
How Photographers Can Make Money without Copyright - wrrice
http://mises.org/daily/5371/How-Photographers-Can-Make-Money-without-Copyright
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anigbrowl
Though I have sympathy for the writer's position, he makes a terrible
argument.

 _So what does all of this mean for the client? Let's say for instance that
you hired Eyesometry to shoot your wedding. Part of what we offer clients are
digital files that can be downloaded from a website._

This is a ridiculous example. Wedding photographers are usually paid in
advance or make delivery conditional on payment. Some of them assert copyright
ownership, but usually those contracts are full of holes, and a court is
likely to find that the photographs constitute a work-for-hire made at the
request of the wedding couple. In any case, few people outside of the couple
getting married and their friends and relatives are interested in copying and
reproducing the wedding photographs, so the writer of this piece is not
forgoing any significant amount of income by making the pictures available
under a CC license.

Now consider the situation where a picture has significant artistic, news, or
entertainment value, and multiple commercial publishers would like to use the
image for product packaging/advertising/art prints/newspaper features/magazine
covers. That's where the real money is in commercial photography, and that's
where copyright law is meant to protect the interests of the creator. I don't
see any reason why the photographer/artist _shouldn't_ enjoy a temporary
monopoly because they have actually created something brand new but have
considerable difficulty in controlling post-sale distribution. What good is
his creative commons license going to provide if every commercial publisher
can just reuse the photograph without paying anything to Eyesometry? One
reason that wedding photography costs an eye-watering average of $1000 for
half a day is that it's actually very hard to make a living doing stock or
news or fashion photography.

