A serious question
I have many amazing artist friends. People who are getting ripped off all the time. I do not want to be the cause of that.
A few months ago, I quietly added a feature to enjoysthin.gs. A feature that only I could use. It allows me to blacklist entire domains from being enjoyed. So if boston.com wrote me and told me they didn’t want users enjoying things from the big picture, I’d just add them the blacklist and nobody would be able to do it anymore. Oddly enough, as much as I worried about it, nobody has ever requested it.
Until today.
Today a wonderful photographer called me out and asked me to remove his or her posts. Which I did.
In my day job, I am constantly dealing with the fact that people can copy our product and put it wherever they please. As a matter of fact, it’s a BIG part of what I look at. Notice that I didn’t say “problem that I’m trying to solve.” But there is no denying that is a big… um, issue. And I do not want to be part of the problem.
I recently released some software and didn’t know if I should be pleased or upset to find it available on pirate sites. (I took my good friend Scott’s advice and decided I should be both offended and honored.)
Since I know many photographers/artists, I want to ask you personally how to handle this.
I run a site where people can “enjoy” things they find on the internet. A side effect as that I make a copy of the image or text and serve it from my servers. This is not to hide the original posting of it. The entire reason that I rehost the image, is that I almost always get more traffic than the average artist’s site can handle. If I just used your image, you’d owe a lot of money to your hosting provider. To counter this, I ensure that if someone enjoys your image, they can’t editorialize about it at all. People can’t post a picture of a baby eating a lightbulb with the words “FAIL” unless you typed those words. I’m unconditionally true to the source…. something people almost never notice. Users cannot post anything but your image, it’s title and content. They cannot claim it’s theirs or write snarky comments about it. Not at all.
So my questions is this…
Is my only option to allow people to enjoy things on sites that agree to it? I know that that where I work, they’d never agree to it. They’d never even let me in the room to discuss it. Am I helping their bottom line in any way? No. Am I hurting it? I don’t think so, I’m not sending them more than 100s of hits a month. But then again, I’m the one who pays my crazy server bills every month. Not them. So perhaps I am helping their botton line in some way.
Either way. They don’t complain about it. Almost nobody ever has. But today someone did and I take it very seriously.
So, to all of my artist friends who post their life’s work online with the expectation that people like me don’t steal it. What should I do? Does the site need to be shut down? Is there something I can do that makes sense? I’m honestly looking for your thoughts. Jen, Justin, Noah, everybody. What should I do?
