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Time for a repost of my favorite guba rant:
Outfits like Guba and those who support their blatant copyright infringement practices dismay me - as a producer of original content.
Ever since the Guba skin went up on GFY last month, there has been considerable discussion, debate and arguments between both sides of the copyright camps. And it still carries on...
Some people just don't 'get it'. Whether they choose not to understand things, or they're just not capable of grasping the big picture - either way its disturbing to those of us who spent time, money and effort creating original content to see people argue in support of what Guba does.
Some folks dance and twist around the issues with phonetics, attempting to justify what Guba does with one lame, self-serving argument after another...all the while ignoring or overlooking the reasons why copyright laws were created in the first place. In a nutshell...copyright law was primarily designed to safeguard and protect the legal rights of copyright owners and prevent others from making a profit from redistribution or republication of copyrighted images without consent.
Most people who argue in support of Guba's practices seem to do so from the position of not producing original content themselves. Many have no clue or concept of how much work and investment goes in to creating original photos. Others argue from the standpoint that they actively promote and send traffic to Guba for affiliate revenues. But meanwhile, they overlook the rammifications of copyright infringement - primarily the loss of potential revenues and livelihood for the photographers.
While Guba makes copyrighted material from Usenet available often at a lower price than the photographers charge on their paysite (mostly because they don't have the overhead costs of production themselves), they are luring potential customers away from the copyright owner's paysite(s)...thus impacting negatively their ability to fund continued production of new content. In effect, Guba serves to cripple the photographers who produce the sources of content they steal, all the while turning a handsome profit for themselves in the process. It is nothing more than adding insult to injury.
Gallingly, they claim to help photographers and webmasters by working with them to remove copyrighted material when requested to do so. All the while knowing full well that the logistics of tracking down all the stolen images in a collection that self-admittedly contains millions of images - would be virtually impossible. What producer has the time and resources to allocate towards searching the entire Guba inventory for their own images?
Then there are people who say, "If you don't want your images on Guba...don't post them to Usenet." This obviously overlooks the fact that most often content gets reposted without permission to Usenet by individuals who have leeched the material from the pay areas of membership websites, or from places such as Yahoo or MSN groups. Some even go so far as to create specific newsgroups to cater to popular paysites (i.e. Suze Randall, Earl Miller) and floodpost massive quantities of images on a daily basis. In the case of Suze Randall, a few years ago she had to launch a lengthy and expensive lawsuit to put a halt to the illegal reposting of her content to Usenet.
All the while, Guba sits back and has a good laugh while raking in pure profits for themselves. They laugh even harder when they see people supposedly 'in the industry' standing up in their defense on webmaster forums. Their minions attack and denounce producers and webmasters who complain as being "whiners and crybabies." They attempt to silence us by belittling and denegrating our efforts to stand up for our legal rights.
Some say, "Then why don't you just sue Guba?" - as though assuming we somehow have the financial resources and time available to carry out a protracted legal attack against Guba. Again, the theory sounds good...but the actual logistics for most simply aren't feasible. Attorney fees, court costs, travel and accomodation expenses to attend court dates, etc. It could easily amount to tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to mount a copyright infringement case against them. And undoubtedly Guba is well aware of this fact as well. Yes, a producer would have a good chance of winning in the end - but at what cost?
It dismays me to see an organization such as Playboy seemingly turn a blind eye to Guba and allow them to advertise on GFY.com. As an industry leader, Playboy has long been a champion of copyright issues that many of us have respected and appreciated over the years...but lately it appears they have done a 180-degree turnabout on their position, for reasons we can only speculate about. Money? Apathy? Ignorance? In the vacuum of silence that has ensued since the Guba skin was abruptly removed from GFY - we can only guess at their motivations.
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