Post a photo on the free internet, and by default its copyright will be twisted into a knot of "yes but"s and "you have to expect"s. Here's the "Actually, NO!" you were looking for...
One of most common things I see when I look at the average photographer online, is a person who truly has no concept of how grotesquely they’re being screwed over. I’ve said before that I despair when I see photographers accepting as normal a situation where they have to pay to contribute their work to the internet. But in this three and a half thousand word epic, I’m going to delve much deeper into the kit of psychological tools, used by big tech, to turn the web's most important contributors into the most unsung. And then I’m going to discuss some solutions…
The internet has deliberately been engineered to devalue photos, whilst at the same time using them to front nearly everything the web has to offer. And when I say front it, I don’t just mean appear at the top. I mean literally drive it. Photos are about 90% of the value of £billions worth of online content. Alongside provocative titles and egotistical lure, they’re one of the key push systems of traffic to some of the web’s most lucrative domains.
One might imagine that would be good news for the photographer. But because of the way the internet is set up, it’s the exact opposite. It’s very bad news indeed.
