Piracy/Plagarism/Stealing...

Piracy/Plagarism/Stealing...



Photo courtesy www.worth1000.com



I came across a post by Debdut on the Kolkata Photographers Club community on orkut.com
..to Pirate or not to Pirate ?not so fotografic , yet an ethical question related to our hobby .do you believe in copy-righting your work ?if yes , do you respect copyright , ..to be specific did you 'buy' that piece of photoshop you use or downloaded ur 'mp3' from paid site?s'd copyright be equally applicable to software , books , songs and photos ?w'd be interesting to know peoples point of view .. if they agree to share personally : i support open-source ( b'coz i cant afford to pay ) , no copyrights ( b'coz no-one w'd care to steal mine )
On the examples that Devdut have put up there, I felt each of those services are different in their own right:
PS is a tool, helps me process a photo to make it more 'viewable'.
A song is just a pleasure thing for my ears.
A photo is a visual treat.

In all the cases, however, there are two types of uses - I use it to create something which is for private sharing, and I use it for public sharing and then mint money out of it.

Piracy, that way, to me, is too vague a word. When I play a song on my HT, my neighbour listens it for free. Nobody, including the singer himself/herself, would treat this as piracy. When the same song is played in a Kalipuja pandal, do we ever think of it as privacy? When a hotel plays it, the producer cries 'piracy'.

When Rabindranath Tagore used a Irish tune for his 'Aji Subhodine' - we called it 'adaptation'. When Nadeem-Shravan uses them, we call it 'sur churi'.

Why do we say so? Because Tagore recognised it to be based on an Irish tune, Nadeen didn't. Also because Rabindranath did it for his own pleasure and pleasure of his close ones, Nadeem did it to mint money. Many may agree, many may not for arguments sake - but those who do not agree ask your inner self - this is what you will get as an answer. If one is using something for private sharing, we do not tend to call it piracy. We do, however, call it piracy if the user suppresses the information of the original.

For 'borrowed' stuff, in certain cases, even though willing, we do not pay for use, because of the high price set for something which is not proportionate to the amount of effort given. To me as a consumer, a singer singing a nice song vis-a-vis a masseur giving me a nice massage requires equal effort (one physical, one vocal). However, the singer uses technology to record his/her songs and charges for every device on which it is played back. Can the masseur do it? A good singer is a gift to the society. But is it so that the singer actually 'deserves' so much money for one effort? Is the effort that high?

The perspective from the opposite side:
As a seller of services, what do I get if everyone feels like what I felt in the previous paragraph? Ok, many people will not pay, but some will. And I will not allow people to mint money from my creations. So if a person creates copies of my song and SELLS them, I will be after him as I believe I need to have my share of that money. If he sells a CD for Rs 20, I will be happy with Rs 10 for 200 songs of mine, but I will not let it go free. For an individual, however, who shares my music for pleasure, I will not really mind, as long as he likes my songs and recognises them publicly to be mine. The price I get here is publicity, which can be translated to money at a later date.Same for my photos. i will really be angry if someone takes credit or gets paid for my photos, without sharing anything with me. Otherwise, I am happy if he uses my photos on his desktop, and when a passer by asks him 'where did you get this from?' - he says this has been shot by Bijit Bose.

Finally, why I still do not upload large photos taken by me and do not intend to do so in the future? Because I do not have control over whether they are used by their admirers for pleasure, or by some website building company/ ad agency for commercial use. I call the second one as blatant piracy, and I'm dead against it.

To me, Bobby's action (Bobby is a KPC member on orkut who has taken fellow members' photos and put them in his own album) is not piracy. It is plagarism. Plagarism is not considered as plagarism when the basic recognition comes from the borrower. If my photos were taken, I would have expected Bobby to announce somewhere explicitly that these were my photos and he is keeping them in his album as a recognition to my work.

All this is just me, and me alone.........