Piracy with a Human Face

Wednesday March 2nd, 2011

A Photo Editor just posted an excerpt from a recent article by the journalist Chris Hedges about the acquisition of Huffington Post by AOL. This deal was worth $315 million, netting Arianna Huffington millions in profits, for a site in which all the writing was contributed for free.

It’s worth reading Hedges’ article in full. He describes the hypocrisy of a fashionable liberal news source that “uses largely unpaid labor, with a handful of underpaid, nonunion employees, to build a company that is sold for a few hundred million dollars.” This is part of a wider reality that is familiar to photographers:

Good reporters, like good copy editors or good photographers, who must be paid and trained for years while they learn the trade, are becoming as rare as blacksmiths. Stories on popular sites are judged not by the traditional standards of journalism but by how many hits they receive, how much Internet traffic they generate, and how much advertising they can attract. News is irrelevant. Facts mean little. Reporting is largely nonexistent.

This seems to be a familiar lament, one that is made often about what we could either call the digital democratization of culture, or the technophilic cult of the amateur, depending on our position. We’ve touched on this problem before; what’s odd is that so often this understandable concern is connected to an extremist defense of intellectual property, and a paranoia about individuals downloading copyrighted material for personal use. Let’s put the moral questions about downloading aside, and just look at the stark reality exposed by Huffington and company: the real threat to journalists, photographers, and all other creative workers is not from small-time bloggers copying and pasting, but from a few industry magnates making enormous profits from free labor.

"...trained for years while they learn the trade..." (Photo by Tadd Myers/Dallas)

After all, the intellectual property argument is not quite effective here; those who represent Huffington can easily point out that the writers chose to hand their work over. The problem, of course, is that this is not exactly a “free” choice in a time when creative work is being devalued, and the highly consolidated media industry is cutting its costs and therefore job opportunities. Hedges also elaborates on this:

The argument made to defend this exploitation is that the writers had a choice. It is an argument I also heard made by the managers of sweatshops in the Dominican Republic and Mexico, the coal companies in West Virginia or Kentucky and huge poultry farms in Maine. It is the argument made by the comfortable, by those who do not know what it is to be hard up, desperate or driven by a passion to express one’s self and the world through journalism or art.

In response, Bill Lasarow, publisher of Visual Art Source, has taken a cue from Wisconsin and called for a creative strike; his writers will no longer allow their content to be reposted on the Huffington Post.

Let us know what you think; does this analysis apply to photography, or is it completely off the mark?

-Asad