
How a College Student Used Creative Commons to Dominate Political Photography - gregdoesit
http://priceonomics.com/how-a-college-student-used-creative-commons-to/
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ThinkBeat
What impresses me most when I look through his stream on Flickr is his access.

It is not easy to get into as many events as he has managed, and it even
harder to get a seat or being allowed to get close enough to get a good
picture. If he is not working for, or assignment for a media company he
probably doesnt have a press pass, or at least not one that gets bouncers /
security people to step aside.

Presumably he gains more and more access as his pictures are published. This
is the key thing that will help him if he ever wants to get paid work out of
it. Leading powerful politicians will know him, and know him as a
photographer. Getting that recognition is not easy for a photo journalist.

Getting started in photo journalism is really hard, and its getting harder as
news agencies downsize both regular journalists and photographers The market
is turning more and more toward video and crowd sourcing images.

Lets say you went to school, studied photography, getting started as a
freelancer, you take ok pictures and you submit them and pray for a
publication. If you are luck you get picked up a little here and there, but
unless you get lucky, no one really pay attention to who you are.

He has taken a bold step, and his name is now known to editors at major
publications. Getting that network is far more difficult than learning how to
take pictures.

~~~
sandworm101
The kid has money. Traveling to all these events isn't cheap. So I think it
safe to assume he and/or his family are donors at some level. It doesn't take
much of a donation to get a seat close to the front, far less than the cost of
traveling to the event.

~~~
brudgers
Parents in the US spend money on their kids' activities. This probably is
equivalent to mid-level travel sports, selective musical organizations, and
beauty pageants. It is almost certainly less expensive than traveling with
horses.

Ten hours of driving each way and a budget hotel runs a couple of hundred
dollars and provides a substantial operating radius...and that ain't much
money for a lot of people.

~~~
dilemma
Individual venture capital from parents to their son. Probably a lot less than
a brand name university, with a lot more benefit in terms of network, personal
brand, and skills.

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autarch
Hilariously, I'm pretty sure that this article is violating the license! This
person's photos are licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
([https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-
sa/2.0/](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)). Among its terms
are "ou must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and
indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not
in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use."

Maybe I missed it but I did not see any link to the license or indication of
whether changes were made. Simply crediting the copyright owner is not
sufficient to satisfy the terms of the license. Also, with CC < 4.0 you need
to include the work's title.

The Trump site is doing exactly the same thing, not linking to the license

~~~
ghaff
I use (and attribute) CC photographs all the time and I have to say that I
wasn't even aware of a couple of those requirements. Sadly, I think terms like
these, as well as the optional non-commercial variant, are serious issues with
CC. Attribution can be hard to carry along with a photograph consistently but
at least the idea of a photo credit is pretty deeply ingrained in professional
publishing circles if not the Web more broadly. I expect most of the other
requirements and limitations are rarely followed to the letter.

~~~
thephyber
They aren't "serious issues" with CC.

They are the legal terms under which you are allowed/licensed the use of the
copyrighted content. If you don't know the license and the requirements of the
license, how you can pretend to fulfill them? You are just waiting for a
lawsuit and "ignorance is no excuse" in the eyes of the law.

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Agustus
I am not one to say that the rich get richer, but this may be a specific case
of an individual being supported by his parents circumventing the normal
process of working the ropes to progress up to taking photos of the people
discussed.

On the other hand, it is great that these photos are available as they allow
bloggers to use these to make their site look more professional.

Journalists cannot help inserting their views of candidates, Zachary Crockett,
describes anyone who works for Trump as "Cronies." Since, @zzcrockett will
read this now, you need to keep your opinion out, your other articles were
great, keep them that way.

~~~
myNXTact
This is the exact opposite of the "rich getting richer!" Whenever we start
discussing income and wealth trends in the United States we always neglect how
we as a society have gotten richer through technological progress. Even the
poorest houses in the USA have computers and tv's that would blow the minds of
people from the 1990's and be incomprehensible to people from the 1950's.

Cameras have gotten better and better while getting cheaper. Twenty years ago
the only people taking photos of this quality were professional photographers.
Now we have college students who can work really hard over a school break and
be able to afford a great camera setup.

~~~
URSpider94
On the cost of cameras, if anything, they have gotten much more expensive. It
used to be possible to buy a pro-quality film camera and prime lens for less
than $1,000 -- so, let's say $1500 in today's dollars. More money might get
you features like better auto-exposure, auto-focus or high-speed film winders,
but a lot of pros didn't use any of those features, and back in the day when I
was shooting sports events at my college, I often had a more modern camera rig
than the pros sitting next to me. Digital cameras that give similar image
quality as those film cameras start at $2,500 today, and go up from there. It
feels like the divide between pro and amateur equipment in photography has
shot through the roof over the past decade, with the blanket adoption of
digital.

What has gotten cheaper / more accessible is the ability to publicize,
duplicate and distribute one's work. Twenty years ago, short of dropping off
prints at the local newspaper, there would be no way for an amateur
photographer to get her photos under the nose of photo editors at major news
outlets. Today, that's as simple as uploading to Flickr.

~~~
ghaff
I generally agree with you with respect to equipment cost although, to be
fair, a lot of that difference is offset by consumables. A Nikon F4 may only
have been modestly more expensive than a more consumer-oriented SLR but the
pro probably shot thousands of dollars more film during a year.

So in addition to distribution, just using the camera has also gotten a lot
cheaper.

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ChuckMcM
Ok, and all this time I thought Gage Skidmore was a "fake" name like Alan
Smithee[1] that photographers who didn't want to dilute their own brand used
to get their work out. That it is a real person, and has such a wide swatch of
candidate pictures, is pretty cool.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee)

~~~
ikeboy
Wow.

 _The film 's creation set off a chain of events which would lead the
Directors Guild of America to officially discontinue the Alan Smithee credit
in 2000. Its plot (about a director attempting to disown a film) eventually,
and ironically, described the film's own production; director Arthur Hiller
requested that his name be removed after witnessing the final cut of the film
by the studio._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Alan_Smithee_Film:_Burn_Hol...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Alan_Smithee_Film:_Burn_Hollywood_Burn)

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nefitty
It's interesting that there is a backlash brewing against Skidmore from the
pro photog community. Giving away his work for free seems similar to the way
bloggers pour countless hours into creating content for their sites. People
don't expect to pay to read your blog post, but of course they should expect
to pay you if they need custom content made for them. Competition is fierce,
and I'd be surprised if this type of thing isn't happening in every content-
creation industry. I can actually think of an example relevant to HN: the
ubiquity of free, open source software.

~~~
saulrh
The complaints about undercutting real photographers actually kind of amused
me. The big political parties spend literally half a billion dollars a year on
advertising. If they find a photo good enough to go on the front page of their
website, they are _perfectly_ willing to make that photographer's year, and
they're not going to skimp on something that important. There's no
undercutting going on here - they decided that this guy's photographs were the
best options. Maybe it's because the marginal value of a higher-quality
photograph is not worth the money for some reason, in which case political
photography as a business is doomed. Maybe it's because he's not making
technically great photographs but is somehow better at political photographs.
Maybe it's because the licensing is a bureaucratic nightmare and the cost to a
party of using a professional photograph is 90% the manpower required to deal
with it costing _any money whatsoever_. Whatever it is, I seriously doubt that
it isn't the major political parties cheaping out.

~~~
ghaff
>The big political parties spend literally half a billion dollars a year on
advertising. If they find a photo good enough to go on the front page of their
website, they are perfectly willing to make that photographer's year, and
they're not going to skimp on something that important.

I'm actually surprised that a major campaign would just see a CC photo on
flickr and decide to use it (assuming that's what happened). Pretty much no ad
agency or other non-editorial user would do such a thing. There's too much
risk that the photographer could object to the use (in spite of the CC
licensing) or didn't actually own the rights to the image in question or had
exclusively licensed it to someone. As someone else pointed out, they're not
even using the image in a way that technically meets the letter of all the CC
license requirements.

~~~
snowwrestler
Political campaigns are ephemeral organizations and take financial and legal
risks at a far higher rate than a typical company.

They get no credit for being good with money, only for winning the election.
If they lose, they just disband and there is no one to sue. If they win, they
have a good platform to find people willing to forgive or fund debt payments
and legal settlements.

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notlisted
Admire his persistence and dedication to creative commons. That said, I can
see why professional news photographers feel threatened and perhaps a little
insulted too... Most shots in the article and on his Flickr feed look merely
'good enough' or 'usable' (as opposed to 'great').

~~~
njharman
They feel just as threatened as book publishers, MPAA, RIAA and all the short-
sighted content producers who have been relying on quirks of technology that
allowed them to monopolize distribution of content. Quirks that no longer
exist in Internet/Digital age. These people have and continue abusing the
legal system to shore up their previous monopoly.

~~~
bobby_9x
Distribution of content is easy, yes. But creation of content is still just as
difficult.

Intellectual property laws are a bit extreme, but they also protect the small
inventor/business owner.

Without these protections, we would have an increase in trade secrets and any
individual or company that had enough money and resources could just sit there
and legally rip everyone off.

China is a good example of this. With weak IP laws, tecnology moves at a
snails pace and small business owners really can’t compete.

~~~
sangnoir
> With weak IP laws, tecnology moves at a snails pace and small business
> owners really can’t compete.

I beg to differ. With weak IP laws, technology moves at breakneck speeds with
no artificial roadblocks (patents). Take dual-sim phones as an example of
Chinese innovation - virtually every Chinese OEM supports them. Imagine if
Apple had invented (and patented) this tech: only Apple would have it.

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vaadu
The professional photographers display the same arrogant entitlement mentality
that's seen by so many of those being obsoleted by innovation. Skidmore is not
putting professional photogs out of business, the professional photogs
inability or unwillingness to compete is putting themselves out of business.

~~~
ghaff
Yes, it is indeed difficult to compete with free even with a better product.
This isn't about competing with "innovation." It's about better distribution
channels for the free stuff that has always existed.

To be clear, there's absolutely nothing wrong with putting photos up on the
web and allowing for their free reuse. But, yes, it is the collective use of
free/cheap photographs that are good enough for their target purpose (and
sometimes as good as anything a pro would have created) that are cutting into
the professional photography business.

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cooper12
I don't think professional photographers are in danger yet. The guy was only
able to succeed because of several factors: access to elections is open to
everyone (he probably doesn't even need to be close if using the right lens),
it isn't too difficult to take a picture of someone speaking at a podium, and
if the subject is putting any energy into speaking the photo will come out
looking decent. Professional photographers on the other hand have to deal with
open environments with varying lighting and subjects which requires a lot more
skill.

I think what he's doing is great. A creative commons is an absolute necessity
in today's age. Imagine a blogger had to pay for each image they used; they
wouldn't even be able to illustrate their subjects. Freely licensed content is
also the lifeblood of Wikipedia, which doesn't allow images of living people
under fair use. For things which can't accept amateur quality, professional
work will always be available. It certainly says something about the
profession if Trump's campaign is willing to choose amateur photographs over
theirs: they're not selling themselves hard enough or networks are not worth
as much as they used to be in today's digital age.

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mwsherman
Here Comes Everybody.

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MCRed
Calling Ron Paul a "tea party" candidate is accurate only if you recognize the
Tea Party as a grassroots libertarian movement that, among other things,
supported gay rights. Calling him a "libertarian" candidate would have been
more appropriate.

While the TEA PARTY was a libertarian movement (That supported gay rights) the
term was not trademarked and was quickly hijacked by propagandists on the left
and the right to try and pretend like it was a neocon movement.

This shows the wisdom of Linus Torvalds and Satoshi Nakamoto trademarking
Linux and Bitcoin respectively.

Alas, having read this blog, I feel it is pretty well spun to support a vary
specific political bias and I'm not surprised they made this statement--
probably attempting to portray Ron Paul as a neocon deliberately.

I know they are YC alumni and thus I risk being banned for daring to criticize
them. But at some point you gotta get out of your filter bubble and realize
there's a real world out there.

