lewis collard DOT COM. writing about photography and other things i like, ON THE INTERNET.

Why I will never sell my photos to a stock photography agency (or, Getty Images are a pack of fuckheads)

I'll start this off with getting this off my chest:

GETTY IMAGES ARE A PACK OF FUCKHEADS.
Okay, that's better. 

So it turned out a good friend of mine was using a Getty stock photograph on the blog for his company, which, by the way, carries no ads and costs him money. Out of ignorance of copyright law, I'm sure, but that's how it happened (and it was actually one of his employees that posted it). Well, today, my friend had a letter come in the post, which didn't demand the £78 it would have cost him to license the image for as a perhaps-reasonable solution might have been. No, instead, they demanded nine hundred and sixty eight quid. £968 for an ignorant-of-the-law-innocent infringement of copyright law. 978 pounds for using a technically shitty photograph of a fucking hot dog

He has two choices: pay up, or go to court. And the great thing is, if he went to court, he'd certainly lose the case (it's as clear-cut as copyright infringement goes), and then he'd have to pay not just his own legal fees, but theirs on top of that, plus whatever damages the court decides is appropriate. He doesn't really have the money to pay either, but a court battle is certainly going to end up costing more, so he's just going to have to fork over the £968.  Can I take a moment to re-state something here? Because:

GETTY IMAGES ARE A PACK OF FUCKHEADS.

I had a moment of clarity when I heard about it. Several people have suggested I sell some of my stuff to a stock photography company, and this is exactly why I will never do that. It's easy for photographers to say "well he had it coming". Yes, he was certainly on the wrong side of the law, and perhaps wrong to use the photograph without paying for it. And one could even make the argument that by using this image with attribution to the photographer but not paying the royalties, was exactly identical to charging into the photographer's house armed with a couple of AK-47s, grabbing their kids' meals, spraying diarrhoea all over them then shoving them into the dustbin. You'd be fucking stupid and I'd hate you for it, but you could make that argument. Before telling me that, though, I hope you get an opportunity to say it to the face of one of your friends when their ignorance lands them with a letter demanding that they fork over either nearly a thousand fucking pounds or face a costly legal battle they will lose. I don't hope that they will refrain from spitting in your face and disowning you, nor do I hope that you don't die of a massive heart attack a few seconds later. Trust me, totally fucking people, or allowing other people to totally fuck people on your behalf, is all well and good until that shit comes around and sinks its shark teeth into someone you know personally. Then you'll realise that being a massive cock hurts everyone, in the long run.

So yeah, this is why I will never, ever sell my stuff to a stock photography agency. If I have one principle by which I live my life, it is don't totally fuck people. I'm not totally sure I like the idea of my shit being redistributed without my permission (I've still not totally worked out my position on copyright law). But by my one principle by which I live my life, I'm not willing to totally fuck them either. At most, if they're carrying ads on their site, if I found an infringement, I might ask them nicely to take it down; or if they're not carrying ads, I'll ask them for a link back. I am not about to send legal threats to anyone, ever, because I'm not a cocksucker who totally fucks people. And there's the thing. Copyright is becoming increasingly difficult to enforce on the Internet, which translates into "you have to be an evil fuckhead (LIKE GETTY WHO ARE A PACK OF FUCKHEADS) to enforce it". And I will not do that, ever. I would never fuck people myself, and likewise there is no way in hell that I will sit back and watch the money roll in while a stock photography agency does it on my behalf. Not fucking happening ever.

Morals of the story:

1. Don't use their photos. Hey, did you know that there's a massive repository of pictures you can use for free, with varying license conditions, over at the Wikimedia Commons? I've got quite a lot of stuff there. Hey, if everyone decided to use freely-licensed media Getty would go out of business. It's something short of the solution I'd like to see, which is those fuckers dying of heart attacks, but I'll settle for going out of business.

2. Go and buy a few dozen hot dogs from a burger van and take photographs of them yourself. Really, that's going to be a lot cheaper than fucking with Getty, and you'll have a few dozen hot dogs to eat, too. And finally


3. GETTY IMAGES ARE A PACK OF FUCKHEADS.

Oh, and if you're a photographer selling your stuff to Getty? Sleep well tonight, knowing that today, you've done your part to totally fuck people. Sweet dreams!

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Saying goodbye to an old friend

(Left to right, top to bottom: Roll of Kodak Portra 400 VC, Pentacon 135mm f/2.8, Pentacon 29mm f/2.8, Praktica MTL3 with a very ugly strap, Pentacon 50mm f/1.8.)
 

This is the Praktica MTL3, the first SLR camera I ever owned (rather than borrowed). I love this camera. The tough build quality (which makes my Nikon D2H feel like a toy), the brutally-loud shutter noise, the mirror slap that registers in double digits on the Richter scale, everything. And yet. I might (do) own way too many cameras, but I've always thought of myself as a camera user, not a collector. I always told myself that if one of my cameras went completely unused, that I would find a good home for it. Since I hadn't used it in well over a year, I figured it was time to let it go. I've donated it along with three Pentacon lenses to a promising photography student in the States who needed a camera for her photography classes. I'm sad to see it go, but happy that it's going to find some real use again.

Goodbye old friend.

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The only appropriate response to Leonard Peikoff

In other news, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Peikoff for the opportunity to use the beautiful phrase "go fuck yourself with a wheelbarrow". Thanks Leonard!

(see here.)

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Dear Parcelforce: Fuck you too. Love, Lewis.

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Ubuntu Netbook Edition on Acer Aspire One A110

So I have a tiny Acer Aspire One A110 craptop and I've been running Ubuntu Netbook Edition for a few weeks now, and I am impressed. Here's some thoughts, tips, and things that I would do differently.

Shit just works. It took the Linux world a long time, but we're finally at the point where an average computer user can stick in a USB stick, reboot, answer a few questions and then have an installation that just works. This is better and easier to install than Windows which rarely has all the drivers for all the hardware you need (let alone up-to-date ones). Hooray!

It's fast. Like really fast. See this?

Yeah, that's pretty much exactly how it is. Much faster to boot than Karmic, for one. I've also noticed less application hanging on disk I/O, which happened a lot under Lucid (I'm not sure if this is a problem with my SSD disk or with the OS, but I suspect the latter). I'm going from hitting the power button to a fully working, logged-in system in about 27 seconds. Sounds slow, except that probably five or more seconds of that is taken up by the BIOS, and that's a logged in, ready-to-roll system without all the other shit that has to load after "boot" on lesser operating systems. I'd call that pretty impressive performance for a baby notebook with about half the processor power of my 5-year-old Pentium 4. I might have shaved a few centiseconds off it by disabling a whole bunch of startup programs (bluetooth manager, "check for new hardware drivers", Evolution alarm notifier, etc etc).

The default media player is rude. Clicking the X on the title bar to close Rhythmbox does not close Rhythmbox, but sends it to the system tray (or whatever Ubuntu would rather call it). No fuckers, "close" means "close", seriously. Oh did I mention that behaviour is not configurable? Awesome.

I can't disable the social stuff. Or at least not by any obvious method. That's rude, too, since I don't use it and it just takes up space. The mail notifier applet is also not removable, and assumes that you use the Evolution email client. If I could set this up to check my Gmail without adding that account to Evolution I'd be fine with that, but I can't, and I'm not.

Firefox sucks. Firefox sucks in so many ways that I won't even go into it here, other than to say that if your web browser actually sucks more than Internet Explorer, something is seriously wrong, and Firefox really does suck that much. Chromium is much, much better in every way. Fortunately for those of us who don't like crappy web browsers (and my faith in the human race takes a huge dent every time I see a person who not only uses Firefox, but actually likes that shit), there's a PPA with nightly Chromium builds. Despite being nightlies, they're actually more stable than every version of Firefox I've had the misfortune of using. Did I mention that Firefox sucks? Because if I haven't I'd like you all to know that Firefox sucks. The Ubuntu people know that Firefox sucks too, which is why they'll probably be sending it to the glue factory in the next version, and replacing it with Chromium.

OpenOffice.org sucks as well. A bloat-monster like that on any operating system is a bad idea, but that's even more so on a operating system designed for computers with less than six terabytes of RAM and four processors, let alone one designed for little 1.6ghz-or-less netbooks. For the two times I've actually needed a word processor, I'm a huge fan of AbiWord which is awesome, fast and light-weight.

All in, though, you can colour me seriously impressed.

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I have a Voigtlander Vito B cuddly toy, therefore I am better than you.

I have a Voigtlander Vito B cuddly toy, therefore I am better than you.

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fuck yeah film

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I love getting free stuff.

Left to right: boxed and mint Nikon Series E 70-210mm f/4 (manual focus, same optics as the AF 70-210 f/4), dead Nikon FG (I think I can get it working; if not I'll use it for spares), boxed and mint Nikon Series E 50mm f/1.8 (same optics as the AF 50mm f/1.8). Rear: some 1980s thyristor auto-flash. Not shown: three expired-in-2005 films which I fully intend to use.

Man, I love it when people give me free camera shit. Thanks Mark! Even though the 50mm f/1.8 (a great lens) looks silly on my D2H:

 

I'm gonna put this out here as some Google bait: the focus ring on the Series E 50mm f/1.8 is a bit tough to turn. Is this how the lens should be or is this in need of a service?

Filed under  //   cameras  

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Getting Warsow to not suck on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid)

TL;DR: If you're having sound and frame-rate issues, use the OpenAL sound module. You'll need to create a symlink libopenal.so.0 to libopenal.so.1, since Warsow is expecting the former. Noob instructions follow.

So like, I have an ATI Radeon RV516 and a Pentium 4 HT, and I was using Ubuntu Lucid, right? And I wanted to play Warsow but I was having all sorts of issues with stuttering sound and a very low frame rate, right? So then I was like, OK I gotta fix this, right? And so I fixed it and I thought I'd tell everyone on my blog, right?</teenagegirl>

Anyway here's how you fix that shit. I'm using the version of Warsow available from the Warsow website. I haven't tried it with the one in the package repositories, because that's always twenty fucking years out of date. Here goes:

Install OpenAL.

sudo apt-get install libopenal1

Change to your Warsow directory and create a symbolic link from /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1 to libopenal.so.0 .

cd ~/warsow
ln -s /usr/lib/libopenal.so.1 libopenal.so.0

Run Warsow with the current working directory appended to the dynamic linker path. (This is how you will run Warsow from now, by the way.)

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./warsow.i386

Go to Setup -> Sound options and set the sound module to "OpenAL"

You're done! And it works MUCH better under Lucid than it ever did on Jaunty, hooray! :D

Filed under  //   lunix  

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