The Act contains changes to UK copyright law which permit the commercial exploitation of images where information identifying the owner is missing, so-called "orphan works", into what's known in the jargon as "extended collective licensing" schemes. Since most digital images on the internet today are orphans - the metadata is missing or has been stripped by a large organisation - then millions of photographs and illustrations are swept into such schemes.
Time to start water marking again? Or just use a platform you can control?
What I did love this week was what someone on twitter posted about the UKIP Hitler worship thing - "there's no bigger example of a European wanting to come over here and take all our jobs than Hitler"
ai3x wrote:
Definitely time to put pressure on Facebook to stop stripping metadata. Bugger.
Ugh, that's nasty. Most imaging professionals (graphic designers etc) are fully aware that if you don't have permission from the copyright owner, you shouldn't use an image. That includes orphans.
- if you don't know who owns an image, you need to find out.
The Instagram Act needs to be accompanied by a law which makes it illegal to deliberately strip metadata.
Otherwise it's too easy to create your own 'orphan' so you can commercially exploit someone else's image.
