...not that he realizes it, but for the first time in my life a piece of Canadian legislation will have a positive, direct and substantive impact on mybusiness, family and that of my professional photography colleagues.

 Bill C-61, the new copyright act that Michael Geist and his merry band of Internet pirates are getting people foaming at the mouth over, was tabled in the House of Commons today. Geist, who is actually a nice guy and very smart, along with the media, are focusing on the part of the new act that prevents people from stealing music and videos from artists and media companies on the Internet. What almost nobody knows is that a part of this bill will finally give Canadian photographers the same rights as other Canadian artists, writers and people who create original works. Professional photographers organizations have been fighting for years to get this law updated. They almost had it in the dying days of Paul Martin's Liberal government.

Until now, photographers fell under the same rules as engravers and lithographers from the ancient days of printing and that meant, without an agreement otherwise, the person or company commissioning the photograph, lithograph or engraving owned the copyright once the fee was paid. This is the opposite to the copyrights laws of the USA and Europe with regard to photography and who the onus falls.

The irony is that Canada is a signatory to the Berne Convention on copyright and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and protects the rights of foreign photographers in Canada under these treaties but not their own citizens.

When people hire a photographer many think they are "buying" the photographs produced. Established respected professional photographers work on a "professional services" business model whereby you are paying for the professionals time and the rights to USE the fruits of that work for the purpose you stated you wanted it for when you contracted the photographer. This in no way coveys copyright to the client. The new law repeals section 13.2 of the copyright act and would, like all other artists, give the copyright to the photographer by default without the need of a specific agreement or contract. From Industry Canada;

In contrast with the existing rules, photographers would always be considered the authors of, and the first owners of, copyright in photographs, including commissioned photographs (e.g., wedding photos).

The terms of protections for some actual rights would be extended to:

• fifty years after publication for sound-recording makers and performers
• life plus 50 years for photographers

So, when you hear people moaning about not being able to get free music or video off the Internet remember, there are more important issues at play. This new copyright act protects individual artists, not just corporations, by updating and reinforcing the copyright laws in the Digital Age to protect them from people and corporations who steal their music, art works, writing, videos, software ...AND PHOTOGRAPHS, from the Internet. I'm sure we have all seen websites and blogs that are nothing more than cut and paste of other peoples work. "Fair use" not withstanding, it has always been illegal. The new copyright law reinforces that and provides for penalties thus giving  strength to artists rights.

So, Stephen, if you're reading...Thanks!

...now with our luck, this is the bill Stephane Dion will decide to get brave on and bring down the government. It's happened to us before!

Bill C-61, Canadian Copyright Act, Copyright reform Process, CAPIC, EP Canada, WIPO

Our apologies if this changes everytime you log or GASP!  ...see something you shouldn't. No one ever said it was a "family website".  Just doing a little pixel construction and testing out some new CSS code for a web project. Now its a test bed.

What's new you ask?
Well, I'm back doing some journalism and writing for the Halifaxt Chronicle-Herald. Which explains why there has been little news here. Just too damn busy!

It's good to get back to writing again but its funny how rusty you get.
...and it was enlightening to read my style guides and journalism ethics and guideline manuals again. It reminded of why I started in journalism and what some of my mentors taught me.
I find it odd that journalist rate so low in public opinion. The ethics and practises guidelines set out in policy, at least at reputable news organizations, is very specific and taken seriously by managment and a journalist agrees to this when he signs on the dotted line. I have only see these written policies from the Canadian Press, CBC, Globe & Mail and now the Chronical Herald. I have worked for other news organizations where this was a joke, If anyone knows of any other news or media companies that have written policy manuals for journalism ethics and practise please let me know ...I seem to be collecting them these days.

Here is a photo from a recent story for the Chronicle Herald.

 
Bell Island mayor and ferry traveller advocate, Gary Gosine, at DICK'S. A bell Island landmark at the ferry dock and know to anyone who has spent the day on Bell Island. 
Photo by Greg Locke for the Halifax Chronicle Herald. © 2008

This is a update of an earlier post ...gl

It's not news that online journalism is evolving well beyond words and pictures. What's new is how technology is giving photographers and the visually literate communicators and story tellers an edge in creating and delivering multimedia content. This enhanced journalism gives the Internet a major role as a new news medium. It coincides with new hardware technology developing new tools that journalists will be using to deliver their stories and information to their new medium.

BLACK TICKLE STORY PREVIEWS THE FUTURE OF NEWS

A story about Black Tickle, Labrador on the Globe & Mail's website on November 10th, while not unlike many stories about the death of rural Newfoundland and Labrador we have been reading in the Canadian media of the past 30 years, gives us a peek at the future of news and how the internet is becoming a new news medium in its own right.  Little did the people of Black Tickle know their role in our technological and media future.

What makes this story interesting is not the textual reporting by Oliver Moore but the multi media presentation by Globe & Mail staff photographer Peter Power. Power is a Newfoundlander, from Gander, who worked at the Toronto Star for many years before recently joining the Globe & Mail. Power "gets" both the aesthetic of Newfoundland and the potential of the new media.  His "video" is a well executed blending of still photos, audio, video and text animation that goes far beyond the traditionally separate streams of these media and the standard news video we see on TV. This kind of presentation is the logical extension of the fusion of various media and in the legacy of the cutting edge documentary films by Ken Burns (PBS.org) who in recent years has been using traditional motion picture film, animation techniques and analog technology to produce unique looking films. It is web technology that has allowed the evolution of the technique into the digital realm.

MELDING OF MEDIUMS

The web is a place for multimedia. Text, unlike in the print media, is the weaker sibling. Visual rules the roost in the multimedia world of the Internet. Visual literacy is as important as textual literacy in order to comprehend visual communications. As newspapers, traditionally run by "word people", start to figure this out, after many years of flailing about in the digital maelstrom, they are getting a grip on how to use the web as a medium onto itself instead of just a static repository for the material from their dead tree daily editions. Newspapers have been getting their photographers to shoot video and do "slide shows" for their websites for a couple of years but they have never "clicked" and never quite reached their full potential. Power, and his Black Tickle presentation, have taken the next step and shown the full potential of the Internet as a grown up news medium with its own unique abilities that newspapers and TV can't or won't touch.

NEW TECHNOLOGY FOR A NEW MEDIA

The days of Max Headroom are upon us. An animated cyberpunk broadcast journalist from the 1980’s foreshadowed the “camera to desktop” media world we live with today. Witness the wildly popular Yahoo News project of last year where they hired their first and only war correspondent. Indeed, their first ever staff reporter. In The Hot Zone with Kevin Sites saw Sites equipped with a digital video camera, laptop computer and a portable satellite phone, stuffed in a backpack, travel the worlds "hot spots" reporting with text, still photos, video and audio posted from remote location to the Yahoo News website. The reporting has certainly had its critics in the journalism world, as discussed by veteran journalist, Claude Adams in The Tyee, but the delivery method broke new trails with its ease, simplicity and low cost. It did with one person, a backpack and some gear from any electronics store what previously took major broadcasting corporations hundreds of thousands of dollars and dozens of people to produce. It took global news delivery to a new place.

What’s next? Higher quality in smaller packages. Reuters PLC, one of the oldest and most forward thinking news agency out there is already in the next generation. They recently announced a deal with Nokia, the cell phone maker, on the Mobile Journalism Project. They equipped a select group of Reuters’ correspondents with the latest generation of cell phones but "cell phone" is certainly an understatement. The Nokia N95 (Nokia.com) is a global communications device capable of high resolution still photos, audio and video. It also allows word processing and delivery via various communications protocols. GSM, CDMA cell phones, computer modem, Wifi and the usual Internet connections. Reuters clients are now getting text, photos and video from single correspondents at the major news events happening around the world. This how we get images and stories of sinking ships in the Antarctic, desert warfare in Afghanistan and fashion shows in Milan within minutes or hours of them being captured. Compare this to the 1970’s when it took a full week to get film footage of the Viet Nam war from Saigon to the news room in New York.

As newspapers see their readership decline  and as an increasingly

connected population turns to the online world for their news and information we will see more sophisticated methods of news gathering and presentation on the web that will be a combination of the traditional mediums of text,  photos, video, audio and animated graphics. This convergence has been a few years coming but the major news organizations could not figure out how to make money at it so there was not a big push to move forward. It was the smaller, more adaptable, news organizations and independent journalists that first took advantage of the quickly evolving technology and became the early adopters. The tools that journalists use get more portable with each new product and global communications via cellular and satellite are reaching even the most remote points on the planet mean near instantaneous delivery of news from anywhere on the globe to our computers or cell phones.

Of course, North Americans will first need to get consistant cell phone quality, service and rates on par with Europe, Asia and even Africa before they can be a part of this world on a large scale and at a reasonable price.

As more frequent visitors will notice we've been doing some house cleaning. All the old posts have been deleted, although I'm sure the Google has them somewhere in their alternate universe, and the focus is changing once again. Exit Zero, Dispatches from the Newfoundland Diaspora, has moved into a pre-production phase and hopefully you will see it in the human world before too long.

The blog was never meant to be ongoing single subject rant as is the want of most blog operators but rather a place display and comment on whatever projects I was working on at the time or the latest work. Some you know me as a commercial photographer, others as a journalist and producer and still more for my IT work. So, this is where this blog is headed.

"Where's the politics", you ask. Well, frankly, its gotten predictable and boring in Newfoundland and Labrador so ...WHO CARES!  Let's leave it to others to battle it out in the matrix. Does anyone one else find it sadly ironic that we now have the greatest global communications system in human history and the first thing people say to each other is "SHUT UP" ? So much for building community and understanding through communications. I have been using computers and the Internet since DOS 3.2, Apple II and CompuServe BBS and two descriptions I've heard remain true. "...it's CB radio for people who can type." and, "No one knows you're a dog on the Internet." ...and a third is a comparison to the Special Olympics, that's best not repeated in public  ..which, surprisingly, has some cross-over in the news media and subject for a future post.

I'll be re-posting some of the old articles, that are relevant, over the holidays and all the photo galleries will be moving to my main website at www.greglocke.com. Check the portfolio link.

The other changes coming in the new year will be a redesigned and cleaned up primary website with new portfolios and services for clients and look for a new downtown exhibition and working studio suitable for portrait, product and technical/scientific photography.

Have a great Christmas ...or whatever holiday you are celebrating :^)