A rather nasty little piece of government legislation has been rushed through and is awaiting royal assent. This effectively enables anyone to take photographers' and artists' work and use it without asking first. This tends to happen a lot anyway, especially with stuff uploaded onto the internet, but is technically illegal - until now. It allows for so-called 'orphaned works', i.e. those with no identifiable or traceable author, to be used by anybody but, in reality, any image can be taken, metadata stripped out and the image passed off as someone else's.
Ok, for hobbyists such as myself this might not seem such a big problem but for people who make a living from photography, as a few of my friends do, this is a very big deal indeed because their work can now legitimately be taken and used without so much as a 'Please, thank you or kiss my arse' - but, even as a non-professional, why SHOULD anyone's photos be taken without their permission and used by someone else with no acknowledgement and no credit? It's the principle of the thing.
We have to accept that uploading to the internet is fraught with peril, because photos are downloadable with the click of a mouse, but to effectively legitimise it is wrong on every level.
It seems to me that the appalling coalition Government we have here are very keen to stamp out piracy when it is Joe, Jane and Junior Public doing the copying, such as illegally downloading films and music (which, let me add, I absolutely do not condone) but, when it comes to stealing the public's own intellectual property the Government is very happy to let us be screwed over. The last line of The Register's article is right, we have, indeed, been 'royally fucked'.
In the meantime, here is a Petition against the legislation concerned.
