“Intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century“. We all now know this quote from Mark Getty, the businessman who used his family’s oil fortune to invest in immaterial rights. His company Getty Images, founded in 1995, holds one of the world’s largest copyright portfolios: 3.200.000.000 photographies.
Yet, stock prices almost halved last year. The price curve indeed shows a rather drastically falling tendency ever since it’s high peak around the end of 2004. Now, Getty Images is up for sale and could be bought up by private equity, just like happened to EMI.
So, how to understand Mark Getty’s recent move? Is intellectual property not any more the oil of the 21st century?
Maybe. Anyway, one reason for the company’s crisis is said to be the spread of digital and movie cameras. “Editors give priority to on-the-spot pictures, regardless of photographical quality”, writes the Swedish business magazine Resumé.
That’s a rather interesting development, which remains to be analyzed in terms of economy as well as in terms of aesthetics. The hype around “user-generated content“, which for newspapers means a possibility to outsource some photographic work to cheap amateurs (at the same time as writing journalists are nowadays often expected to take photos as well), goes hand in hand with some kind of “performativization” of photography. What counts is now the photographic production of presence rather than sitting on the largest database of archived pictures.
In fact, the golden age of Getty Images (1995-2005) seems to have some similarities with the golden age of the compact disc (1985-2000, roughly). In both cases businesses could take advantage of a “digital gap” between technologies for storage and technologies for (re)production.
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Obviously, it’s time to require a photographer’s license in order to be allowed to purchase a digital camera! How could we otherwise protect the photography industry? The photographers must be payed for their efforts!
In the November 2007 issue of Professional Photographer Magazine an article focused on Getty Images’ move to offer cheap($49) images for web-use. This was seen as ruining the value of professional photos, witch usually cost a lot more to license. The writer also feared that low-quality footage would flood the repositories.
Clearly people in the business are scared, the value of imaginary property decreases with increasing supply. Even oil or gold would be worthless, if anyone could make it out of air.
Or compare it to the golden age of porn (if there ever was one). In “Porr – en bästsäljande historia”, Mattias Andersson similarly argues that Private Media Group’s IPOs failed because they were based on the fundamental misconception that a giant stock of pornographic images is a unique and valuable asset — in an era when literally anyone can become his own porn star/producer/distributor, or for that matter, can access endless amounts of free porn online. To judge by Andersson’s book, the same holds true for most of the porn industry and the only companies making big money on porn are telcos and cable providers.
If “IP is the new oil,” just look at how world real-term oil prices constantly fell throughout the postwar Fordist economy (up until the oil crisis, ca 1972). This was what lubricated those golden years of Western prosperity (of course at the expense of the environment).
So, in the current post-Fordist, “immaterial” economy what we are seeing is also a form of inflation, but of course much more radical – because oil cannot after all be copied, and information can. But all this cheap information is lubricating society! The externalities of digitization are much more beneficial to society than those dirty, industrial, analogue, limited-stock 20th century economic logics.
Moreover, the current Web 2.0-hyped Eve of the Amateurs will soon be over, since there is an inflation of quality going on too: when all this content around you turns out to be so unbelievably cheap (in the *crappy* sense), you once again turn to the finer things in life…
it was never so much a “digital gap”, as a “technological gap” between storage and reproduction. The CD was digital also in 1985, but the content could not be circulated as information until a few years later. This is the technological gap, where all business activity throughout history has in one way or another been thriving. Ask Manuel De Landas ;-)
Yes, just classical supply and demand. As digital cameras became cheaper, better and more people learned to master the “digital darkroom”, the supply of good quality useable images increased dramatically. Thus the price went down to commodity price, even if the commercial advertising demand also have gone up a bit with the new medium Internet.
In the eighties a photographer could earn quite a lot on good high quality stock images, but that time is long gone. Today stock images is just about exchange money, often licensed “royalty free” – buy once, use forever. The idea is to sell many times for a small fee, rather than sell a few for a big fee – that usually is to not sell at all. But stock agencys use a lot of different models, from managed rights to royalty free and different kinds of subscription solutions. They also focus on different kind of images like nature, conceptual, people, food and what not. The most competitive survive.
The income for a pro photographer today is almost completely about charging hours than selling license agreements, stock images could just be seen as a small bonus coming from “leftovers”. Average Joe that only occasionally happen to succeed with his digital compact, cannot compete with the pro in the charge by hour game, where the pro has all the hard earned knowledge and experience that delivers. Today that usually goes for the “digital darkroom” too. But of course, there has been a lot wining among old dinosaurs. Some could not adapt, they work with other things today. But some used all the new tech to their advantage and took the opportunities from those unwilling to change, they could deliver what was asked for, usually both faster and cheaper. It is all about manage change well.
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It’s about time photographers must be paid for their efforts!
I agree with San Antonio. The y should get what they deserve.
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