copyright


Hands off my pictures


Andrew Wiard on a move to stop photos being stolen to create realistic fake images


M


ore frequently than ever before, authentic news photographs are being used to create fake news pictures.


They are stolen – mainly by online scraping – and ingested into generative AI machines that churn out ever more credible photorealistic fakes. This picture of a distressed little girl and her dog, ostensibly fleeing Hurricane Helene, is a total fake, widely distributed across social media. There has been little we


photographers could do to stop this – until now. The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), which sets the standards for photographic metadata, has introduced a ‘data mining’ field, which we can use to prohibit theft of data (pictures to you and me). This has already been incorporated by Camerabits into their PhotoMechanic (PM) software, and others will surely follow suit. PM is the go-to software so many professionals use for editing and captioning. It applies my essential IPTC data to all my photographs as they enter my computer and before I even see them on the screen. These include my copyright and


contact details and now the data mining field you see here, directly under the field I use to assert the authenticity of my work. This can be set to allowed (no way!) or to one of a range of prohibitions; mine declares ‘Prohibited except for search engine indexing’. It can be read by all IPTC-compliant


software: No picture will leave my hands without it. It means I don’t need one of those registries for excluding my work from generative AI and I don’t


need the tiresome opt-out procedures of corporate data thieves. I’m not opting out and I’m not opting in. I don’t need collective licensing schemes here because I’m not licensing – I’m prohibiting. Now I’ve told the world all it needs to


know, it’s all right there in the pictures themselves – hands off! This is simple, effective, effortless and automatic and I will never have to think about it again. But I – we – will still have to deal with those who steal our work regardless. The mere act of scraping involves


copying which is in breach of copyright law, so some might say “Why not just take them to court?” This is because there are exceptions to copyright and, while most are fairly innocuous, that’s not the case with the text and data mining (TDM). This was inserted a decade ago into the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. While it permits TDM ‘for the sole purpose of research for a non-commercial purpose’, it leaves the door wide open to coach- and-horses amendments, which the last government tried to introduce, extending TDM to just about all and every purpose. After vociferous protest, this was blocked in 2023 – for now. Today, Google is having another go, urging the UK to allow TDM “to catch up with other markets such as the US, Singapore and EU by adopting the right


“


Just how creating fake news increases UK GDP is beyond me and, besides, what price public trust in press photography?


legal framework for TDM. To ensure the UK can be a competitive place to develop and train AI models in the future, they should enable TDM for both commercial and research purposes”. In other words, anything goes. It’s open season on all we create. Sacrificed on the alter of the great god ‘Innovation’. Just how creating fake news increases


UK GDP is beyond me and, besides, what price public trust in press photography? We must not allow our work to be abused in this way. We must not be complicit in any way, such as accepting derisory offers of payment. The NUJ, alongside other representative organisations, will lobby hard to protect our intellectual property. So, does our Labour government respect the rights of creators? Will Labour see Google off? Let’s see. If all else fails, we will need an exception to an exception. A recent EU directive permits TDM provided the use of the works “has not been expressly reserved by their rightholders in an appropriate manner, such as machine-readable means in the case of content made publicly available online”. That’s exactly what the new IPTC field does. It’s machine readable,so no thieving corporation can plead ignorance. If they’ve got a machine to scrape our pictures, they’ve got a machine to read this too. We are no longer powerless. Every


news photograph could and should now carry the data mining prohibited warning. This is how every individual photographer can join the collective fight. Whatever can now be achieved will ultimately depend on each and every one of us saying, ‘No!’


Response, page 25 theJournalist | 07


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