (distribution) rather than fighting those same dynamics. So rather than stifling use of my images with brutal copyright terms, I gave them away for free and then tried to make money out of the wider reaching audience.

In full: here are the links to the posts Part I Part II Part III and a further follow up (which riffs a bit, but buried in there are some outcomes).

In keeping, the following is split into a skinny and a full fat version, the former consisting of the numbers the latter pertaining to the broader fall-out.

Caveat: God knows, I'm not an economist so please indulge my language and please do correct me if I use the wrong terms. If I don't know of a term to describe what I find then I make one up (which I'll try to prefix with a 'what I'm calling'). I'll probably also mis-use terms, mis-quote people and inadvertently plagiarize , though on this last point someone once said that 'Amateurs plagiarize whereas Artists steal', a quote which (in keeping) I have stolen.



The Skinny:

Total gross cost of making the original images of Cory £114.00 GBP*
Total cost of producing the 111 small prints for sale £111.00 GBP (that's approx)
Total cost of Printing the three large contact composite prints £ 150.00
Total cost of packaging (archival sleeves, envelopes and tube) £65.00

Overall cost per unit £ 3.85 GBP
Total overall cost £ 440.00 GBP

Income from Etsy print sales £ 875.00
Income from Print usage $250 (see here for client refusing to use the image without paying)
Income from Guest Speaking about the trial £ 300
Total income £1325
Minus £125 donation to charity (tax deductible)

Net Profit to date £ 760.00 GBP

*These costs don't include the net costs of doing business (cost of my time, business overheads etc) nor the opportunity cost (opportunities forsaken to produce the work, in other words - what I could have done instead during that time).


The fuller fat version:

The skinny really doesn't tell the full story. For a start there remain sixty unsold prints which I've already said here, will go on sale for one month when Cory's "For the Win" is published at ten times their current price. There will be no second edition and any remainders will be destroyed. So there remains potentially, a significant further income from sales.

There are a number of what I'll call 'perceivable non-material benefits' which range from my learning experience in general to the increase in number and make-up of my contacts, to my general status as a practitioner. What to include and what not include here is a bit messy and really the untangling of which I spoke earlier, but here are some clearly tangible and relevant examples:

The original image that Cory annotated to date has been viewed 8,321 times on Flickr, the others from the set have been viewed 972 times and 1,344 times respectively - every page of which links to my site and credits me.

One of the images appears on Wikipidea - again crediting me and driving traffic to me and my site.


Cory also has a significant twitter following so when he tweeted what I was up to it went out to 30,000 plus people. I tried to keep up with the (what I'll call) 'compound retweets', in other words the total number of people reached when someone following Cory or me, retweeted what we were saying to their followers, and them in turn to theirs and so on. For this purpose I had columns in my Twitter desktop application that were just searching the relevant key phrases, the upshot of which is that after 36 hours I lost count somewhere around a conservative 750,000 people reached. Perhaps this is what Clay Shirky means when he refers to Twitter's “algorithmic authority”.

Cory wrote about the experiment on his Craphound blog:

Jonathan Worth is "experimenting with new business-models for photography that leverage, rather than fight, the Internet"

and also at BoingBoing where he is an editor, these both directed more traffic to me and my site
(and continue to do so).

"Jonathan Worth tries out a copy-friendly photography business-experiment"

In turn, a further series of articles and blog posts followed, which likewise generated more traffic, reached even wider audiences and so on.

"In the New Media World, Photographers Who Embrace Change Will Succeed" by Wayne Ford

"One Great Idea – Meet Jonathan Worth" by Lori Osterberg

"Social Skills: Using the Web more effectively" by Charlotte Griffiths

Likewise, the experiment and now references to my practice as a whole, crop up in articles and blog posts amongst yet other strata of audience (and potential collaborators) :

"Required Reading: Posts about photography’s future you can’t afford to miss" by Miki Johnson

"Revolutions in the media economy (5) – the pay wall folly for photographers" by David Campbell

"Towards a Sustainable Journalism" by Fred Ritchin

Then in "recognition of (my) innovation and influential role in developing new business models for photographers using the social web”, I was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, another network whose pertinence was illustrated to me on a recent trip out to New York. I was out there primarily to try to meet Fred Ritchin (After Photography, Pixel Press) and see Stephen Mayes (VII) in the hope of getting advice. Fred kindly invited me to talk to his students at NYU, and the morning I was due to do this I tweeted to that effect. Within ten minutes I'd received an email from the RSA in the US asking if the talk was public as there were over four hundred fellows in the NY area and they'd like to offer the chance out to them to attend and meet me.

I mentioned earlier one of the publications that used the image of Cory to illustrate an article insisted on paying to do so, yet another (Jon Levy of FOTO8 magazine) after having used the same image, also contacted me to discuss the opportunity of producing a series of portraits for him in the same visual vein.



Conclusion :

The cold maths of this one-off trial don't equate to a viable business model, at least not my execution of it. Not when one takes into account the costs of doing business however, this is only a fraction of the story and the learning that I've paid for here with my time, someone else can pick up and take forward much more efficiently, as I intend to from now on.

There were a few things that made Cory an ideal subject and I think are worth reflecting on:

He has a cult following and he interacts with these followers, in fact he actually involves them directly in the production of his work, so that they become in every respect, partisan. Take for example when people point out typos Cory amends the mistake and thanks them in a footnote (who wouldn't buy a second copy of the book with your name in it?) and the very fact that his CC licensing actively encourages reworking or 'derivative' versions of his work. He takes Jeff Jarvis's advice to "make more customers take ownership of your brand" to the next level, literally.

He was also willing to motivate this community and so thereby indirectly grant me access to them.

The mechanics of how he does what he does are also detached from the end product. You read his books, you don't watch him write them, and so there's an element of mystery, wherein for the fan there's an inherent value. Think at base level of the autograph, then think of the actual pen that was used to write the autograph or the desk that it was written at, or the author's favourite chair/typewriter etc. This stuff is only valuable to the avid fan but the bigger the fan the greater the inferred value, the trick is enabling every level of fan to access their particular version of the product.

I incorporated this by employing something that Chris Anderson refers to in his book "Free: The Future Of A Radical Price" as 'Versioning'. The prints were available from zero cost and infinite availability (Flickr and Archive.org) towards infinite cost for the singularly unique, though in truth this was also where I learned about 'price discovery'. The most expensive prints were the first to go, from which I conclude that I should have pitched their price much higher. These more expensive prints enabled me to sell the cheaper prints at break-even but they should have made me a much larger profit or perhaps even more delicate versioning .

This still gave the fans access to versions of the product and because Cory granted me access to his followers I overcame the second traditional problem - that of geography - how to economically reach each and every level of fan, wherever they might live, which might be what Jeff Jarvis describes as effectively 'targeting masses of niches' for which the internet is the only viable tool.

Distilled out - the Internet enables access, Social Media enables discerning access. Versioning enables the customer to dictate their individually perceived value of the product and at the same time it justifies that choice to their peers (see the comments section at BoingBoing where fans joust about who got to buy Ltd. Ed. Number 1).

It seems natural to me that the next step is to use this same heady cocktail to ask the masses of niches "Who do you want me to photograph?". The product of which I could then afford to allow magazines to publish for free, so disseminating my work again amongst their paper-fans and using them for what they're still really good at (physical distribution and cross-promotion, such as when a reader of X-Magazine stumbles across my article after reading another unrelated piece), as opposed to relying on them for what they're no longer able to do (commission and pay).

UPDATED ARTICLE LINKS :

Economics Toolbox
FOTO8 Leo Hsu
RISING BLACKSTAR

Reasons to be Cheerful Part One.

Last week I invested the proceeds from my experiment with Cory Doctorow.

Actually I gambled them, but then that's all investing is anyway isn't it or did I miss something ?

I gambled that some of the people I've not been able to access via Twitter (or any other of the traditional social media methods) might speak to me if I knocked on their door (old school).

I booked a flight, a couch and then whored my services as a photographer, an assistant, a re-toucher and a speaker, in order to pay for my stay.

"Sir, is your trip business or pleasure?"
"Sir, my Dad said 'Find a job you like and you'll never work again'. So I'm here strictly on pleasure."

The people that I met, fell broadly into four categories;

i. Those who saw their practice/business as being in terminal decline and/or out of their control.

ii. Those in denial (the true Radicals).

iii. A precious few who were excited and pro-active (the Visionaries).

iv. And the fish.


(i) One of the photographers that I spent time with described how he was struggling on his reduced editorial fees, that he wanted to fund new projects and he'd been trying to set-up a book deal for nearly two years without success. This very established photographer then explained that the book is a valuable aspect of his promotion and one of the vehicles that he employed to generate new commissions.

So I asked him why he wasn't publishing it himself and at the same time earning the proceeds ?

Answer; 'Because it's not that simple. Funding, design, storage, distribution - and there's no money in books '


What about if you minimised the upfront costs by say, using a print on demand company ? That way you can have it designed by whichever designer you want to work with (rather than being saddled with whichever one is at this elusive publishing house).

Likewise we just removed the storage issue (because they'd be printed on demand), leaving only Money and Distribution.

So I asked him; why he usually did both hard and soft-back versions of his books.

Answer - because one's better and more expensive, thereby catering for different buyer's budgets.

Great, but only two different budgets? Why not ten or twenty ? In fact, why not cater for everyone's budget? Why not have one virtual version that's open and available at no cost, one small softback version that's $5, one better quality at $10, another hardback at $20, another larger hardback at $30 and yet another limited edition with signed for $50.

$100 could buy you a hard-back with a signed print - some of these could go out to your commissioning editors and so on, until ultimately you make a unique handbound set of fine prints, stitched together by elves and delivered by you in person on a unicorn for $100,000.

Then follow that up by making yourself available for commission at $10,000 a sitting.

That just leaves distribution.


So I asked him; were there any people repeatedly interested in his work, like a fan-base? Or did he sell to different people every time one of his books was published? In answer to which, he showed me the vaguely terrifying list of email requests from assistants, students, enthusiasts etc all requesting an audience, work, advice, donations and so on.

Ummm.... so what about if you sort of provided a virtual forum for those people to congregate? A place where you could (for want of a better phrase), herd them towards other virtual environments to experience your magic first hand ? Like for example, which publications are showing your work, what campaigns you've been working on, what projects you're thinking about, perhaps even give these loyal fans access to behind the scenes footage and the odd contact sheet. Maybe even reward their commitment by offering advance copies of those books, special rates etc ?

Well there's this thing called Social Media and it allows you to do all of that and probably a lot more too. We're all still waiting for the Fish to work out and show us it's full potential.

And here's another thing about the "new commissions" part. What about if there was a way of gathering this loyal 'fanbase' and asking them if they'd fund your next project? In gratitude for which you'd reward these new 'patrons' with special treatment and access to some of the afore mentioned magic.

Well there's a website for that too.

Giving things Away Part III

Last Friday I sent out the following email to the purchasers of the Limited Edition Cory Doctorow Prints and Signed Manuscript pages;


Advance Notice of Withdrawal from sale of Signed Cory Doctorow Manuscript and Photograph.


As someone that has supported Cory's and my "Trial", it is my pleasure to give you exclusive, prior notice that the remaining prints will be withdrawn from sale at midnight GMT on Sunday the 8th of November. I will Tweet and blog publicly, to this effect from Monday 2nd of November.

The remainder will go back on sale when "For the Win" is published April 2010.

They will however go on sale at exactly TEN TIMES the price you paid for them.

So to be clear, if you bought one of the higher numbers 65-111 at $8, then any remaining editions will be back on sale at $80 each in 2010, if you bought one of numbers 7-17 then they will only be available at $800 each.

There will be no discounting and no exceptions. Should the situation arise whereby any prints remain unsold one month after publication of the novel, then they will be destroyed and there will be no second edition.

To affirm validity and value, I have kept a record of every purchaser, their Zip / Postal code and their respective Print Edition Numbers, if you sell or gift your prints in the meantime please pass onto me a record of the transaction and the details of the new owner.

I would like to stay in touch further, but I hate SPAM and presume you do too. If you would like me to send you updates such as this one (and there won't be many) then please just send a reply to this mail.

It's been lovely to meet you albeit virtually and I hope our paths cross again.

Very best wishes,

Jonathan.

REMAINING PRINTS AND MANUSCRIPT PAGES ON SALE HERE.

Getting paid to give things away.

My Dad spent six years in the printing trade as an apprentice "Compositor", setting every letter of cold type by hand. He said he learned the job in the first two, then spent four years doing a mans work, for a boys wage.

Some of my earliest memories are the smell of books bigger than me and fonts with magical names I could barely read.I loved their shapes. I'd trace them with my finger. Then with my pencils.


He wasn't a printer by that time, he'd just kept the books. One day in 1960 Fairchild Semiconductor invented the Phototypesetter and his job disappeared.

I have the benefit of this knowledge at my back. And like many passionate media creatives I do not want to sell insurance. You work in the media or else you wouldn't be here, so you know that our industry is illustrating how business models do or don't adapt to technological and societal evolutions.

I'm running a series of live trials that form (for lack of a better word), "Research". They're the sort of thing that all long-term freelancers do, just I'm making mine public.

I know freelancers generally don't collaborate. And I've never been drawn to a particular Union. So I thought this would be just a case of sharing information, maybe a few people would comment and chuck in some experiences of their own. I thought I'd publish information on a series of ongoing experiments and then hope others'd pitch in and help me work out what conclusions to drawer.

I didn't expect people to actively engage. I've never seen the industry (in it's broadest sense) that way before.


I'll record Cory (the subject) Doctorow's massive and hugely generous support no doubt, in detail in the future, but I wanted to drop a couple of things here that happened last week.

So you know what particular trial I'm referring to now (?) if not click here. This week I was approached by the Art Director of a Magazine in NY wanting to use one of the images of Cory. He approached me saying that he understood the images were CC licensed to be available for reproduction (Cory and I agreed this particular flavour of CC license for the purposes of this test) but that he wanted to use the image for the cover of the magazine and ...

"As a long-time art director and former freelancer myself (illustration), I am always concerned about fairness in compensation for photographers.

I also work for a (currently) budget-strapped magazine, and as a result we always try to figure out how to do our covers for free (fairly of course), or as cheaply as possible. Many of our cover photo images are provided by publishers because they serve their purpose of promoting their books while serving our need to illustrate the story. Other times we come up with original design solutions.

But I also respect your desire to be compensated, and putting the photo on a print magazine cover is probably extraordinary usage of your imagery. I appreciate you checking in with Cory re: the scope of the CC licensing (of which I admittedly need to become more educated about).

We have an broad agreement with XXSTOCK AGENCYXX for photography, and the cover we were considering for this issue before deciding to make Cory Doctorow the cover, was going to use a royalty-free image from XXX which would have cost us only $150.00 (US dollars).

Would you be OK if we compensated you $250 for use of your image..."

I explained that he was not obliged to pay me and it's worth noting (one way or another) that for the period of this Blog my website and online folio have been off line - so this AD has no idea who I am or what I've done in the past. He just has an image that he likes, which serves a specific purpose.

It's also worth noting that Cory has a bunch of similarly licensed images that are freely available to use from his flickr stream. But anyway, the AD wanted this one and, he wanted to pay me for it.

I didn't expect that.

I didn't expect it so much, that after a some back and forth emailing we're meeting up when I'm next in New York. That's someone who likes my work, and wants to pay me for using it, which means that meeting goes into my "Perceivable Non-Material Benefit" column and the fee goes into the perceivable benefits column.


Here's another thing. When I began using Twitter (as opposed to signed up for and forgot about) one of the first people that I came across who was Tweeting things I wanted to learn more about, was a very reputable Art Director whom I'd worked for in the past.

I became a part of his Twitter community, and through the echos that are RT's I gradually sidled up, before tapping him on the shoulder and asking if he remembered me and came here often?













Up to now, I'd always always thought "Networking" to be a hollow and crap term, which summed up what vacuous Trustafarian Socialites did and whose sole motivation was personal gain in a fashionably fair-weather world of parasitic exploitation.

I've never understood it as a variable sifting through, of all the friends, colleagues and acquaintances one had come across, to find those who, at that particular moment you have the most in common with. I don't now think there's anything sinister in this practice as I did before. It's just great.

I wonder, is that what the younglings mean by the Social-Media-Interface-tubing in my space?

Anyway, here's a line of what Wayne Ford wrote in a blog titled "In the New Media World, Photographers Who Embrace Change Will Succeed" for Black Star:

(of our subsequent conversations)"it is the dialogue itself that will ensure the media’s long-term survival — and the success of photojournalists and others. "

Dialogue, with another ally. Not Patron, but ally and partner.

My Dad assists me these days and not long ago we did a job that meant hanging about waiting for someone in a dank and forgotten storage area. Against one wall were a bunch of old wooden drawers a yard across and at least as deep. Each of these were divided and subdivided into open topped sections.

My Dad explained that these were the Type-Cases he'd had to use as a youth. He pointed where every letter of the alphabet, the numbers, the punctuation and the spaces would have lived.

Although there aren't as many books bigger than me now, I still love the smell of ink.

And I love making Photographs. And I'm not ready to sell insurance.

"Tradition is not a business model."

Why do Architects listen to photographers?

There's no punch-line. The question is almost as random as it appears on the surface. And still, I have more blog and Twitter interaction from Architects than anyone else non-photographic.

And I'm not the only one. A Foto Magazine publisher that I was talking to last week said that he also learned from and exchanged ideas with Architects. The more we talked, the more I realised how incredibly short sighted and narrow minded I am. Me, who preaches to other photographers to think of new ways to understand what we do and how we might make it relevant.

I listened to Cory Doctorow when he described how Science-Fiction writers would take great pride in the fact that their work would build on the work of their mentor's. Far from being covetous of his product, he actively works with other writers and sees this 'passing of a flame' as paying homage to the people that he in turn learned from and continues to be inspired by.



I thought of this, but in a different way when reading an article over on TechCrunch (thanks to @popsciguy from where this title originates). The full Journalism Internet Manifesto is here, I was reading it through my Photographer's eyes for what was relevant to me and perceiving photography as a small cog within the giant amorphous mass that is Journalism in it's broader sense. I was thinking - yes "16. Quality remains the most important quality." is relevant , practitioners that strive to produce original high quality work will always be in demand.... and then it occurred to me that I was again missing the point.


At the core of journalism is the idea that once garnered, information possessed by the journalist must be coveted and hidden. It's value is it's exclusivity. We've got something that we have to share but in traditional business models the only way to consistently realise the material benefit is to sell it exclusively.


This can't be the most efficient way of getting our work seen or heard. Assuming that sharing was the journalist's original intent, then this method must be at odds, in fact I struggle to think of a more effective way of limiting the people that are able to share in the work.

The upshot are practitioners who historically are frightened of admitting their work is informed by others and consequently terrified that others will steal their ideas. The 2.0 discipline equivalent of an inter-webular stillbirth.


Similarly both Music as a Practice and Music as an Industry have elements of this in common with photography and journalism- I suppose all art has elements in common. The most important one being that they drawer people together with something that transcends the material body of the the artifact. To illustrate this I often feel it my obligation to point out how much great Art artifacts have in common with the best Jokes.

The science of the Joke is a dark one and whomsoever works it out first probably won't be that funny. A bit like the Joker in Batman. But clearly, humour transcends the Joke itself and drawers people together in an involuntary response, Art and 'the sublime' do the same. And the more democratic the humour, or perhaps another way of putting that might be ; the more access-able the humour, then the more people will be drawn together and the louder they'll laugh.

So, ahem, I think it's fair to say that we've established categorically, the effects of Photography, Journalism, Music and Jokes are the same, in that they transcend the material body of the artifact and bring people together in a moment or on a subject.

This being the case, then what's the difference between reading a joke alone and hearing it amongst friends? I guess it's similar to listening to music alone as opposed to going to a concert? Or singing in the bath as opposed to singing as part of a choir? Perhaps in journalism it's the difference between having information that you keep to yourself or being part of a political movement.

Would it be fair then to say that as more people experience something alone, so the value of that experience increases when it becomes part of a larger whole?

Might this be a way of looking at the increasing numbers of people attending live music events as being directly related to the increase in 'freely' download-able music ?


Might it also apply to a piece of fine-art. Lets say Da Vinci's Mona Lisa? A painting that has been reproduced countless times. Would it be fair to say that the original artifact had been devalued as a consequence?

Well what if we take the opposite point of view ? What if that picture remained seen by only a few people along with everything else that Da Vinci produced? Would these unseen artifacts be worth more because no one had heard of him or seen his work ?

No, of course not.

They're valuable because they're well known. As more people value them, so the perceived worth of the original artifact increases respectively.Likewise as awareness of the original is disseminated, so the likelihood of someone able to afford this now escalating price coming into contact with this knowledge also increases.

Excellent, we've clearly illustrated why Architects listen to photographers, and who could dispute it? But where does that leave new business practices and models for the lens-based practitioners formally known as Photographers?

Perhaps, it's seeing partners where previously we'd looked for patrons. Perhaps, it's seeking to exploit the very things that in prior business models we might have perceived as exploiting us.
Maybe, the answer is understanding what we can learn, not only from Architects, but from any and all seemingly unrelated disciplines which are just like us, trying to navigate their way through a world widely webbed.