Hans van der Kamp

There is a new trend in printed media. Recently I was asked to send a series of photographs to a magazine. The editor who was desperately close to deadline, wanted to know if some if not all of the photographs were published before in other magazines or on the web. It was not the first time that week I was asked this question. No, I said. It was tragic and funny at the same time, because he had picked most of the pictures himself on my website with 500 daily visitors. I kept quiet of course about the twenty or so other sites with even more traffic that had featured the same material.

When I hung up the phone, I regretted that I had not answered: “Not unless you stole them before.” Because that is what the real situation is. Contributors to printed media are always scared that their works will be stolen and published on the Internet, whereas most of the web publicists could not care less about their works being stolen by printed media. If you can’t Google it, it simply does not exist. That seems to be their motto.

So now we have two competing groups of publishers who both think that what the other half does is of little or no importance, but I really would not put my money on the lumberjacks.