The Online Photographer

(Note to our U.K. readers—in the U.S., the phrase "p*ss off" doesn't mean "go away" like it does for you, it means "to make angry" or "to become angry.")

Okay, I said I was going to take the day off today, but some things just pi...er, make me angry.

Let me parse this ridiculous story for you.

Two competing local news organizations in a medium-sized metropolitan market. The first is a print newspaper with a website, the second is website-only.

Local high school is remodeled. Newspaper #1 (N1) sends one of its photographers, who also happens to be a TOP reader, to take a picture of it. He does; N1 publishes the article and picture (in August, 2008); all is well. Because it's work for hire, the rights to the photograph of the high school belong to N1.

At some point, somebody at the high school discovers the picture on the internet, nabs it, and puts it up on the high school's website. Well, it's the high school, right? Everybody likes the high school, everybody likes local kids, everybody's just being neighborly. So, N1 doesn't object. No harm, no foul.

Then, News Organization #2 (NO2) needs a picture of the high school for an unrelated story of its own (in May, 2010). Do they send their own photographer to take a picture of the high school? They do not. Instead, they just go to the high school's website and nab a picture from there, figuring the high school won't mind.

Got that so far? NO2 has unwittingly stolen a picture belonging to its direct competitor, N1, through an unrelated intermediary.

This is a bit much for N1, so its publisher sends a nice, friendly, casual email (I've seen it) to the high school and to NO2, claiming ownership of the photograph and asking both entities to take it down from their respective websites.

The high school complies, and takes the picture down right away.

But get this. Instead of taking N1's picture off its website, NO2 goes to the trouble of publishing a story ridiculing and criticizing N1 for requesting that it take the picture down. As if N1 were being petty and unreasonable.

A few choice absurdities from the comments to NO2's article: "The school website is a government entity. If the gov has it out there for public consumption, it's public domain. Anyone can use it." (What, everyone is free to make up their own internet law now?) "It's a public place and a picture that could have been taken by anyone, anytime." (Right. Good argument: it's not very valuable, therefore it's okay to steal it. If the picture is so easy to take, then why didn't NO2 just go take one?) "[N1] was actually the real OFFENDER and maybe even broke the law. They actually put their own name on the photo which is government property and claimed it as their own private property." (That's a good one: turn the issue inside out. Like the photographer doesn't know his own picture.)

At least one smart commenter figured out that the creator's name—oops, it's an N1 photographer!—is embedded in the file.

Sh...er, stuff happens
Every now and then, I take a snippet of text from one of my own articles and do a Google search on it. Occasionally, I'll turn up what's called a "spam blog"—someone who sets up their own website attempting to sell ads and affiliations and populates it with stolen content. The thing to do in that situation is to contact the offending site's internet service provider (ISP) and file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) Takedown Notice. The ISP will then request that the infringing material be taken down. If it isn't, it can pull the plug on the infringing website.

So the funny part of this story is that N1 could potentially get the plug pulled on its competitor's website—if they really wanted to get strict about it.

Occasionally, too, I'll get a request from a rights holder informing me that I've published their photograph on this site and asking me to take it down. That has only happened twice since 2005—I'm pretty careful about what I use and how—but in both cases I took down the material in dispute immediately. That's what NO2 should have done. It's what any internet content provider should do when challenged over rights, unless it is completely sure of its position.

Oh, and as every internet content provider ought to know: just because you find something on a particular internet site doesn't automatically mean that it originated there, or that the place where you found it necessarily owns the rights to it. People do publish things on the internet that don't belong to them. Imagine that. (And imagine not knowing that.)

Keeping you posted
Inadvertently publishing copyrighted material belonging to your direct competitor would be seen as a huge embarrassment by most news outfits. They'd make amends as quickly as possible and hope as few people as possible took notice of it. They certainly wouldn't want guys like me writing about it.

I'll be following this story next week. We'll see if the Publisher of N1 decides to file a formal Takedown Notice, or if NO2 wakes up, sees the error of its ways, and removes the infringing material voluntarily. If it doesn't, I'll name names. I'll call out the offending news site and its publisher. A news organization that inadvertently steals its direct competitor's property isn't so bad—mistakes happen—but one that subsequently brags about it deserves some bad publicity.

The best thing, of course, would have been for NO2 to send its own photographer to take its own picture for its own story. Then it would own the rights to its own content and nothing would be in dispute.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

"Getting p*ssed or being p*ssed is the one that causes all the confusion because it's about alcohol over here. It's quite normal to talk about going out on the p*ss, too—same thing.

"Meeting Americans in college was funny for them and for us—not only did they all have big-screen accents and look the wrong way when crossing the road but they kept talking about being 'really p*ssed' in the most unexpected situations and (funniest of all) would make casual references to a body part called the fanny. Fanny as body part is something very different over here—though it's in roughly the same area of the body, over here, a fanny is something a man doesn't have. An American asking where he could buy a fanny pack could instantly silence a room of noisy London students out on the p*ss. Good times…."

Actor Sean Penn was sentenced to three years of probation and 300 hours of community service yesterday for battery and vandalism against photographer Jordan Dawes in an incident that occurred on October 2, 2009, in Brentwood, California. Dawes was filming a story about Paparazzi when Penn "began kicking and punching" him. He says he later required knee surgery as a result of the attack. According to a civil suit filed by Dawes, Penn has threatened to kill him, saying "The next time I see you, you will be in a box."

Penn's lawyer, Richard Hirsch, stated, "Prolonging this matter in the court system would not have been in Mr. Penn's best interests and would have distracted from his charitable commitments, specifically his work in Haiti. Accordingly he has decided to accept the terms and move on."

Sean Penn's imdb.com bio says he is a "powerhouse film performer capable of intensely moving work who has gone from strength to strength during a colorful film career, and who has drawn much media attention for his stormy private life and political viewpoints."

Mike

ADDENDUM: A little more information—Penn pleaded no contest to one count of misdemeanor vandalism, and the battery charge was dismissed. In addition to the probation, he was assigned 36 hours of anger management therapy by the court and must stay 100 yards away from his victim. A restitution hearing for the photographer's cameras and medical bills is scheduled for July 8th. (Thanks for this to TOP's Legal Editor-at-Large, Anonymous.)

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Conor Risch of pdnpulse.com is reporting that misdemeanor criminal charges against photographer Jonas Lara were dropped at his trial in Los Angeles Tuesday. Lara had been charged with aiding and abetting vandalism in a February 2, 2010 incident during which he photographed three men spraying graffiti on an abandoned building. The charges were reduced to disturbing the peace, which does not result in a criminal record, and Lara agreed to pay $200 restitution to the property owner toward the removal of the graffiti.

The LAPD refused to return Lara's camera equipment to him yesterday despite a court order issued by the trial judge instructing them to do so.

If you'd like to get the photographer's own take on these events, his blog is here (it hasn't been updated as of this writing).

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Jonas Lara is a photographer who was arrested for photographing graffiti [artists/vandals—take your pick] in action. Re the discussion about the case in our comments section, we've heard from a TOP reader who's a California criminal lawyer (he prefers to remain anonymous in this context). He had this to say: "California has a written criminal code, and over a hundred years of appellate court opinions construing that code. Aiding and abetting a crime is one of the first subjects taught in a first year crim law class. Of course media reports of the facts of any given case are almost useless in determining what really happened, but it seems to me that it would be difficult to convict a photographer for taking pictures of a crime. Citizens have no duty to stop a crime or even to report it. Unless he did something to encourage or facilitate the crime, it seems to me that they'd be hard pressed to convict."

Penal Code section 594: 

    (a) Every person who maliciously commits any of the following acts with respect to any real or personal property not his or her own, in cases other than those specified by state law, is guilty of vandalism:
   (1) Defaces with graffiti or other inscribed material.
   (2) Damages.
   (3) Destroys.
   Whenever a person violates this subdivision with respect to real property, vehicles, signs, fixtures, furnishings, or property belonging to any public entity, as defined by Section 811.2 of the Government Code, or the federal government, it shall be a permissive inference that the person neither owned the property nor had the permission of the owner to deface, damage, or destroy the property.
   (b) (1) If the amount of defacement, damage, or destruction is four hundred dollars ($400) or more, vandalism is punishable by imprisonment in the state prison or in a county jail not exceeding one year, or by a fine of not more than ten thousand dollars ($10,000), or if the amount of defacement, damage, or destruction is ten thousand dollars ($10,000) or more, by a fine of not more than fifty thousand dollars ($50,000), or by both that fine and imprisonment.

Our lawyer friend again: "What follows is what one court said about whether being at the scene of an act of vandalism is enough to support a conviction for aiding and abetting. It's a juvenile case, but the reasonable doubt standard of proof is the same. (The appellate court is referring to the lower court's [the 'juvenile court'] denial of a section 701.1 motion, which asserted that the evidence was insufficient. The Court of Appeal disagreed.)"

In denying the section 701.1 motion, the juvenile court stated: 'I think that the circumstances of the setting of the fire, plus the statements of the minor before, during and after this occurred, establishes circumstantially that he was an aider and abettor.' The court cited People v. Campbell (1994) 25 Cal.App.4th 402, 408-410, 30 Cal.Rptr.2d 525, noting in that case one codefendant 'did not independently happen by the scene of the crime' and was with the principal and returned with him 'to the scene of the crime and together they approached the victims...and their concerted action reasonably implied a common purpose.'

In People v. Campbell, supra, 25 Cal.App.4th at pages 408, 30 Cal.Rptr.2d 525 to 410, the Court of Appeal upheld convictions of attempted robbery and attempted murder because the aider and abettor 'knew...and shared [the principal's] intent to rob [the victim] and that in a supportive role, he affirmatively facilitated [the principal].' ( Id. at p. 410, 30 Cal.Rptr.2d 525.) The aider and abettor in Campbell was seen with the perpetrator, both before and during the crime—and assumed a position in front of the victims 'to intimidate and block them, divert suspicion, and watch out for others who might approach. Such conduct is a textbook example of aiding and abetting.' ( Id . at p. 409, 30 Cal.Rptr.2d 525.) This case is clearly distinguishable from Campbell. There was no evidence-either direct or circumstantial—in the prosecution's case-in-chief that Michael instigated the arson and vandalism, facilitated or promoted the crimes or acted as a lookout. He was a bystander, nothing more. The undisputed evidence that Michael went to the playground with five friends—including the three who set the jacket on fire—and left with the same five friends did not establish—directly or inferentially—that he aided and abetted the crimes. Michael was on the basketball court, not in the area of the gym apparatus. Under these circumstances, the fact that Michael went to the school and left the school with the three perpetrators is not enough to make him more than an innocent bystander.

Seems to me that the most pertinent information here is "citizens have no duty to stop a crime or even to report it," and that arriving and leaving with the perpetrators is not enough to make someone more than an innocent bystander.

Photographer Jonas Lara's trial is scheduled for today.

Mike
(Thanks to Anonymous)

ADDENDUM: A couple more factoids. 1. Several readers have opined that they think Jonas is clearly "an accessory." He hasn't been charged as an accessory, and it's not at issue anyway: "accessory" means someone who assists a criminal after the crime, and you can't be an accessory to a misdemeanor—only to a felony. 2. Jonas is a Marine Corps veteran with a service connected disability. (Not pertinent, just thought you might be interested to know.)

ADDENDUM #2: "I keep reading wild allegations on the Internet where people fantasize about my part in the graffiti," says Lara. "For the record, I maintain neutrality in my work. I do not encourage, nor do I help plan or anything even remotely close to that. People keep asking if I knew [the taggers] would be there. Of course I knew. I don’t know how that translates into me being guilty of the crime of vandalism. Does a photojournalist with a magazine blindly drive around at night hoping that he stumbles on a story? No, he conducts research and receives tips on where a story might occur. The painting would have taken place regardless whether I was there or not." (Source.)

ADDENDUM #3: The Jonas Lara Legal Defense Fund.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Yet a further example of the current low status from which photographers suffer in U.S. society—the absurd charges against Jonas Lara are apparently not going to go away, and he has been forced to set up a legal defense fund. The L.A. police are evidently determined to make an "example" out of him.

I hope at least Banksy and Shepard Fairey will contribute to the fund....

Our advice: be sure not to photograph anyone jaywalking. You could be detained for aiding and abetting.

Mike
(Thanks to Andre Moreau)

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

• A battle joined on behalf of photographers: "This is a civil action that arises under the laws of the United States and is designed to redress the most widespread, well-publicized, and uncompensated infringement of exclusive rights in images in the history of book and periodical publishing." So says the photographers' trade association The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), in its lawsuit filed in New York Federal Court yesterday. At issue are the thousands of images contained in books scanned and indexed for Google Books that Google does not own the rights to.

READ MORE at The Register

• A battle won on behalf of photographers: "Photographers cemented a spectacular victory by crushing the orphan works clause," commented Andrew Orlowski at "The Register," after the British House of Commons removed the controversial Clause 43 from the Digital Economy Bill. "Photographers united under the Stop43 campaign argued that the proposed legislation would bring to an end a photographer's control over his images," said the BJP.

READ MORE at The British Journal of Photography

Mike
(Thanks to Vlatko)

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by David Ramos: "In fairness, there's a good case for allowing easier use of orphaned works. The chilling effects of over-expansive copyright protections make it hard for archivists and librarians to preserve older documents, and nearly impossible for historians to use materials that are any younger than the early 20th century.

"Prue Adler, of the American Library Association (ALA), gave a talk in which she described Cornell University's efforts to digitize part of their collection. Cornell spent $50,000 trying to obtain permission to digitize 343 monographs in their collection. They couldn't even find owners for 58% of those works.

"An historian who wants to quote, say, a letter from a soldier named 'Bob' from Chicago, or to show an image from a family photo album of some unknown immigrant family sometime in the 1920s, probably won't be able to get permission."

Featured Comment by Olivier Laurent, News Editor, British Journal of Photography: "David, in most cases, at least in the UK, photographers and their representative organisations are not against cultural institutions and non-profit organisations such as schools, libraries and museums using orphan works. In effect, these institutions would be using these 'orphan works' for non-commercial goals.

"The problem, they argued, was that the legislation proposed, with its general terms and lack of details, would have also allowed commercial entities to use orphan works to make a profit, without properly remunerating photographers. That's the main problem with this legislation. Photographers would have lost control over their images....

"However, the most important point, I would say, is that instead of trying to deal with the consequences of a problem (i.e. how can you use orphan works?) I believe, and I know a lot of photographers do so too, that the government should deal with the causes of the problem—the creation of orphan works in the first place. It's too easy, in today's world, for a photograph to become orphan (removing metadata is simple, and despite being a crime in some countries, it's rarely enforced). What photographers need are unalienable moral rights."

Featured Comment by latent_image: "From the point of view of a working photographer, the discussion about archivists and orphan works seems mighty esoteric. Sure, I hope the matter gets worked out in a reasonable way, but the needs of archivists are way down my list of concerns. What I care about is working my tail off for a year and emptying my bank account while I put together a photography book, only to have Google Books grab it, scan it, and put a big chunk of it online. (I've never digitized a photo and put it online.) That's what I care about, and I call it theft. So I am extremely pleased ASMP and other American and British photographer groups are tackling this issue."

Featured Comment by Matthew Brown: "The problem is that Fair Use is a defense, not an indemnity, and the letter of the law is very vague. You can still be sued even if you have an ironclad Fair Use defense, which makes it financially unfeasible to rely upon given U.S. rules which rarely award costs to the winning side.

"This is one of the ways in which the previous U.S. copyright regime was preferable; things only stayed in copyright if someone cared enough to renew them, which generally meant there was someone who could be contacted.  It had plenty of other flaws, but it did not have an orphan works problem.

"A decent solution to the issue, I think, would be to have limits on recentness as proposed above (though I think you could easily extend that to thirty years or so; most of the problems are to do with works much older than that) and a requirement to place funds in escrow, at a rate equivalent to known creators and at least a statutory minimum rate of some kind.

"I think that would remove most of the temptation to use this as an excuse for piracy."

By Vlatko Juric-Kokic

Round and round and round
There are events occurring in cycles. Seasons, elections, forest fires. Just like forest fires, there are occasional waves of attempts on intellectual property rights of individuals on the Internet. For instance, there was a huge scandal nine years ago when Microsoft proposed terms of use for its Passport sites that would give Microsoft all the rights to all the users' bits, as Slashdot reported, even if said bits just passed through Passport sites. The resulting storm of complaints caused Microsoft to back off.

Last year, Facebook did something similar in its terms of service. It didn't "propose," though—it changed the terms of service to allow it to do absolutely whatever it want with the content (I'm starting to hate that word) that Facebook users uploaded to Facebook servers, forever. Chris Walters from The Consumerist noticed the changes, wrote about them on the blog, and the final result was that Facebook backed off.

As time goes by
A year has passed. Facebook has apparently learned something. This time it is proposing new changes to its terms of service. There is no evil stuff in there. No allowing Facebook to use your photos, videos and whatnot for commercial purposes. But it has apparently not learned enough. In the innocuous wording of the section about sharing your content and information, there is still one little word: use.

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content"), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License"). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

Whoa! You can use anything anybody uploads? And you can transfer the license to whomever you please? You can sub-license the "content"? I don't think so. Granted, there's also the phrase "subject to your privacy and application settings." It does look like you can prevent anybody from taking your photos. It's not such a clear-cut limitation, though. Firstly, how many people really read terms of use? Not very many. I am somewhat sensitized to the matter but I don't consider myself to represent the majority, nor to be as privacy-conscious as it may seem. And even I noticed the proposal by accident. I was replying to a message and saw the proposal among the updates, which I usually just delete because the updates mostly appear in my News Feed anyway. Others won't even know the use of their photos is in question.

Secondly, take some very real cases into account. For example, I upload my snapshots to Facebook and send the link around. It's easier than uploading them to my site and it's easier to show them around. Everybody can see them. And I mean everybody. There are no restrictions to who can see the photos. Therefore, no privacy. Therefore, the license applies. Riiight.

Dubiosity
Even more dubious is the last sentence of the quoted text. At the moment, when you upload photos, you have to check a box confirming you're the owner and you have the right..., et cetera and so forth. If I took a portrait of my friend and uploaded it to their wall so they can use it as a profile photo, I shared it with them. If I delete my account later, the photo remains among my friend's profile photos. Let's say I didn't ask, nor did my friend think, about deleting the photo. According to the proposal, Facebook retains the license. But since the author has to check the box, and my friend was not the author, Facebook retaining the use is in direct conflict with Facebook's own policies. How about that?

An awful, awful thought occured to me. By allowing itself the use of photos by authors who are no longer on Facebook, is Facebook somehow creating orphan works? Nah, it's certainly just a dark figment of my imagination. Anyway, dear Facebook, Brad Templeton wrote down Ten Big Myths about Copyright so many years ago. Please do read them. The article does talk about writings and outmoded social networks like the Usenet, but the same things apply to photographs and everything else on the web as well as on the current social networking sites. It all boils down to one principle: you can't use a work without explicit permission from its author.

If the author puts her work on a site, the site can store it and display it, but the same site cannot give the work to other sites, organizations, or individuals. Again, you need explicit permission, one stating the purpose and the way of sharing. Even less can the site "use" the work, with everything such a broad verb can imply—from creating a banner or illustration for the site to licensing or selling the work to others to do the same. Members of social networking sites are not a source of free content for the sites to exploit.

Enough already. We don't want to live in a dystopian science fiction novel.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by latent_image: "I eagerly await the day a major court decision knocks the stuffing out of one of the big internet companies on a copyright issue. Even though I formally opted out of Google Books, they grabbed one of my books and posted 20% of it online, including approximately 20 full-page photos. As of this weekend, my book has finally been removed, but let's just say that Google Books was less than cooperative about it, considering that my first request for removal was last October and that it took repeated efforts on my part to get them to comply.

"Google Books is a massive grab of copyrighted material. Now that the courts have forced them into an agreement with authors and publishers groups, Google Books tries to put a nice face on it. But they started out scanning and posting book pages without the slightest regard for copyright. (Google Books make a 'fair use' argument, but 20% of a book? I don't think so.) Copyright grabs are not okay with me...ever."

This image, which obviously should contain a whole lot of red, white, and blue, comes from "The Commons on Flickr," a collection of mostly rights-free images that anybody can download and use however they want. Take a look at this imposing contributor's list. Whew!

I've been looking into the microstock and penny-stock controversies a bit recently—they're mostly historical at this point—and one thing strikes me as...well, let's say "ironic," because to call it "funny" would offend a few people, and I wouldn't want to do that (seriously, I wouldn't). It's that the whole furor over microstock essentially mirrors the outrage and anxiety that attended the inception of regular stock agencies, going back to H. Armstrong Roberts in the 1920s, and (an era I'm more aware of) to the 1980s, when photographers switched over from largely dumping their unwanted seconds and overstock on stock houses and began shooting specifically for stock, some of them making a living exclusively from stock sales. I'm not sure there was any such thing as a "stock shooter" in 1950, although there's always that exception waiting out there in the weeds to bite me on the katuschka.

The gnashing of teeth I'm reading from traditional usage-dependent stock photographers about microstock pretty much echoes what traditional assignment and staff photographers were saying about the new breed of stock photographers in the 1980s! Like I say...ironic.

The issue isn't black-and-white, of course; there are two understandable sides to most arguments. I guess where I come down on the whole thing is that if you provide a valuable enough service to people, then they'll pay you for what you provide; but if they can get the same value for cheaper elsewhere, then they probably will. It's why nobody will pay me $30 an hour to do what a guy in China will do (with more determination, fewer breaks, and far fewer sarcastic comments) for $11 a day. Again, not trying to offend anybody.

The best thing, of course, would be if I were the only person in the world allowed to use a camera. Then all subjects would be exclusively mine, and I could charge $100,000 for every usage of every one of my photographs. Clients would line up for my services and throw cash at me to get me to work for them. The public would flock to my amazing gallery shows*. My books would sell in the millions. All the rest of you camera-wielding bastards are just taking wealth out of my coffers, when you look at it that way.

Mike
(Thanks to Bob Burnett)

*My dog would be famous.

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Photo by Umida Akhmedova

Uzbek photographer Umida Akhmedova is awaiting trial and is facing a potential sentence of six months in prison or three years forced labor. At issue is a 2007 work called Men and Women from Dawn to Dusk that contains approximately 100 of her photographs of life and customs in Uzbekistan. A special commission tasked by the government prosecutor has analyzed the photographs and charged Ms. Akhmedova with "defamation and insulting Uzbek traditions."

There are ten of her photographs here. The story is told in the (brief) captions. It's a very quick read; won't take you more than a minute or two.

Let's be clear: this makes the Uzbeks look backward and uncultured, all right, just as they feared. But what makes them look so bad is not the photographs or the photographer (which are really quite nice, and perfectly respectful, at least the ones I've seen). It's the fact that they'd even think of prosecuting anyone for making documentary photographs of her own country.

Mike
(Thanks to Marcin Bieszczanin)

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Jamie's List has posted an excellent follow-up of its post about James Nachtwey Studio's apparently innocent ad seeking an intern. Jamie's List was surprised at the volume and vehemence of the response, and, although our comments were a degree more civilized, I was surprised at the response it generated here, too, when I linked to it.

The follow-up is much better than the original post—it features Brian Smith, John Harrington, and (through John Harrington's comments) Vincent Laforet discussing various aspects of internships and common practices. Particularly interesting is John Harrington's presentation and subsequent discussion of the legal requirements that pertain. Good reading if you were interested in the issue to start with.

Mike
(Thanks to several readers)

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I'm finding remarkably little commentary on this in the U.K. press—perhaps because it's hard to search for—but, on Tuesday, the official site of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown offered an official response to an e-petition protesting the unreasonable oppression of photographers in the U.K.

As I read the document—the language of which has a pretty hard plating of official blandness—it's essentially saying, "Right, we hear you, but it's terrorism we're dealing with here, so bugger off." Adding, at the end, in a slightly more conciliatory vein, that if you're nabbed up you're welcome to make excuses for yourself if you like—which might do you some good. Or not.

I'm not sure whether this is a fair characterization.

If anybody has an opinion about the response, or has found an interesting one online, please let us know.

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Featured Comment by Chuck Albertson: "Sir Humphrey couldn't have drafted a more opaque response, viz: 'Well Minister, if you ask me for a straight answer, then I shall say that, as far as we can see, looking at it by and large, taking one thing with another in terms of the average of departments, then in the final analysis it is probably true to say, that at the end of the day, in general terms, you would probably find that, not to put too fine a point on it, there probably wasn't very much in it one way or the other. As far as one can see, at this stage.'"

Featured Comment by David Talmage: "Your next civil disobedience T-shirt: innocent tourist or other sight-seer."

Featured Comment by David Miller: "Getting well into my grey panther years, I summoned up a bit of long-languishing young revolutionary spirit on a recent five week walking holiday around England—I thought it would be a bit of a lark to get myself arrested for photographing a policeman, and set out to snap everything in uniform from Southampton to Carlisle. Complete waste of time: none of the coppers so much as raised an eyebrow, and when I began to ask them about the law I couldn't find a single one who had heard of it. 'Sounds a bit daft to me,' was the usual response. And during our stay we saw several televised news items which displayed the constabulary in a far-from-flattering light. When it comes down to it, this may be a bit of a tempest in a teapot."

Featured Comment by Calvin Amari: "I know folks talk funny over there, but this frankly seems like rather noxious guff for the Government to fart in the face of our dwile flonking photographer friends. 'An officer making an arrest under section 58A must reasonably suspect that the information is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.' Note that the photographer in this weasel-worded sentence need not necessarily refer to the 'person committing or preparing an act of terrorism.' Even if the photographer is taken to be nothing more than a doddering tourist with a disposable camera, the focus (so to speak) seems to be on the subject of the photograph—or, more broadly still, on a photograph of that general kind—and whether it, in turn, 'likely' could be 'useful' to a terrorist. 'Legitimate journalistic activity (such as covering a demonstration for a newspaper) is likely to constitute such an excuse. Similarly, an innocent tourist or other sight-seer taking a photograph of a police officer is likely to have a reasonable excuse.' Likely?!? This plainly means that a journalist engaging in 'legitimate' activity or an 'innocent' tourist (under some unspecified circumstances) might not have a legitimate defense to an arrest."