The photographer produces these sample photos because he expects that providing samples of his work gives his potential customers more reason to buy his product. As long as the samples, as an aggregate, convince enough additional people to cover the cost of creating those samples, they are making him a net profit.
By giving away these samples, you introduce a third variable: the lost sales to anyone who chooses not to buy the photos because Enola Gay is giving away the samples for free. That may lead to the samples being a net loss.
Any parent in preschool or grade school has to deal with what is essentially sanctioned extortion, and there have been threads complaining about fundraisers and fundraising and the like. I put this in the same category.
I have no idea what the market is for school photographers in your area, Enola, but I’d raise the question to the school as to why the photographer they use is so damn expensive. You may want to find a less-expensive alternative company or two to present.
Another suggestion is to ask the parents’ association to establish a fund for families who can’t afford the extras so they can at least have their kids’ school photos.
My point is that you need to get the school itself involved in the discussion. You may not be able to do anything with the photographer, but the school needs to be made aware of the situation.
I would give them to the school - they are the ones who contracted with the photographer, they are the ones who will deal with any repercussions of any decisions. You were acting as an agent for the school, not the photographer, so it’s not really your responsibility to make the decision. Explain your thoughts to the school - tell them about the specific interactions you had and your concerns- and leave it in their hands. The school would have a better handle on financial needs of families, they might have a fund for this specific type of situation, and certainly if they did choose to distribute the photos, they could do so in a much more “professional” and private way. This isn’t your decision to make as you didn’t contract with the photographer. Let the school handle it, given all the information so they can make an informed decision.
I don’t know if this will swing your opinion either way, Enola Gay - maybe you’re not comfortable with being secretive - but I disagree with the suggestions that you start getting other people involved here. The families, the school, the photographer. It’s not at all smart and it’s unnecessary. If you give two pictures each to three families, nobody has to know about it. The more people you get involved, the more likely somebody someplace takes issue with it, and what you’re considering as a minor good deed becomes an issue involving the school’s contract with the photographer and the photographer’s desire to work with the school. You don’t want to thrust yourself into the middle of a business relationship like that. Nor do you want to call these parents all together in the same place: it will just look like you’re rubbing their faces in what a good person you are, and as someone else said, it’ll make the parents feel like they are stealing. If you can’t do this on your own, don’t do it at all. Making it an issue for the photographers, school, or Warren Commission adds too many unpredictable elements without solving any of the issues you are grappling with. I say do your good deed or don’t, either one can be justified ethically. But make the decision yourself.
Yes, hi. I do write for a living and I take copyright very seriously. If only we could count the ways in which this comparison doesn’t hold water.
Here’s the big one: these photos already exist and haven’t been sold. They’re headed for the garbage. If a couple of pictures happen to not find their way into the garbage, nobody’s hurt. The option of buying them was already on the table and it isn’t going to happen because these families can’t afford it. By comparison, if I wrote a book, people could get it from the library for free if they didn’t want to buy it. I have no objection to that. To make a more direct comparison to this picture situation, if copies of the book were about to be pulped and someone took a copy out of the box instead of sending them back for destruction, that does not harm me and I find it totally unobjectionable.
The best we’ve got is “that may lead to a loss”? Given the sincerity of the situation for the families in the OP (and he can really be the only judge), I doubt that this will lead to any kind of “yknow, I got mine for free from…” YMMV, of course.
I stand by my suggestion to give them to the families.
It’s interesting you say that, 'cos I’ve seen a note in some books to the effect that if you receive this work not in its original cover, you should know that it has been reported to the publisher as “destroyed unsold” and neither the publisher nor the writer has received payment for their work. Library books? Well, someone bought them, and no-one gets to keep the library book for themselves unless they go to the trouble of stealing it from the library; similarly, DVDs and CDs may not be played to the general public, only for the amusement of the owner.
And as has already been said, once the notion gets around that you don’t have to shell out for the photos, but can wait around looking hard-up until someone with no authority to do so gives you the proofs for nothing, no-one is going to buy the photos and the photographer is going out of business. Now you may think that professional photography is too expensive and allowing it to be sold is a form of sanctioned extortion :rolleyes: but I submit for consideration the radical notion that you should render unto Caesar and all that. If you don’t want professional-quality photographs, do without; there are worse forms of deprivation.
But the bottom line, and I’ll restate it just for the fun of watching people trying to dance around it, runs as follows.
[ol]
[li]If you want to give shit away, give your own shit away.[/li][li]Shit that is not your shit may not be given away without permission.[/li][li]If you are not seeking permission because you know it will not be granted, you may not give the shit away.[/li][li]Sneaky work-arounds using logic that might raise a cheap cheer among under-tens still falls under the heading of “giving away shit that is not yours”, and we both know it.[/li][/ol]
… as sure as there are two "m"s in “dilemma”.
I think the main dilemma here is that perfectly good pictures of mommy’s little darlings are getting thrown into the garbage. Throwing them away is wasteful, giving them away is dishonest.
Okay, then go with the idea of “throw it away, then it becomes unclaimed property.” Because it’s true. It’s not a cheap logical work-around, it’s a way to satisfy both requirements – you have destroyed the photos (unless the photographer specifies some other means), and you’re able to provide them to the families as a personal gift.
I disagree with Malacandra about the central issue here, obviously, but I think this work around is silly and I do think it’s cheap. If Enola Gay is required to destroy them, then making it possible for someone to take the photos violates that requirement just as much as actively giving them away does. There’s no ethical difference, it’s just handwaving. Further, it’s unethical in that it makes the families thieves, should they choose to take the pictures, and puts that on their consciences while Enola Gay purportedly does a good deed. I think that’s low.
Good thing I’m not in publishing. This is true, though. There’s no dispute that the photographer doesn’t get paid for his work in this scenario. It’s a loss-leader, but still, it’s fairly assumed that nobody is supposed to get the benefit of his product without paying for it.
What makes it different from the book example - and more importantly what makes it ethically permissible in my opinion, just so we don’t get bogged down in the analogizing - is that there was never any way the families were going to buy these photos. They are either going in the trash or being made a gift. The photographer made his sales pitch, and lacking the money, they passed. If they planned to buy them and Enola Gay pinched the pics instead, then yes, she has undeniably deprived the photographer of a sale and his commission or compensation. But the families weren’t buying the pictures, so she didn’t prevent any sale. I like the idea of talking to the nursery school about finding something less expensive in the future (since she presumably won’t be there next year I bet it’ll fall apart without anyone to follow through, but it’s a really good idea), and again, if she does this, I think it’s important that word not get around the school about what she did.
Dude, throwing them away in such a manner as to guarantee their recoverability, when you’re expecting to either effect the recovery yourself or enable someone else to do so, does not count as “destroying” in any sense other than the cheap logical workaround one.
shrug Okay, then it’s cheap handwaving. Whatever it is, I don’t think the OP is condemned to suffer in hell for eternity should he choose to give the photos away.
Well, maybe. But you’ve indicated that you’d be hypothetically cool with the unauthorised disposal of your (unsold and due for pulping) books, so all we have to do now, I guess, is establish that either the photographer is also cool with it, or that the OP has any business deciding that the photographer ought to be, and then we’re good to go with the whole “giving away other people’s shit” thing.
This is the same argument people use when they crack or steal software. “I’d never buy PhotoShop for $500 so they haven’t lost a sale if I take it.” I don’t accept that as ethical in either situation.
Other families may have scraped together and sacrificed to pay for these photos. How is it fair to them? If it was food or medicine I could accept this argument, but not school photos. Again, there’s a perfectly ethical way to get these photos to these people, and that is by paying the photographer for his/her work.
And I completely agree with you that playing games by putting them out in the trash and letting the parents pick them up is doubly dishonest. If you feel that giving them away is ethical, then own up to it and just do so in plain sight. If you feel you need to hide behind games then I question whether you feel it is really ethical.
How about if you just knock off speculating on why my wife and I choose to not buy the school photo? Maybe they are too expensive or maybe we are tired of constantly paying top dollar for crappy fund-raisers 3 or 4 or 5 times a semester. It is for us to decide. $60 this week for a couple of poorly focused pictures of my son with his hair uncombed. $40 next week for a box of crappy tasting chocolate bars we have to try to resell to our co-workers. For the prices the schools charge for pictures we could take the whole family for a portrait every year. In any case, my precious children get dozens of photos every year from sports teams, group outings and just general family, almost all better than the mass school pics.
BTW, the photo companies print the pictures beforehand so the parents can see what they look like but also so that they will feel obliged to pay for them. Who wants pictures of their children to be thrown into the trash? So I’ve changed my mind: give away all of the pictures, put the photo company out of business and end the madness.
I would destroy them if I said I would destroy them. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t, because I would value my ethics more than the families’ need to have school pictures.
However, if you wanted to get shifty about things: do you have a scanner? Technically, though scanning in the pics and then destroying the originals violates the spirit of the agreement and is still technically wrong (because you’re stealing the intellectual property of the photography company), if the scans happened to find their way to your (or Wal-mart’s) photo printers and then into the hands of the families in question…well, they wouldn’t have the fancy-printed photographer’s pics, but at least they’d have photos of the kids.
I’m not advocating this and probably wouldn’t do it, but it’s a thought. (Apologies if someone else already brought this up–I didn’t read through every post in the thread).
