The Silent Scream.

Interesting mini-documentary about a photographer named Noam Galai, who discovered one day that one of his photographs on Flickr had been reproduced and remixed hundreds of times without attribution or payment, eventually taking on an entire life of its own in street art, graphic design, and editorial photography.

While Noam seems to be a good sport about the whole thing, calling out the fact that without such “remixing”, his work might never have been seen at all, he does say that commercial gain from his photograph irks him a bit, calling out an example of a graphic artist who took his photograph, added some things to it, then sold prints on their website.

To draw a parallel between what Noam went through and the music industry, I’m an ardent supporter of remixing, and would defend Girl Talk’s music to the end, but at the end of the day, he’s profiting from other people’s work. I have no interest in getting into a file-sharing debate here, but at what point does someone cross the moral (if not legal) boundary?

There’s certainly a gray area, but surely there are things which are OK (Girl Talk, for example), and which are morally ambiguous. I can’t say that I would be as forgiving as Noam, and admit that upon discovering that my work had been “stolen”, I think my first instinct would be to sue the bastards.

Do visual artists feel differently about this than musical artists? My gut instinct is that most people would agree that what happened to Noam is a crappy situation, and that he should try to get paid for his work, but my instinct also (perhaps erroneously, and yes, this is obviously an over-generalization) tells me that most of the people who think that, also download music illegally.

I dunno, maybe I’m being completely irrational about this. Maybe at the end of the day, my ambiguity in taking a stand here reflects my overall ambiguity and hesitance towards taking a firm stance when it comes to Copyright in general, and that most other people have a far clearer moral (and legal) compass than I, and can say without hesitation that both situations are OK / not OK.

Comments / thoughts / discussion welcome.

(Via F-Stoppers, Chase Jarvis)