Net and New
Technologies
CD-rom, The Net and New Technologies
Technologies are always coming along to challenge the limits of the Copyright Laws. When the Copyright Laws were first enacted, photography wasn't even covered! Court cases will come to the fore to bring about new legal protection strategies which will eventually be embodied in law, but you don't really want one of those court cases to be yours. So, I will give you a synopsis of what I know to be problems with the use of dinosaur imagery and new technologies so far.
CD-rom producers are among the hungriest consumers of image product in the country today. One of the big problems with them is also the good thing about them; they need a lot of images. But they are forced by price ceilings in the market to be incredibly cheap with the per-image fees they offer. The other problems are that they must distort an artist's image to suit their needs, and cannot be constrained from doing so by contract, because it is in their nature to need to do so, and a deal-killer if they can't, (so make sure those needs are reasonable.) Also, the company an artist signs an agreement with is frequently not the company which actually produces the CD! Be very careful about the contract you sign with a CD-rom producer or producer of video products. There are layers of technology between you and the end product, and every one of those layers has to have some access to your art in order to complete the product. Your contract with the original buyer must allow them to put your images in digital form, and allow them to have reproduced and manufactured products containing those images, but must not grant those manufacturing sublicensors any rights to your images. The rights granted to original equipment manufacturers, ("OEM's",) can be sloppily worded and allow the OEM a sublicense of your work that you never intended. Also, unless you run across the on-in-a-million CD producer or video product company who will pay a decent price for your images, grant only non-exclusive rights.
The Net is also a great place for self-advertisement, and just beginning to be a place that generates actual income for an artist. An artist with a domain and the ability to mail-order product has some real possibilities opening up. Imagine a direct-mail businesses without the most of the mail list database buying,brochure production, and postage costs! And many of the people who navigate the Net at this point in time are particularly scientifically oriented or have children and are therefore, a target market for dinosaur artwork. So it is a great opportunity, but there are some precautions to take when self-advertising or selling artwork on the Net.
First, be aware that copyright status is still unclear when artwork is digitally displayed on a home page. Does this constitute publishing? To avoid any mix up about status, an artist should register copyright to all works as unpublished before trafficking them on the information superhighway.
The other cause for concern is the fact that a low-res image of an artist's painting or sculpture can be bumped up to a high-resolution reproduction using any one of several applications available on the market today with results described by a friend of mine as "disastrously good". if you are selling prints, this could cause a problem with "black market" editions.
With anyone publishing work on-line there is the problem of misunderstanding that the information is free. If you are concerned about having your work downloaded and sold as part of a clip art file without your permission, you should be. It happens. But, Adobe Photoshop 4.0 will have been released by the time this manual goes to press, and will contain what they call "digital watermarking technology"; a function which puts invisible copyright information right on the image without altering its appearance, but which is detectable even after the image is downloaded, edited, printed or re-scanned. I have information that additional watermarking technology will be released in the upcoming year which also puts an invisible "trace" on a copyrighted work of art to follow the trail of unlawful use of the image back to the person who first stole it.
In my opinion, although it requires an outlay of funds to buy these technological tools, the advantages to an artist displaying his or her work on the Net, or in other other forms of modern electronic digital media far outweigh the disadvantages, and this new technology is showing that it is mindful of the need for copyright protection while opening up brand new markets for dinosaur imagery and information.