Yes, that's me! You can check it out if you go to
www.nicholas-whittaker.com and follow the platform souls links
Really, I'm just playing devil's advocate here, musing on the academic and practical issues of this whole copyright thing. While I have no wish to 'steal' anyone's photos, there are some interesting areas for discussion. E.g - you take a photo of a railway loco, but that loco is in itself a design that has been patented and copyrighted, so one might argue that is a kind of infringement in itself. There is also such a thing as 'fair use' - so (just as I am allowed to quote from a book) if I downloaded a photo of a deltic, say, and went on to use that photo, appropriately credited, to illustrate a point couldn't that be regarded as fair usage? Let's face it, the monetary value of most railway photos is negligible and one man's photo of Pinza could well be indistinguishable from that of another man's - so we're hardly talking works of art or potential lost income! I discussed this over a curry last night with a guy who works in the media and he agreed with me, unless it was a wholesale theft of many photos there'd be very little an aggrieved photographer could actually do about a single instance...
But to reiterate, there are so many generous people out there, that unagreed borrowing would very rarely be necessary and for every individual who gets anal about the use of his deltic photo there are another hundred who are only too happy to see it reach a wider audience.
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Yes, that's me! You can check it out if you go to
www.nicholas-whittaker.com and follow the platform souls links
Really, I'm just playing devil's advocate here, musing on the academic and practical issues of this whole copyright thing. While I have no wish to 'steal' anyone's photos, there are some interesting areas for discussion. E.g - you take a photo of a railway loco, but that loco is in itself a design that has been patented and copyrighted, so one might argue that is a kind of infringement in itself. There is also such a thing as 'fair use' - so (just as I am allowed to quote from a book) if I downloaded a photo of a deltic, say, and went on to use that photo, appropriately credited, to illustrate a point couldn't that be regarded as fair usage? Let's face it, the monetary value of most railway photos is negligible and one man's photo of Pinza could well be indistinguishable from that of another man's - so we're hardly talking works of art or potential lost income! I discussed this over a curry last night with a guy who works in the media and he agreed with me, unless it was a wholesale theft of many photos there'd be very little an aggrieved photographer could actually do about a single instance...
But to reiterate, there are so many generous people out there, that unagreed borrowing would very rarely be necessary and for every individual who gets anal about the use of his deltic photo there are another hundred who are only too happy to see it reach a wider audience.
