In November a few thousand attorneys, licensing executives and IP personnel will gather in Chicago for three days of seminars on, “Mastering the Next Wave of Marketing Law”. Speakers from many of the numerous prestigious law firms located across this great land that typically represent media companies, publishers and companies that license intellectual property will give the benefit of their experiences. We know many of these law firms having litigated against them.
Attendees will pay $1,500 – $2,500 excluding expenses to attend. Why, you may ask, do we bring this to your attention? Because this seminar is largely about people like you.
By the end of this conference a few million dollars will be spent learning about issues such as: emerging technologies, advertising through social media, privacy, digital content, defending against lawsuits involving intellectual property and so on. Well heeled attorneys and other IP people are being sent at considerable expense to listen to and take advice from other well paid experts so as to be better prepared to play defense if people like you should dare to assert their rights. They are spending lots of time and money preparing and honing their defenses and strategies. They are getting prepared and being smart, very smart.
We covered a small local such gathering in our previous article titled Head Fakes and Other Lawyer Tactics. That was for a few dozen lawyers done locally. This is the same type of a gathering of lawyers, but thousands not dozens, and national not local.
It should be obvious to all of our readers that these Fortune 500 companies and their attorneys believe that this money is very well invested. If you ever stop thinking that your copyrights aren’t worth very much, let your thoughts go to all of those suits spending three days in Chicago at considerable cost. Trust us, they are spending lots of time and money thinking about your intellectual property.
So the lawyers are getting their ducks in a row against future copyright cases that they know photographers and artists will be bring forth in the future. Where are your ducks?
#1 by Damian Vines on October 1, 2013 - 2:51 pm
I hope Mark Zuckerberg attends 🙂 I’m really unclear on just what the new Facebook (or anyone’s) terms of service really mean, what it will allow them to do legally, and how I can protect my IP in situations where it seems like I’m giving it all away by agreeing to an online TOS such as this. Federally registered or not, do I really have to stop uploading my images to Facebook? Or anywhere online for that matter? I would pay money for a publication or service that would explain, in english, exactly what any given online company’s terms of service mean and what exactly they can and can’t do with my IP. Even reading the TOS does not tell a laymen of law like myself what it really means.
Looking forward to your Blog posts after this get together! Great work guys!
#2 by Matt Timmons on October 6, 2013 - 2:14 am
This gave me a good horror movie idea: Weld the doors shut on them and watch these evil bastards eat each other to stay alive.
In all seriousness, I thought our duck was the U.S. Constitution. If these lawyers purpose is to find a way around that, then our duck died of a corrupted system. A system to which the Fortune 500 club money we copyright holders don’t have access to. If Federal judges see fit to rule in favor of companies who have enormous amounts of money regardless of violation of law, then we have no duck. If someone doesn’t have permission to use copyrighted material, they are guilty of infringement, convention or not. They get my coveted “middle finger” award.
#3 by Jack and Ed on October 6, 2013 - 12:14 pm
Damaian- The answer to your great question is long, not simple, and is worth an article, not just a reply. It’ll be up in the next day or too.
Jack
#4 by Jack and Ed on October 6, 2013 - 12:25 pm
Matt, I think you’re getting way ahead of this article. It’s not about circumventing the Constitution or rulings by Federal judges. What they’re doing is way before that and completely fine. They’re getting their defenses organized. Photographers should be doing the same, in educating fellow photographers. In my opinion, from long experience in photo trade associations, photographers can be their own worse enemy because we’re way too independent and can not work together for the greater good. After all the work I’ve done in trade associations, I have to feel that photographers work less in a group than our current Congress in Washington. As that great philosopher and comic character, Pogo, once said, “I has met the enemy, and he is us!”.
The point of the article was just that we should be aware of what the “other side” is doing and we should also be prepared.
Knowing what your enemy is planning is very valuable.
So let’s not say how bad or evil they are, let’s discuss what we can and should do.
And that brings us back to this blog. Bitching and complaining doesn’t move the ball forward. Being informed on how the defense is lining up is golden information.
Jack
#5 by Matt Timmons on October 7, 2013 - 3:31 am
You’re right about that, Jack. Photographers typically don’t like to work together because we’re each others’ direct competitors. But as a whole, we do need to start banding together just to keep our trade in tact. I think Damian’s point is also a good indicator of how social media is just becoming one big stock photo agency, with the IP owners getting the shaft. If Zuckerberg is such a great humanitarian figure, why is he ripping-off his users?
As far as what we can do about that, we can watermark our uploaded images making them unusable for sale, yet redirect to where they can be licensed. As for the lawyers, well, we photographers need money to defend ourselves it looks like. Maybe we could get B&H and all the other equipment suppliers and manufacturers to support us on the copyright home front. After all, if photographers aren’t able to sustain ourselves against the big lawyers, we won’t be camera store customers any longer. We’ll be selling off our gear and going back to doing something we can make a living at.
#6 by Damian Vines on October 7, 2013 - 1:20 pm
Really great point too Matt. But unfortunately I think the big manufacturers and distributors are doing more business than ever these last ten years or so with the explosion of digital, except it’s not from working professions but from hobbyists and wanna be’s that have no intention of making money but just want what they consider the best or professional photos. I think “professional” photographers think that the professional photographer market is dwindling but the fact is to the general uneducated or un artistically inclined, the photographer market is exploding. As far as they are concerned everyone with a camera is a professional.
#7 by Edward C. Greenberg on October 7, 2013 - 5:22 pm
Reading the comments above reminded me of something one of my adversaries from a big law firm once told me while haggling over a settlement figure. We were getting very close to a deal and I said something like, “Your client is a repeat offender. It is as if your client (insert name of big media company, newspaper, publisher etc. here) is addicted to infringing on rights of the little guy”. He replied, “Ah but photographers are such great enablers”. Unfortunately he was/is largely correct.
We settled at a fair number and his client likely continues to infringe as to do so is simply part of their cost of doing business.
#8 by Matt Timmons on October 8, 2013 - 1:12 am
Well put, Ed. As I see it, corporate infringers save more money by paying one or two settlements than they would by paying each and every license fee. It makes sense, economically. How that would change if all those infringed, sued…
#9 by Edward C. Greenberg on October 8, 2013 - 1:45 pm
Matt you are 1/2 right. If creators REGISTERED all of their work and then sued when infringed, the number of infringements overall would likely decrease. In those cases any registrant who obtains a fair settlement from an infringer or who prevails in a copyright litigation, would be fairly paid whether the overall number of infringements nationwide increased, decreased or stayed the same.