By now many of you will have already heard about a site where people “share” (read: violate copyright) magazines in their entirety, online. I’m not posting a link to the site here because I don’t want to contribute to the numbers who visit, even out of curiosity.
Canadian photographer John Fowler sent me a link to an interesting post about that mag site and its ramifications. It brings up a very important point: now that the idea of free magazines online has been let out on the masses, will anyone be able to force the masses back into some other monetization/distribution format or is the proverbial genie out of the bottle?
Discussions of whether or not there are copyright issues here will, in my opinion, not serve the community too well. Yes, we know that these are rip-offs and both the magazines and their contributors are being damaged by this site, so there’s no real discussion there. But the impact on the general public is something we should be paying attention to.
Of course we’d love for people to rise up and say “this is wrong and we will not stand for it!” but the fact is, that is not very likely to happen. When we have relatively few people rising up to protest those who are financially supporting the promotion of the Beijing Olympic games (I am not talking about the athletes, who should be supported, but rather the media companies and the advertisers–people won’t even turn off their tvs!) when the Chinese government has been responsible for supporting countries that engage in genocide (hello Sudan!) as well as the mass murder of millions themselves (over a million Tibetans alone and other minorities are also tortured and killed), I think the chances of getting a groundswell of interest in supporting copyright protection is an unlikely proposition. People just don’t want to be bothered. They want what they want and they’re perfectly willing to ignore the ramifications if those ramifications do not directly affect them.
In other words and in our industry’s world, copyright really doesn’t matter to the outside world very much…except when it costs them money and then they are against it.
The reality is people love free. Even more than cheap, free is compelling. Once we humans get something for free, it’s damn difficult to get us to pay for it later, and that’s what is happening with magazines on that pirating site. It’s something APE has mentioned, and others, but which still seems to be causing a lot of nothing (but griping) in the photo community in general.
We need to get out heads out of the sand and face the reality that the system as we have known it is changing radically. We must figure out some way to work with the change. Magazines may move to entirely digital formats which they distribute for free but pay for only with advertising. Okay, if that is the case, that means we need to figure out how to develop a pricing system that is based on that advertising as well.
This is the new model, I think, for almost all creative work–advertising based. I’ve talked about it before as a possible system for pricing advertising usage, but it could work for editorial as well. Maybe something like this: if a magazine averages $X per content word in advertising revenue (online + print), then the usage fee for an image to run as editorial content (online and print) would be a small percentage of the total number of words of the accompanying article times the per content word figure. For example, the usage fee for an image running with a 1200 word article would be (at $X per content word) 1200X times 10% (or some other percentage).
This is just one idea, and one which I haven’t even begun to think through at any depth. I’m just throwing it out there. But that’s the point–let’s start throwing ideas out there. Wwe have to start thinking someplace and start thinking now. Other ideas should be discussed so that we can, together, find a way to implement change ourselves rather than drown when it’s implemented on us.
There is a scene in Dan Simmons’ “Hyperion” books, set in the far future, where a novelist is asking his publisher why no one is buying his book. The publisher responds that so far, only AI’s seem to like it: human beings don’t.
Well, there are zillions of AI’s, so the author says, “Well, sell it to them!”
The response: “We did. We sold one copy to an AI.” This is paraphrasing, but the implication is that just to discuss the work, an AI must first essentially transmit it in its entirety to the other AI, and they won’t pay twice, because they’re just talking about the book, not reading it independently.
Now *that’s* Fair Use with some *teeth.*
Anyway, you’re right: once they get it free, they won’t pay. The modern mindset is based on entitlement: what I want, I am entitled to – and once I’ve got it, I should continue to get it, forever. Somebody emailed me for advice the other day on what to do about a startup company that wanted a picture to use in their “logo,” for FREE, in exchange for a “credit.” I said, “What are they going to do, put your URL in their brand identity? If they don’t have the brains to BUY OUT an image that central to their brand, much less actually pay for it, I wouldn’t do business with them at all.” But such is the mindset today.
M
Interesting concept.
Indeed, people love free. But for the smart companies, free is never really free.
Does MySpace give away accounts because they’re cool people and like bad site design? Nope.
These blog sites are free, because they give their parents a lot of traffic in which to place ads.
Magazines and newspapers are losing because their primary product, the ads, are no longer the top product of their type.
I don’t buy ads in E&P or other trade mags because a well-targeted postcard campaign is cheaper and more effective.
But I digress.
Give away magazines through an ‘official’ site like the pirate one, in exchange for an in-depth consumer demographic information. That way, when they log in, they get ads in their electronic magazine specifically tailored to them. Advertisers pay essentially per-viewer, and can more accurately track their campaign.
The barrier to entry for the advertiser drops, and the demand for ads goes up.
Really, the subscription cost for most pubs covers distribution costs and not a whole lot more.