Will this kill photography as we know it

As a creative professional, especially in fields like photography where art and commerce intersect, it's easy to get caught up in the excitement of making money from our work. However, when it comes to intellectual property rights, the law can be complex and nuanced. In this case, we're going to explore a specific situation involving a photographer who specialized in shooting resorts and travel type images.

The photographer in question had signed a deal with two different hotels to license his images for use on their websites. The deal was reportedly standard, with the photographer receiving payment for the images. However, what happened next was that the hotels, in an effort to optimize the size of the images for fast loading on the internet, stripped out all the copyright data from the images. This was done unknowingly, and it's possible that the hotels were simply trying to make the images load faster.

However, as we'll see later, this technicality actually ended up becoming a major issue in court. The photographer, feeling that he had been wronged, decided to take action against the hotels. Unfortunately for him, the courts ultimately ruled in favor of the hotels, finding that they had not intentionally stripped out the copyright data and therefore did not owe the photographer any compensation.

The story begins with this gentleman who's a photographer who specializes in shooting resorts and travel type things he signed a deal with two different hotels where he actually licensed his images for them to use what happened was they actually when they were putting them on websites stripped out all the copyright data unknowingly supposedly because they were trying to optimize the size of the images for fast loading on the internet which totally actually makes sense

he was paid for the images because you get about halfway down this article and it says years earlier Alias who's the photographer in question extended broad licenses to these two hotels to reproduce and distribute his photographs in limited qualities for an unlimited time in any format including on third-party booking websites believe what this photographer was doing was getting them on a technicality which basically States as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that metadata has to stay intact in other words the buyer of the art in this case or the client can't strip that out for further use which is a very weird thing to keep track of but I understand photographers are in it to make money and it's the law and they don't want that interpreted another way

so he went after them the courts however were saying that this was a little obscure and the client didn't have any knowledge of this which could possibly be true as well and so that's why they've chosen not only to throw it out but they're not going to appeal it up to a higher court at this point now folks as I mentioned earlier I am not an attorney I do not play one on TV I do not give legal advice however I do know as a business owner as a creative anytime that you are doing something that is very important you should hire an attorney someone who does know what they're doing who is an expert in that field that would be a very good idea because stuff like this happens sure he may have been in the right on the technicality but the Court's role is to interpret what's going on the way I see it is like this we have a series of laws and when something is a law it defines what you can or can't do if you decide to go against that law then that is what we call illegal now the role of a court is to actually interpret these because even though the law is black and white not every situation is black and white and so that's why it's on a case-by-case basis to try to get to the bottom of something and that's where all the technicalities and the interpretive aspects all come together in all of this stuff

and does it seem fair sometimes it depends on which side you're on only thing I can say is that if something is important to you it's probably a good idea to consult an attorney this costs money and this is why sometimes people don't do it but for instance if you do photography for a living and you have a business that does that and it's important to your business sometimes you have to do those things as part of your business it's just a good idea another aspect of this from my own personal experiences anything that becomes a legal entanglement like this and I know everybody's different has different opinions personally I think this guy probably was being a little heavy-handed going after his client trying to sue them especially when they've already hired him and paid him that's just my personal thinking and anytime you get into legal entanglements it will cost money and the people who are definitely guaranteed to make money are the attorneys in any situation so sometimes you have to just kind of cut your losses and feel what's comfortable enough for you sure there may have been a legal thing where he had a little bit of a gotcha but the court didn't interpret that way and he probably is out fees for the attorneys and the filings

so yeah contracts are pretty solid and it's pretty good idea to have everything spelled out that needs to be and sometimes that's where getting an attorney comes in handy because they can help you navigate these complex situations and make sure you're not missing anything important.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis video is brought to you by Squarespace welcome back everyone today we're going to do something that we haven't done in a while I've got a little q a prepared I have two questions that are actually quite excellent having to do with things that seem to threaten photography as we know it so let's get started so first up we have a DM that I got from a gentleman named Chris who asks dear Ted I don't think you've ever talked about AI technology on the channel I would love to hear your thoughts on computer generated Imaging and if you think this could be a legitimate threat to Photography in the future thank you in advance so fair enough question and no it is not something I have talked a lot about on this channel before I've talked a little bit about AI but it's usually in the context of image editing and the question here pertains to actual computer generated photography so to speak that we're starting to see really in the last year there's been several companies that come along and much like chat GPT it's like you give the algorithm a series of prompts and it spits out images that match the criteria that you've given it so if you haven't actually used or seen this yet it actually is pretty impressive one that it can be done but two it's also kind of scary and three I think it's just kind of strange too A lot of times you get back like pictures of people and they've got 11 fingers on each hand and usually even a landscape photo there's just something that's just a little too surreal about it that keeps it from being an actual photograph but it's really impressive that this is the beginning of something and it is very scary to see where this could possibly lead do I think it's going to replace photography that that becomes a more complicated type of question it was a very interesting piece on this on CBS Sunday Morning recently where they had people talking about both sides of this but the whole idea is that you have an algorithm that's smart enough to start inventing stuff and so you give it criteria I would like a landscape image with the sun going down in the back and a person in the front you give it criteria and then they would say things like in the style of the illustrator Norman Rockwell and of course the algorithm does its thing and it returns images pretty close to what you asked for now at this point in time they're fairly crude but you can start to see where this is going the fact that I mentioned Norman Rockwell in here raises a secondary question is one where are some of these companies getting all of their photo data from because clearly two it does know who Norman Rockwell is which actually brings up the question of copyright now you're not looking at an Ansel Adam's image or you're not looking at a Norman Rockwell painting but you're looking at something in this style of so clearly those things have been fed into the algorithm so there's a lot of stuff like that that starts to become questionable now as I mentioned earlier I'm not a big fan of this stuff because I think one there's nothing creative about this it's fairly lazy it's somebody sitting at a computer punching in something and you're getting stuff that looks kind of sort of close to what you were talking about that comes back it's impressive that it can do it and I think the bigger issue here is it's something that's going to continue to improve and it's going to get really good in the future I think one of the biggest issues in here is will this be a threat to commercial photography and actually I'm going to back up just a second because this has actually happened before and it happens in any industry as technology comes along and it actually changes the way we work it allows us to do things more efficiently and unfortunately sometimes that includes people who do things for living on the side that starts to go away let me give you an example so when I was a kid growing up in the 80s there was this thing that kept every creative in business once a year called the annual report every large company was required by law to do this annual report this was before the internet so these were published things it wasn't quite like a book it looked like ah magazine size publication and it would have everything in there from the company's financial statements their numbers their successes their Outreach programs just everything that pertained to what the company was doing in that particular year there were literally Design Studios in Dallas in every Major Market for that matter that existed because of annual reports they would have several clients that they would do these annual reports for they would hire photographers to do all the photography and they would hire illustrators to come help with these things like so for instance if you were a photographer in Dallas in the 80s and you did annual report stuff let's say an oil company uh put two drills in I don't know in the Indian Ocean and so we needed photographs of those because they were done this last year for the manual report so they would hire photographers to actually fly Halfway Around the World to get these images and bring them back and this was a huge deal people had an enormous amount of pride with this there was a lot of money in it and the work was really good this was something though that by the late 80s 90s the internet comes along and of course people's budgets are decreasing and this little thing called stock photography comes along where you have photographers who have large catalogs of work they own all the rights to it and so you have a stock agency that comes along somebody like Getty Images for instance who when you're an art director or graphic designer and you're putting together a large project well you have two choices well we can send a photographer all the way to the Indian Ocean to shoot that oil rig or we can get a stock photo that already exists so the stock photo we can download from the internet today and it costs 60 bucks and the photographer is going to cost several thousand dollars and it's going to take a month to get that done or at very minimum a couple weeks so you can kind of see the direction that everybody goes in so stock photography was a huge imp or it had a huge impact on the commercial photography business in general so does that mean that commercial photography does not exist anymore because the stock well no not at all in fact I have three friends that are very successful photographers the reason that they are is that they've developed success within a niche that you cannot replace with stock photography so if you think of things that you can't get a stock photo to replace it would be things like portraits product shots celebrity images especially when you get into endorsements there's no stock photo that exist you need to go shoot it I have a really good friend who's developed a really successful business as an architectural photographer he works with several architectural firms when they finish a building and they do really interesting really cool stuff they will send him out to go photograph it they don't have stock photography that exists and they want to be able to control that element so the business did not get replaced so much but it changed and if we look at now what we're looking at with AI this is where I wanted to arrive at then how does this impact things okay so I obviously can't predict the future so this is just my opinion on where things are and where I see them going and what I believe and I'd love to hear what you guys have to say on this too please feel free to leave a comment but I think that in general we look at what's going on here and I mentioned earlier that piece I saw on CBS Sunday Morning where they had criteria they gave the computer and it spat out some images in the style of somebody they asked for and so what we're seeing here is computer technology that's completely dependent on being fed things that have come before in other words the computer itself and the algorithm they're not creative they're having to be told what to do now it is scary the level of stuff that they're able to learn but in my own opinion I don't think you're going to get it to where it's actually going to drive something into a new area it's in other words it's like working with a photographer who hasn't kept up in a few years and there's still a few years behind there's no way that we can advance photography as an art form at least with this certain criteria it's just a computer's not going to do that type of thinking I don't know what this means for commercial work necessarily but just like when stock came along and changed everything I think that photographers who want to work commercially are going to have to rethink what that means and rethink what they can do and they're going to have to look for opportunities that are not replaceable I think the other interesting thing where I don't think you're going to see any replacement at all is when we get into the art world of course the art world is more of my expertise since what I've spent the last 15 years building this channel on but with what I've seen with AI so far is again we have a computer algorithm that's simply being able to do what it's told it's just on a very advanced level but if you look at what art is and what art means art is a representation of where we are as a society where we are at our point in history the ideas that we have the concerns that we have the worries that we have the solutions that are proposed sometimes the argument that we have against it the controversy these are certain things that have always defined art this is why you can look at a past Master painting and say ah this looks like it's from about 1750 or so or if you look at a photograph and you say well this is clearly the 1960s you look at the Fashion you look at what the photograph is saying how it's photographed the style it's in the technology that's being used all of this comes into this amalgamation of who we are as people and that's what art is and that's what art will always be moving forward one could argue that AI has been kind of a particular Trend that has maybe affected or influenced at some point but it doesn't take it over and that's my point is that human beings no matter what comes along we have this inherent desire and need to be creative and if you have that within you and you're interested in photography you're going to find a way to create something no matter what now I'm talking about the art side of it we're talking about the commercial side earlier and I don't really know how all of this shakes out but I really am not afraid that things are going to be replaced by artificial intelligence I just don't as for what we're seeing with artificial intelligence now I have pretty much zero interest in it at all there's not much creative about somebody sitting in front of a computer and giving it some words and then seeing this weird bizarre entertainment of images being fed back they're certainly not going to be good enough to use in a commercial application they're certainly not fooling anybody at this point again you could watch this video in the future and think boy Ted sure is eating his words here because it could probably get really good is it going to get really good in the sense that it actually is going to replace what it is that we already do time will tell but my feeling is no so those are my thoughts and please leave me yours and we can discuss this more in future videos I have another question that I want to get to about another thing that is threatening photography but real quick I want to give a shout out to our awesome sponsor this week who are the awesome folks over at Squarespace listen you need a website and we all know how much work that is to build and maintain but it doesn't have to be Squarespace is by far the easiest way to build your online presence it's also the best way to grow a business that works for you without having to write a single line of code do you just need a simple portfolio or a Blog to Showcase your work well Squarespace is perfect featuring a drag and drop interface it's a intuitive it allows you to build galleries quickly and update your site with ease are you running a business well Squarespace gives you additional tools for things like appointment scheduling private member areas social media tools and even Advanced email marketing do you sell products or Services well Squarespace has you covered with complete tools to power your store for merchandising to check out so that you can sell ship and build your customer base you can even sell classes or manage appointments through your website and with Squarespace extensions you can easily sync with third parties to manage optimize and enhance your website from social media integration to SEO Squarespace gives you all the tools you need to grow a business that works for you so head over to Squarespace and sign up for the free trial start with one of their award-winning templates and see what you can create and just how good you're going to look when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com aop and I can save you an additional 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain just use offer code aop on checkout so give it a try and see if Squarespace is right for you and I want to give a special shout out and thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video okay so next up we're going to talk about copyright intellectual property and legal matters another very fun topic for photographers so this is actually a question it was two different questions referencing the same article so essentially there was this article on petapixel the headline was a photographer who sued a company for removing copyright metadata from his photos before posting them on travel websites had his case dismissed and the Supreme Court has denied to hear his appeal so a gentleman named Jack hit me up on Twitter and he wrote appreciate that you don't tend to delve into Political slash legal issues too much but is this significant implications for photographers by any chance I had somebody else that sent me a direct message and they referenced the article and wanted to know if I could chime in on the legal aspects of this should add that I am not a lawyer and I don't give legal advice but I did read through the article because I was curious now I think part of the problem and what makes this confusing is the title and the information that's coming out because I think in general when we hear about photographers in legal battles and Supreme Court refusing to hear things usually the photographer is the one getting screwed and this happens to a lot of other creatives whether you're a musician a photographer an illustrator a writer whatever it is that you do we're into the creative side not the legal side and unfortunately you hear stories of that happening a lot that's not exactly what's going on in this particular case all right so to give you the gist of this article you have this gentleman who's a photographer who specializes in shooting Resorts and travel type things he signed a deal with two different hotels where he actually licensed his images for them to use what happened was they actually when they were putting them on websites stripped out all the copyright data unknowingly supposedly because they were trying to optimize the size of the images for fast loading on the internet which totally actually makes sense he was paid for the images because you get about halfway down this article and it says years earlier Alias who's the photographer in question extended broad licenses to these two hotels to reproduce and distribute his photographs in limited qualities for an unlimited time in any format including on third-party booking websites believe what this photographer was doing was getting them on a technicality which basically States as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that metadata has to stay intact in other words the buyer of the art in this case or the client can't strip that out for further use which is a very weird thing to keep track of but I understand photographers are in it to make money and it's the law and they don't want that interpreted another way so he went after them the courts however were saying that this was a little obscure and the client didn't have any knowledge of this which could possibly be true as well and so that's why they've chosen not only to throw it out but they're not going to appeal it up to a higher court at this point now folks as I mentioned earlier I am not an attorney I do not play one on TV I do not give legal advice however I do know as a business owner as a creative anytime that you are doing something that is very important you should hire an attorney someone who does know what they're doing who is an expert in that field that would be a very good idea because stuff like this happens sure he may have been in the right on the technicality but the Court's role is to interpret what's going on the way I see it is like this we have a series of laws and when something is a law it defines what you can or can't do if you decide to go against that law then that is what we call illegal now the role of a court is to actually interpret these because even though the law is black and white not every situation is black and white and so that's why it's on a case-by-case basis to try to get to the bottom of something and that's where all the technicalities and the interpretive aspects all come together in all of this stuff and does it seem fair sometimes it depends on which side you're on only thing I can say is that if something is important to you it's probably a good idea to consult an attorney this costs money and this is why sometimes people don't do it but for instance if you do photography for a living and you have a business that does that and it's important to your business sometimes you have to do those things as part of your business it's just a good idea another aspect of this from my own personal experiences anything that becomes a legal entanglement like this and I know everybody's different has different opinions personally I think this guy probably was being a little heavy-handed going after his client trying to sue them especially when they've already hired him and paid him that's a good way to never get hired again that's just my personal thinking and anytime you get into legal entanglements it will cost money and the people who are definitely guaranteed to make money are the attorneys in any situation so sometimes you have to just kind of cut your losses and feel what's comfortable enough for you sure there may have been a legal thing where he had a little bit of a gotcha but the court didn't interpret that way and he probably is out fees for the attorneys and the filings so yeah contracts are pretty solid and it's pretty good idea to have everything spelled out that needs to be and sometimes that's where getting an attorney is going to benefit you in the end so I responded to jack on Twitter but I thought it would be an interesting topic to cover here as well and if you guys have any questions let me know I don't talk about intellectual property or copyright very much and it is something that's very interesting it's something that affects us all as photographers I think especially in the age of the internet I mean I can tell you if you put work online you probably had it ripped off I've been ripped off before most successful people that I know have so that's something that affects us all so uh if you have any questions drop them below until the next video I will catch you guys then until then laterthis video is brought to you by Squarespace welcome back everyone today we're going to do something that we haven't done in a while I've got a little q a prepared I have two questions that are actually quite excellent having to do with things that seem to threaten photography as we know it so let's get started so first up we have a DM that I got from a gentleman named Chris who asks dear Ted I don't think you've ever talked about AI technology on the channel I would love to hear your thoughts on computer generated Imaging and if you think this could be a legitimate threat to Photography in the future thank you in advance so fair enough question and no it is not something I have talked a lot about on this channel before I've talked a little bit about AI but it's usually in the context of image editing and the question here pertains to actual computer generated photography so to speak that we're starting to see really in the last year there's been several companies that come along and much like chat GPT it's like you give the algorithm a series of prompts and it spits out images that match the criteria that you've given it so if you haven't actually used or seen this yet it actually is pretty impressive one that it can be done but two it's also kind of scary and three I think it's just kind of strange too A lot of times you get back like pictures of people and they've got 11 fingers on each hand and usually even a landscape photo there's just something that's just a little too surreal about it that keeps it from being an actual photograph but it's really impressive that this is the beginning of something and it is very scary to see where this could possibly lead do I think it's going to replace photography that that becomes a more complicated type of question it was a very interesting piece on this on CBS Sunday Morning recently where they had people talking about both sides of this but the whole idea is that you have an algorithm that's smart enough to start inventing stuff and so you give it criteria I would like a landscape image with the sun going down in the back and a person in the front you give it criteria and then they would say things like in the style of the illustrator Norman Rockwell and of course the algorithm does its thing and it returns images pretty close to what you asked for now at this point in time they're fairly crude but you can start to see where this is going the fact that I mentioned Norman Rockwell in here raises a secondary question is one where are some of these companies getting all of their photo data from because clearly two it does know who Norman Rockwell is which actually brings up the question of copyright now you're not looking at an Ansel Adam's image or you're not looking at a Norman Rockwell painting but you're looking at something in this style of so clearly those things have been fed into the algorithm so there's a lot of stuff like that that starts to become questionable now as I mentioned earlier I'm not a big fan of this stuff because I think one there's nothing creative about this it's fairly lazy it's somebody sitting at a computer punching in something and you're getting stuff that looks kind of sort of close to what you were talking about that comes back it's impressive that it can do it and I think the bigger issue here is it's something that's going to continue to improve and it's going to get really good in the future I think one of the biggest issues in here is will this be a threat to commercial photography and actually I'm going to back up just a second because this has actually happened before and it happens in any industry as technology comes along and it actually changes the way we work it allows us to do things more efficiently and unfortunately sometimes that includes people who do things for living on the side that starts to go away let me give you an example so when I was a kid growing up in the 80s there was this thing that kept every creative in business once a year called the annual report every large company was required by law to do this annual report this was before the internet so these were published things it wasn't quite like a book it looked like ah magazine size publication and it would have everything in there from the company's financial statements their numbers their successes their Outreach programs just everything that pertained to what the company was doing in that particular year there were literally Design Studios in Dallas in every Major Market for that matter that existed because of annual reports they would have several clients that they would do these annual reports for they would hire photographers to do all the photography and they would hire illustrators to come help with these things like so for instance if you were a photographer in Dallas in the 80s and you did annual report stuff let's say an oil company uh put two drills in I don't know in the Indian Ocean and so we needed photographs of those because they were done this last year for the manual report so they would hire photographers to actually fly Halfway Around the World to get these images and bring them back and this was a huge deal people had an enormous amount of pride with this there was a lot of money in it and the work was really good this was something though that by the late 80s 90s the internet comes along and of course people's budgets are decreasing and this little thing called stock photography comes along where you have photographers who have large catalogs of work they own all the rights to it and so you have a stock agency that comes along somebody like Getty Images for instance who when you're an art director or graphic designer and you're putting together a large project well you have two choices well we can send a photographer all the way to the Indian Ocean to shoot that oil rig or we can get a stock photo that already exists so the stock photo we can download from the internet today and it costs 60 bucks and the photographer is going to cost several thousand dollars and it's going to take a month to get that done or at very minimum a couple weeks so you can kind of see the direction that everybody goes in so stock photography was a huge imp or it had a huge impact on the commercial photography business in general so does that mean that commercial photography does not exist anymore because the stock well no not at all in fact I have three friends that are very successful photographers the reason that they are is that they've developed success within a niche that you cannot replace with stock photography so if you think of things that you can't get a stock photo to replace it would be things like portraits product shots celebrity images especially when you get into endorsements there's no stock photo that exist you need to go shoot it I have a really good friend who's developed a really successful business as an architectural photographer he works with several architectural firms when they finish a building and they do really interesting really cool stuff they will send him out to go photograph it they don't have stock photography that exists and they want to be able to control that element so the business did not get replaced so much but it changed and if we look at now what we're looking at with AI this is where I wanted to arrive at then how does this impact things okay so I obviously can't predict the future so this is just my opinion on where things are and where I see them going and what I believe and I'd love to hear what you guys have to say on this too please feel free to leave a comment but I think that in general we look at what's going on here and I mentioned earlier that piece I saw on CBS Sunday Morning where they had criteria they gave the computer and it spat out some images in the style of somebody they asked for and so what we're seeing here is computer technology that's completely dependent on being fed things that have come before in other words the computer itself and the algorithm they're not creative they're having to be told what to do now it is scary the level of stuff that they're able to learn but in my own opinion I don't think you're going to get it to where it's actually going to drive something into a new area it's in other words it's like working with a photographer who hasn't kept up in a few years and there's still a few years behind there's no way that we can advance photography as an art form at least with this certain criteria it's just a computer's not going to do that type of thinking I don't know what this means for commercial work necessarily but just like when stock came along and changed everything I think that photographers who want to work commercially are going to have to rethink what that means and rethink what they can do and they're going to have to look for opportunities that are not replaceable I think the other interesting thing where I don't think you're going to see any replacement at all is when we get into the art world of course the art world is more of my expertise since what I've spent the last 15 years building this channel on but with what I've seen with AI so far is again we have a computer algorithm that's simply being able to do what it's told it's just on a very advanced level but if you look at what art is and what art means art is a representation of where we are as a society where we are at our point in history the ideas that we have the concerns that we have the worries that we have the solutions that are proposed sometimes the argument that we have against it the controversy these are certain things that have always defined art this is why you can look at a past Master painting and say ah this looks like it's from about 1750 or so or if you look at a photograph and you say well this is clearly the 1960s you look at the Fashion you look at what the photograph is saying how it's photographed the style it's in the technology that's being used all of this comes into this amalgamation of who we are as people and that's what art is and that's what art will always be moving forward one could argue that AI has been kind of a particular Trend that has maybe affected or influenced at some point but it doesn't take it over and that's my point is that human beings no matter what comes along we have this inherent desire and need to be creative and if you have that within you and you're interested in photography you're going to find a way to create something no matter what now I'm talking about the art side of it we're talking about the commercial side earlier and I don't really know how all of this shakes out but I really am not afraid that things are going to be replaced by artificial intelligence I just don't as for what we're seeing with artificial intelligence now I have pretty much zero interest in it at all there's not much creative about somebody sitting in front of a computer and giving it some words and then seeing this weird bizarre entertainment of images being fed back they're certainly not going to be good enough to use in a commercial application they're certainly not fooling anybody at this point again you could watch this video in the future and think boy Ted sure is eating his words here because it could probably get really good is it going to get really good in the sense that it actually is going to replace what it is that we already do time will tell but my feeling is no so those are my thoughts and please leave me yours and we can discuss this more in future videos I have another question that I want to get to about another thing that is threatening photography but real quick I want to give a shout out to our awesome sponsor this week who are the awesome folks over at Squarespace listen you need a website and we all know how much work that is to build and maintain but it doesn't have to be Squarespace is by far the easiest way to build your online presence it's also the best way to grow a business that works for you without having to write a single line of code do you just need a simple portfolio or a Blog to Showcase your work well Squarespace is perfect featuring a drag and drop interface it's a intuitive it allows you to build galleries quickly and update your site with ease are you running a business well Squarespace gives you additional tools for things like appointment scheduling private member areas social media tools and even Advanced email marketing do you sell products or Services well Squarespace has you covered with complete tools to power your store for merchandising to check out so that you can sell ship and build your customer base you can even sell classes or manage appointments through your website and with Squarespace extensions you can easily sync with third parties to manage optimize and enhance your website from social media integration to SEO Squarespace gives you all the tools you need to grow a business that works for you so head over to Squarespace and sign up for the free trial start with one of their award-winning templates and see what you can create and just how good you're going to look when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com aop and I can save you an additional 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain just use offer code aop on checkout so give it a try and see if Squarespace is right for you and I want to give a special shout out and thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this video okay so next up we're going to talk about copyright intellectual property and legal matters another very fun topic for photographers so this is actually a question it was two different questions referencing the same article so essentially there was this article on petapixel the headline was a photographer who sued a company for removing copyright metadata from his photos before posting them on travel websites had his case dismissed and the Supreme Court has denied to hear his appeal so a gentleman named Jack hit me up on Twitter and he wrote appreciate that you don't tend to delve into Political slash legal issues too much but is this significant implications for photographers by any chance I had somebody else that sent me a direct message and they referenced the article and wanted to know if I could chime in on the legal aspects of this should add that I am not a lawyer and I don't give legal advice but I did read through the article because I was curious now I think part of the problem and what makes this confusing is the title and the information that's coming out because I think in general when we hear about photographers in legal battles and Supreme Court refusing to hear things usually the photographer is the one getting screwed and this happens to a lot of other creatives whether you're a musician a photographer an illustrator a writer whatever it is that you do we're into the creative side not the legal side and unfortunately you hear stories of that happening a lot that's not exactly what's going on in this particular case all right so to give you the gist of this article you have this gentleman who's a photographer who specializes in shooting Resorts and travel type things he signed a deal with two different hotels where he actually licensed his images for them to use what happened was they actually when they were putting them on websites stripped out all the copyright data unknowingly supposedly because they were trying to optimize the size of the images for fast loading on the internet which totally actually makes sense he was paid for the images because you get about halfway down this article and it says years earlier Alias who's the photographer in question extended broad licenses to these two hotels to reproduce and distribute his photographs in limited qualities for an unlimited time in any format including on third-party booking websites believe what this photographer was doing was getting them on a technicality which basically States as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that metadata has to stay intact in other words the buyer of the art in this case or the client can't strip that out for further use which is a very weird thing to keep track of but I understand photographers are in it to make money and it's the law and they don't want that interpreted another way so he went after them the courts however were saying that this was a little obscure and the client didn't have any knowledge of this which could possibly be true as well and so that's why they've chosen not only to throw it out but they're not going to appeal it up to a higher court at this point now folks as I mentioned earlier I am not an attorney I do not play one on TV I do not give legal advice however I do know as a business owner as a creative anytime that you are doing something that is very important you should hire an attorney someone who does know what they're doing who is an expert in that field that would be a very good idea because stuff like this happens sure he may have been in the right on the technicality but the Court's role is to interpret what's going on the way I see it is like this we have a series of laws and when something is a law it defines what you can or can't do if you decide to go against that law then that is what we call illegal now the role of a court is to actually interpret these because even though the law is black and white not every situation is black and white and so that's why it's on a case-by-case basis to try to get to the bottom of something and that's where all the technicalities and the interpretive aspects all come together in all of this stuff and does it seem fair sometimes it depends on which side you're on only thing I can say is that if something is important to you it's probably a good idea to consult an attorney this costs money and this is why sometimes people don't do it but for instance if you do photography for a living and you have a business that does that and it's important to your business sometimes you have to do those things as part of your business it's just a good idea another aspect of this from my own personal experiences anything that becomes a legal entanglement like this and I know everybody's different has different opinions personally I think this guy probably was being a little heavy-handed going after his client trying to sue them especially when they've already hired him and paid him that's a good way to never get hired again that's just my personal thinking and anytime you get into legal entanglements it will cost money and the people who are definitely guaranteed to make money are the attorneys in any situation so sometimes you have to just kind of cut your losses and feel what's comfortable enough for you sure there may have been a legal thing where he had a little bit of a gotcha but the court didn't interpret that way and he probably is out fees for the attorneys and the filings so yeah contracts are pretty solid and it's pretty good idea to have everything spelled out that needs to be and sometimes that's where getting an attorney is going to benefit you in the end so I responded to jack on Twitter but I thought it would be an interesting topic to cover here as well and if you guys have any questions let me know I don't talk about intellectual property or copyright very much and it is something that's very interesting it's something that affects us all as photographers I think especially in the age of the internet I mean I can tell you if you put work online you probably had it ripped off I've been ripped off before most successful people that I know have so that's something that affects us all so uh if you have any questions drop them below until the next video I will catch you guys then until then later\n"