Mark Lyn­der­say

It be­gan with a sim­ple pho­to shot by Ja­son Nicholas Sook­er­many, a young civ­il ser­vant from Siparia cap­tured at the La Div­ina Pas­to­ra pro­ces­sion in May last year. Sook­er­many put a wa­ter­mark on his pho­to and up­loaded it to his Face­book gallery, tag­ging the peo­ple in the pho­to as he did so. Sook­er­many is an en­thu­si­as­tic pho­tog­ra­ph­er and posts many im­ages to Face­book un­der his nom de pho­to, Ja­son X Pho­tog­ra­phy. His equip­ment and his in­ten­tions are hum­ble. Then his pho­to ap­peared on the front page of the TNT Mir­ror, his wa­ter­mark cropped out and with­out cred­it to him. Un­hap­py about the sit­u­a­tion, he be­gan a thread on Face­book ex­plain­ing the sit­u­a­tion. I've had this type of thing hap­pen to me too of­ten not to em­pathise. I wrote a note about his sto­ry, post­ing it as a com­ment on a TNT Mir­ror Me­di­awatch sto­ry that de­clared the man­age­ment of the pa­per to be "mild­ly amused" by all the fuss on Face­book.

Not ex­pect­ing the Mir­ror to ap­prove the on­line com­ment (they did), I post­ed the note to Face­book, where a dis­cus­sion en­sued, which you can find here: http://ow.ly/ad­skX. That de­bate large­ly dis­ap­proved of the Mir­ror's de­ci­sion to pub­lish with­out per­mis­sion or cred­it, but the com­ments surged af­ter the pa­per's CEO and Pub­lish­er, Max­ie Cuffie, showed up to game­ly de­fend the pub­li­ca­tion's de­ci­sions. That led to an­oth­er Me­di­awatch no­tice on the mat­ter, in which the Mir­ror, no longer amused, de­clared it­self "tak­en aback" by what it de­scribed as a "bit­ter re­sponse." The thread is far too long to get in­to here, and it's all avail­able on­line for the ter­mi­nal­ly cu­ri­ous. Short ver­sion here. Cuffie, who has an­nounced a set­tle­ment with Sook­er­many, re­mains un­moved by ar­gu­ments against his im­age ac­qui­si­tion prac­tices. In Cuffie's own words, "...we con­sid­er any pub­licly avail­able im­age fair game and we do scrape the In­ter­net for im­ages, but we do so with­in the law and we re­spect all as­ser­tions of copy­right." The Mir­ror boss be­lieves that the copy­right law sup­ports what he's do­ing and cites this word­ing from the 2008 Copy­right Act, which sup­ports "the re­pro­duc­tion in a news­pa­per or pe­ri­od­i­cal, the broad­cast­ing or oth­er com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the pub­lic of an ar­ti­cle pub­lished in a news­pa­per or pe­ri­od­i­cal on cur­rent eco­nom­ic, po­lit­i­cal or re­li­gious top­ics or a broad­cast work of the same char­ac­ter."

The journo in me nods at this, but the pho­tog­ra­ph­er laments what's been left out. There's a caveat on such use, which en­joins the me­dia to ho­n­our an "oblig­a­tion to in­di­cate the source and the name of the au­thor as far as prac­ti­ca­ble." The law then goes on to state quite plain­ly: "...this per­mis­sion shall not ap­ply where the own­er of copy­right has re­served the right to au­tho­rise re­pro­duc­tion." Ul­ti­mate­ly, this isn't about the TNT Mir­ror or Max­ie Cuffie. It's about un­der­stand­ing the com­mon­sense rules of en­gage­ment that make an ex­pan­sive com­mons like the In­ter­net valu­able to all its par­tic­i­pants, while re­spect­ing the rights of cre­ators who wish to share their works there. Since Face­book strips em­bed­ded meta­da­ta, au­to­mat­i­cal­ly cre­at­ing or­phaned works out of every­thing post­ed to its gal­leries, em­bed­ded wa­ter­marks are al­most manda­to­ry for any­one who wants to re­serve their rights of re­pro­duc­tion. Pho­tog­ra­phers might be bet­ter off skip­ping or­nate graph­ics and im­agery in their wa­ter­marks in favour of sim­ple, tidy state­ments like, your name, copy­right the year of cre­ation, all re­pro­duc­tion rights re­served. The copy­right sym­bol is sup­posed to con­vey these sen­ti­ments, but in lo­cal courts, where there's been no test­ing of the spe­cif­ic pro­vi­sions this as­pect of Trinidad and To­ba­go's copy­right act, more in­for­ma­tion, more blunt­ly spelled out, is clear­ly bet­ter than in­fer­ence.

An ex­tend­ed ver­sion of this col­umn: http://ow.ly/adAll

My Face­book post and the com­ments: http://ow.ly/ad­skX or on­line on my site, here: http://ow.ly/adZGP

Sook­er­many's orig­i­nal Face­book post: http://ow.ly/adtwZ

The TNT Mir­ror Me­dia Watch posts: http://ow.ly/aduHU http://ow.ly/aduN0

Name and shame posts on copy­right vi­o­la­tors: http://ow.ly/adA0G