This may seem like another “so-what” image, and in a certain way it is. Actually it is not a real image – meaning an image that I’m proud of – at all. It’s a memory, and to be precise, it’s a future memory.

This is of course the morning view from my study in Carinthia again. It’s not particularly interesting, just a morning, and during the last 17 months (so long have we been in Villach … so long), I have shown you many versions of this view, some of them maybe even good.

This is all going to fade away. Nothing will remain but a sweet memory.

See the red and white ribbons? They are all over the place, marking the outlines of furture buildings. So far they are nothing but a nuisance, making a lot of noise when the wind rushes in, but I suppose it’s only a matter of weeks until the bulldozers come.

It fills me with a certain nostalgia to know that this place will never again be what I have learned to love. But then: that’s life

The Song of the Day is “Sweet Memory” from the 2008 Melody Gardot debut album “Worrisome Heart”. See a live video on YouTube.

What do you do when you can’t decide between two pictures? Well, of course I use both. See “slightly below” for #2

Today winter was back again, but at the same time it was a wonderfully sunny morning. I rose early, left home shortly after 7 am, and when I went down Lerchenfelder Straße, I was walking directly into gleaming sunlight. As you can see, both images were taken in roughly the same place. Originally I wanted to take an image of the sun together with its many reflections, but when the woman passed by and the traffic lined up nicely, I made one more image, and that ended up as the Image of the Day.

As for the rest of this post, I’d like to clarify what I said in the last post regarding the need for “a system where you waive your rights by refusing to publish“. Flo reacted with a comment that made me realize how unspecific my rant had been, thus let me start by quoting her comment:

If you were a songwriter or composer of music, you’d feel just as proprietary about your hard work as photographers do about their images! It doesn’t matter whether an image has been printed, or if it exists as a film negative that has never been printed, or as a bunch of pixels/photons on a hard drive, that image represents a photographer’s hard work – and is given the same copyright protection as other property, such as paintings and sculptures, whether it ever is published or not. So I don’t understand why music should be any different.

All of us have seen paintings, sculptures, photo images, and other art work that we’d just love to be able to own – but we can’t just go and take them for our own use. But you want songwriters and composers to be willing to fork over their hard work to you for nothing, if they choose not to publish their work! I’m just not sure I understand what you mean by “publish or give it up.” You give something up only after you die, as you certainly can’t take it with you!

Should I give up all my images because I choose not to “publish” them, which means putting them on the internet or printing and hanging them in a gallery?

OK, I see, I should have been precise or shut up entirely I didn’t, so let me now try to do the second best thing, to try to explain what I really mean.

Oh, and one more thing before I begin: I am no lawyer, and even if I were, much brighter minds than mine have tried to solve those problems, so don’t expect me to succeed. Still, I’ll try to indicate a general direction.

There is no such thing as a “Natural Law”. Laws are agreements between influential forces in a society. In a democratic society, the agreeing parties can be thought of as rather broadly defined, ideally encompassing the society as a whole. In a totalitarian régime the participating forces represent only a small group, those who are in power, normally the ruling party and a group of wealthy supporters. I won’t speak of totalitarian systems here. I see totalitarian tendencies in our society, but I firmly believe that we still have a democratic consensus in what we frequently refer to as the “Western World”.

Modern democracy is firmly rooted in the philosophic system that developed in Europe’s Age of Enlightenment. One of the fundamental ideas of democracy is, that laws should be for the general good, not for the benefit of a certain group.

Just as there is no “Natural Law”, there is no “Natural Right” to enjoy unrestricted private property either. It’s all a matter of agreements. History saw systems that were vastly different from our current one, and even in the last 30 years we have seen many countries in Europe change from being oriented towards social welfare, to a system that more and more resembles that of the United States. There are many reasons for that. One is the complete failure and the demise of communism, another is the strong political influence of the US as the only remaining superpower. None of the political tendencies we see today is “just given”, nothing is an “only natural way”, everything is just as it currently is, and when anything of it turns out to work badly, to be inhuman, to be detrimental to the greater good of the society as a whole, there is nothing more natural than to think about changes.

Our system of “Intelectual Properties” is just that, a consensus, an agreement, and it has evolved a long time ago, well before the advent of computers, of digitalization, of the Internet, well before we learned to copy information in a completely lossless way. Flo writes about this matter in a very personal way, addressing it from the perspective of the creative artist. The problem is, that the current system does not exactly protect the interest of the artist, it protects the interest of the publisher.

Much of what is published, is not owned by its original creator. Contracts in the recording industry are normally much in favor of the corporations, not of the artists. Sure, some few artists get real rich, but this is not the rule. The rule is, that the recording industry takes most of the money, and normally they exercise their rights long after the artist has died. Ella Fitzgerald is long dead, but there is still a lot of money to be made with her work. Look at Billie Holiday: did she die incredibly rich? What did Vincent Van Gogh get from the billions of dollars that have since been paid for his paintings?

Again, I am not strictly against intellectual property, but I am strictly against the current trend to see it as god-given. The concept of “Intellectual Property” grants to the artist, the inventor, and to the one, who bought the work of art or the patent, a temporary monopoly. This is believed to foster creativity and to be in the best interest of an advancing culture. But still, this is meant to be a compromise. We make it easy for artists or inventors to profit from their work, and we do it in exchange for their increased output. It’s a deal. Society grants some privileges in order to get something back.

Unfortunately there is a tendency of capitalism to favor the concentration of wealth, and with concentrated wealth comes increased political influence, which again tends to even increase this tendency, and so on. As a consequence, it is hardly important to concentrate on the protection of the rich, they can perfectly care for themselves (and they certainly do), no, the primary focus must be on protecting those who can not pay for their political influence, those who can not pay for laws in their favor.

In that light, let me clarify what I meant with “publish or give it up”.

First: If I create any kind of work and don’t publish it, it is entirely my decision. No one is or should be able to force me. For the general public, it is just the same as if I had never created it at all.

Second: If I have published my own work and want to stop its circulation, I am free to do so. I don’t waive any rights. I probably won’t be able to completely undo the effect of the prior publication though. People may have seen or heard it, they may have quoted it, and it would be unreasonable to expect the world to help me undo my work. After all, from the moment of publication, my work begins to influence others, begins to become part of our shared experience, part of our cultural heritage. Creation is communication. Once the word is out, it can’t be unsaid, the book can’t be made unread, the song can’t be made unsung. But still, if I believe it was an unworthy piece, I am free to try to unmake it as good as I can.

If you think of it, no harm to society is done by these premises. We can assume that artists in general want to publish their work. There may be exceptions, but there is no real need to force anybody. Artists give gladly and freely, to compensate them is in the best interest of any society.

This is not necessarily the case with derived rights, for example those of publishers or those of organizations that mainly trade intellectual property rights. Just look at the patent system: There are companies, so-called “patent trolls”, that do nothing but buying trivial, broadly formulated patents, and then look for someone who actually invents their “invention”, or at least something that is similar enough to take the case to court. They are a special kind of non-practicing entities. They have never ever invented anything. Those companies are nothing but a bunch of lawyers, their only purpose is to sue those who actually do the research. Normally their patents are not even strong enough to win an actual case. No, they get their money because real companies try to avoid litigation. Litigation can damage an actual product, can delay its introduction, can make for bad press, and so the parasites “earn” their money. It would obviously be in the best interest of our society to redefine the patent system, in order to make such parasitic behavior impossible.

Squatting on a work of art for financial reasons is a similar thing. It’s certainly not in the interest of the artist. Artists want to see their work published. The idea is not, as Flo has insinuated, for me to want something for free, is not to leave the artist uncompensated, not at all, the idea is to prevent publishers from hoarding music or other works of art.

Now, as we talk about other works of art, let’s think about paintings and sculptures. Are they the same? Would I want to see them exhibited, by force if need be? Mind please, I say exhibited, not published! There’s a difference: A painting cannot be published, it can only be exhibited. Why? Because it is unique. It’s not that it can’t possibly be reproduced in an almost perfect way, at least so well that practically nobody could see a difference, no, I don’t rule that out, but reproduction is not the usual way to enjoy a painting or a sculpture. We expect it to be unique and we enjoy that uniqueness. Copying simply makes no sense in that context.

A book or a music record is different. We don’t mind getting a copy. Normally nobody even gets to see any manuscripts. What we expect are industrially manudfactured copies.

Thus I’ll rephrase my request:

Any work of art that (a) is of a kind that is normally reproduced, and that (b) is not in the possession of its creator, and that (c) has already been published once for a minimum duration of, say, a month, and (d) has been published commercially, has to be held in publication perpetually, in order to retain its proprietor’s copyright.

Additionally I’d require a reasonable price. Publishing the works of Frank Sinatra as digital downloads at Amazon.com, that’s perfectly OK. A price of below $1 per song or around $10 per album, that’s OK, twice as much would probably be already frivolous.

Something around that. A customary price in that market, and to be precise, a customary price for new music, thus already a little high for remastered songs from the 1950s. The market may not buy at that price. I, for instance, have bought the digital downloads for a Frank Sinatra collection called “Concepts”, originally released in 1992 as a boxed set of 16 CDs, currently available in the Amazon marketplace, used from $175.98, new at $899.99. That’s frivolous.

The current price for digital downloads is $185.76. Still a tad high, but then, maybe not. It’s the customary price, a little below $1 per song. After all, there are 248 songs in this collection. I was particularly lucky though, because – for whatever reason – Amazon sold it for $5 in the US and for 5.98€ in Europe. Cool, huh? What a bargain!

It was completely by chance that I saw it. Would I have bought at the current, customary price? Hell, no. I already had some Sinatra collections, many of those songs are probably duplicates, but then, at that bargain price I did not care.

Thus, the normal price for new songs may be a little high for Sinatra songs, the average music buyer may find it too high, but even at this price, the music is available for everybody who is interested. Setting the price for the digital downloads at $1000 would be much too high. It would be so high, that practically nothing would be sold at all. The price would have been set as a means to induce artificial scarcity, making the price an equivalence to not selling at all. That’s what I want to avoid, and for that reason I would make this pricing illegal.

As a govenment, I would not force prices on you as a publisher of art, but I would have a law against artificial scarcity. Thus you would lose a lawsuit aganst you.

And if you refuse to sell? Well, that’s the “give it up” part of my original rant. Our legal system grants copyright holders a monopoly, and it does that, because we believe, that it is in the interest of our society. That monopoly could be revoked. Why not? You act egoistically, why should scoiety protect you? You could still keep it from being published, but the law would allow unrestricted copying of such works. Essentially you as the formerly exclusive publisher would have given up copyright.

That’s not at all unreasonable, not anti-capitalist, not against private property. Monopolies are a danger to free markets, and they have been fought even in the US. Think of IBM and AT&T.

Speaking of music, here the problem is the availability of a semi-public good. We as a society grant some publishers the exclusive rights to take money for what other people, long dead, have produced. There is no reason why we must do that. Copyright could end with the death of the holder. It could end ten years after the work has been created and even for the artist. Why not? Ten years should be sufficient time to monetize a good song.

Or there could be no copyright at all. Copyright is an invention of the 19^th century. The world has endured thousands of years before the invention of copyright, and we can’t say that it did not develop quite well, can we? The absence of copyright protection did not mean that there was no incentive to produce art either. So what?

But then again, that’s not what I would do. I would just prevent copyright holders, that are not the original artists, from taking works, that have already been published commercially, off the market, either by not selling at all, or by creating artificial scarcity via outrageous prices. Finally, I would do this only for works of a category, that is applicable to selling as digital downloads. This certainly encompasses music and movies.

Note that I have phrased it “published commercially”. Actually this is because I want to take most photography out of the equation. Not necessarily my own. I sell images via Imagekind and the Fine Art Photoblog. Theoretically at least

There are uses where photography is sold to a publisher and then given away as part of a product, for instance press photography. Digital downloads are not a customary distribution method for these kinds of photography, thus I would not want to force digital distribution upon it.

There may be many similar examples, there may be holes in my “legal” construction, but in general it would reach its goal, the availability of our cultural heritage, and it would do so without undue restrictions to current proprietors.

The Song of the Day is “Once I Walked In The Sun” from the 2002 Jane Monheit album “In The Sun”. Hear it on YouTube.

This is an image of yesterday morning. Michael had bought some used furniture via Internet, we had organized a transporter for over the weekend, and the original plan was to return it on Sunday.

Unfortunately one of the two closets that we got as a set for 25€ turned out to be too big to get into his apartment. We could disassemble the other one, but the only option for this one was to throw it away.

The problem is, in an Austrian city you can’t throw a cabinet away on a Sunday. The waste disposal sites are closed, thus we needed to keep the car till Monday morning, rise early, get rid of the damn thing and return the car before 8am.

This image is an HDR that I took as I went to work. There’s nothing special with it apart from the fact that all the cars were moving. I’ve used Photomatix Pro, and this program did a great job deciding for each moving object which version to keep. I was absolutely and thoroughly impressed.

The Song of the Day is “Early In The Morning“. This time it’s not Clapton like in “819 – Early In The Morning“, this time it’s John ‘Sonny Boy’ Lee Williamson. I have the song on disc 49 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”, but if you’re not interested in buying 168 great CDs for almost nothing, you can get it on the collection “Vol. 12-Story of Blues” as well. Hear it on YouTube

OK, that’s what I talked about in the last entry, the view from my study this morning. This was another day spent at home, relaxing, playing games, finishing Orson Scott Card’s sci-fi novel “Ender’s Game”, winner of both Hugo and Nebula awards,

The book didn’t impress me all that much. When it came out in 1985, it was criticized for the way it excused violence, but in the end it is not much more than a mix of Potter in space and Full Metal Jacket. In a way.

It’s not a bad book. It’s only not great. Still, I liked it well enough that I give the author another chance: I’ll continue with the sequel, “Speaker for the Dead”. Maybe the whole is more than the first part

The Song of the Day is “White Winter Hymnal” from the 2008 self titled Fleet Foxes debut album. Great song, see the video on YouTube.

One of the nice things in winter, don’t laugh, it’s that the days are so short. Even a lazy sloth as I can see a sunrise.

Here we are with Sunday’s images. It’s late, I won’t make a second post with today’s, I’ll try to catch up tomorrow.

This weekend we made the second attempt at Michael’s migration from Salzburg to Vienna, and this time we succeeded. Weather was with us. You may remember, the first attempt two weeks ago was thwarted by heavy snowfall.

Again I fetched the car, a Fiat Ducato Mark 3, on Saturday, left it over night in Villach, and at 7am I was already on the highway north, towards Salzburg. I had to cross the mountains, that’s where I made two short stops, not necessarily in the best places, just where it was possible, took some images in bitter cold, and then drove on.

I really wish I could have stopped wherever I wanted. I saw some absolutely breathtaking vistas, the snowy castle of Werfen in front of the most majestic snow-capped mountains, some winter dreams of magnificent beauty, but alas most of the time I was speeding along at 130 kmph with no chance to stop.

You have to take my word and the few images I was able to capture. I wildly enjoyed driving across the mountain range of the Alps, seeing all that beauty and even being able to snap a few pictures.

The actual migration took us till the evening, and there’s still a lot to do in Michael’s new apartment. Tomorrow night we’ll re-assemble his furniture, but most of the grunt work is done. Now, when I think of it, maybe I won’t be able to catch up tomorrow

The Song of the Day is the hauntingly beautiful “Alone With The Moon” from the 1998 Tiger Lillies album “The Brothel to the Cemetery”. Hear it on YouTube.

Sometimes the titles won’t come. Train, rain, … I’ve had too many of them. It is late now, very late. This is an image taken early this morning from the rear window of the tramway train, line #5.

Yes, there are still some with real windows, windows that you can open. I love those trains and I always open the windows, take images while the train rumbles on. Not many of them find their way into this blog, but they are countless.

The Song of the Day is “No One Knows I’m Gone” from Tom Waits’ 2002 album Alice. Hear it on YouTube.

PS: Wanna see some good pictures? Head over to Emma’s blog. That’s some good pictures

Looking out of the window of my study, and if the sky or the light are interesting at all, taking some morning photos, this has become a habit.

Today it was an especially excellent idea, because I spent the rest of this wonderful, sunny, warm day in bed. Diarrhea, fever, and generally a feeling of being completely drained of all energy. Hate those days, and even more so, when they are that beautiful!

Tomorrow evening I should be on my way back to Vienna, but I guess I will need another day or two, at least given how I feel at the moment.

The Song of the Day is “Sick And Tired” from Eric Clapton’s 1998 album “Pilgrim”. See a live performance on YouTube.

The same bicycle on two consecutive days? Oh dear, where will this end?

On the technical front I have just solved my feed problem. It was pretty easy really. Struggling with Apache’s “mod_rewrite” and complex rewrite rules was totally unnecessary, a simple “Rewrite” for the feed and a “RewriteMatch” did the trick, thus I expect to see the subscriber count go to normal tomorrow.

What had happened was, that the old source feed “http://blog.andreas-manessinger.info/feeds/posts/default” had not been correctly redirected to my Feedburner feed. Thus everybody who had subscribed to my blog before I began using Feedburner, was now hanging in limbo. Oh well.

The Song of the Day (this would be Wednesday, by the way) is “Feelin’ The Same Way” from the 2002 Norah Jones album “Come Away with Me”. See a video on YouTube.

It’s Friday, I’m on the train to Carinthia and this is an image of Tuesday morning.

You know this bicycle. It’s an old friend and I have shown him at least once in “1034 – That Look You Give That Guy“. This week was rather bicycle-centric again. I suppose that I can show you some images of other things as well, but at least what sprang to my eye were mostly bicycles.

As to my site, I suppose I still have some problems. My Feedburner stats show that about a third of the subscribers are missing. This is obviously due to the fact that I have not managed to redirect the old source feed to the new Feedburner feed yet. Does this make no sense to you at all? Never mind, just bear with me while things are still flaky.

The layout is preliminary, I haven’t had time to work on it yet. So far I have not found anything that I like better, but I have looked for black layouts only. This is due to the black background of the Amazon ads. It would be no big deal to change them to white with black text, I’d only need another export/change/import cycle, and with the current blog this would be a matter of a few minutes only.

A white background with black text would make the text better readable, but probably this is worse for the images. As this is a photoblog, I have used black backgrounds ever since, though the sheer number of nice white layouts for WordPress tempts me. Now tell me, what do you like better: the black background that I currently have, or a white background?

On another front I have canceled my SmugMug account today. Feels strange after three years. Just a little bit like leaving an old friend. On the other hand, as far as I can tell from a view in their forums, quite some people are fed up and consider leaving as well.

The Song of the Day is “He’s The Keeper” from Paul Weller’s 2000 album “Heliocentric”. See a video on YouTube.

Some very interesting cameras have appeared recently, and due to all that web site fuzz I have not yet commented on that.

It’s interesting, digital photography seems to get to a point where it’s more than good enough. When i bought my Nikon D200, I knew that, short of the high-end pro models, I had probably the best camera one could buy, with only one exception: the sensor was a little bit too noisy at high ISOs. It was still at least as good as film, but the Canons were better.

With the D300 that all changed. Suddenly Nikon had a first league sensor, and the camera itself had become ergonomically and feature-wise more or less perfect.

Sure, the D700 brought even less noise and full-frame, but in the end I decided to save the money. Full-frame would have sky-rocketed my lens costs, I would have lost the 100% viewfinder that I loved so much from the first moment, and the D300’s high ISO image quality is just good enough.

Additionally I would have lost the long reach without gaining anything on the short end. The point is this: the wide-angle problem for APS-C sensors is solved, there are plenty fine ultra-wide lenses. They may be not as good as the Nikon 14-24/2.8, but they take filters, cost half of it and ultimately they are again good enough. On the long end though, switching to full-frame would have had enormous impact. On the D300, my Nikon 70-300 VR has enormous reach. It’s equivalent to a 450mm lens. Ok, Nikon’s 400 and 500mm lenses are faster and of higher quality, but apart from the fact that they cost between 10 and 20 times as much, you can’t even carry them. Oh, and need I say that for my application, mostly street photography, the 70-300 is good enough?

With the new D300s (that’s a suffix, not a plural, thanks Nikon), the decision was even easier. I don’t need or even desire video, and apart from that, the D300s has nothing relevant to offer.

How about other brands? Not that I have any desire to change, but we have seen some interesting cameras in the last month. With the 7D, Canon finally have their answer to the Nikon D300. It has a much improved autofocus module (in this respect toppling the more expensive 5DMkII), has higher resolution, at least on paper it seems to offer excellent high-ISO noise, it has 18 megapixels, thus a whole lot more than the D300, they have even given it the 100% viewfinder. There are no reviews yet, but when they have not fumbled badly, this camera is bound to sell and give Nikon a headache. If I would begin today, I’d strongly consider the Canon 7D. As things are, it is just another excellent camera that’s more than good enough.

What else? Of course, the new Leica M9. This beast is totally and utterly out of reach, but I suppose if I had enough money to burn, I would buy one. Finally and after a long odyssey, Leica has arrived in the digital age. I am impressed.

And then? What about the Leicas for the poor man? What about those big sensor / non DSLR cameras that have appeared recently? It’s strange, they all have their strengths, but none of them is really interesting yet. The Sigma DP2 has improved upon the DP1, nevertheless it’s still much too slow. The Olympus Pen E-P1 is a nice camera, good looking, charming even, but its autofocus is much inferior to any DSLR and even to Panasonic’s Micro Four Thirds offerings. On the other hand, Panasonic has brought a too big, too DSLR-ish first offering with the G1, followed by a much nicer GF1, a camera of about the same type as the Olympus, but why on earth have they decided to set on stabilized lenses instead of a stabilized sensor?? That’s stupid! About the only argument in favor of lens stabilization is, that it stabilizes the image in an optical viewfinder. Apart from that it is only more expensive and adds complex elements that can fail. On a camera that does not even have an optical viewfinder, lens stabilization is pure folly.

Leaves the new Leica X1. Oh well, no need to salivate about this. Leica’s appeal are the M lenses. A fixed-lens Leica X1 is just another overprized camera soon to be obsolete.

All in all it seems that the category is not yet there. The cameras are either not good enough, or if they are, they are irrelevantly expensive.

Let’s look into the other direction, let’s look at medium format and the new Leica S2 system. This is even more out of reach than the M9, but again, if I had the money to burn, I would probably lust for a Leica S2. It’s not bigger than a pro DSLR (which most people would already consider too big to carry around at all times), but it should give us much better image quality. Indeed, the 100% crop shown on The Luminous Landscape hints at probably the best image quality ever seen in a digital camera. Impressive again.

In a way even the big medium format backs from Phase One and Hasselblad impress me, although those cameras are completely unusable for my type of photography. And then there is it again: my 12 megapixels are just good enough for me. They suffice even in those cases where I don’t invent half of my pixels with tools like Alien Skin Snap Art. And there is more to it: with 12 megapixels and the corresponding file sizes, my storage problem is solved. Hard drive space increases faster than I can make images, even though I save all my multi-layer Photoshop files, with some of the bigger of them being around half a gigabyte. I can still keep all my images so far on one single inexpensive drive, and I will be able to do so forever. Going medium format would set me back not only financially. Find a laptop that can edit a 60 megapixel image with ease. Well, you may find some extremely expensive MacBook Pro to come near, but then show me one of them that weighs 1.5 kg. No chance.

So do I care? Heaven, no! Times have changed. This is not the early digital age. Cameras keep their value now. Mind it, I don’t mean monetary value, that one goes down as it used to, but they keep their inherent usage value. I have no idea when I will change cameras. Should the D300 fail or get destroyed, I would of course buy a newer camera, but other than that I see no reason to change one good enough camera with all features that I could ever need, against another good enough camera with the same or similar features. Fact is, the D300 is already more than I need.

These images are from yesterday morning, thus the title. The Song of the Day is “Morningshow” from fellow Austrian Fuzzman’s self-titled first album. See a video on YouTube.