This one’s kind of roundabout, but bear with me. So, last week we talked about turning “free” into “profit,” with thanks to the liveBooks RESOLVE blog. Well, the New York Times informs us that one of the online kings of free content, Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone can edit, is suffering from a certain dearth of quality imagery. (yes, I know nytimes.com requires registration to view some of their stories. Either visit bugmenot.com for free logins, or do what I did and guess at something. I got in on my first try guessing “screwyou” would work for both a name and password)
Go to your favorite movie star’s Wikipedia page. Chances are the picture of said multi-millionaire accompanying his or her bio is some god-awful turd snapped with a camera phone. Why? Because Wikipedia only posts photographs with the most liberal Creative Commons license. You as the photographer have to basically give up all rights to your image, including both commercial and non-commercial usage, in order to upload it to the free encyclopedia.
So riddle me this. Would you, photographer, give up all the rights to an image worthy of being published on the Internet’s foremost knowledge authority? If you did, do you think you’d be able to turn that free act into a profit later? And why don’t more celebrity publicists buy out the full rights to a professional photograph of their client (for an appropriately exorbitant fee) so the #1 google link to their client doesn’t feature a blurry, out of focus camera phone snap of him looking like a douche?
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4 Comments at "Wikipedia Photos are Not So Good"
Because most celebrity publicists are as ditsy as their clients?
Because they’re cheap. And Wikipedia is not something that is worth spending a lot of money on in their eyes.
I would possibly be willing if somehow this helped my SEO for my website or someone worth knowing knew I took the photo. Giving away the rights to an image in hopes you later get work doesn’t make sense if people don’t know it is you who took the photo. Otherwise it is just a nice picture. To illustrate one of my clients posted a portrait I did of them on facebook. there are 20 comments about how good the image is, but no one knows it was me that took it. This was a paying client. Now I did a free Senior portrait and gave her 20 images for website use only all with my watermark and I’ve gotten 4 inquires and 1 booking in less than a week.
I would be willing to post some of my lesser photos on Wikipedia if, as compensation, I would get a backlink to my web site (that didn’t have a nofollow tag attached). But with the current CCL terms, that’s not ever gonna happen with my professional work.
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