Placidus
09-06-2016, 09:41 AM
I come from an academic background, where plagiarism will plunge you into the darkest circles of hell, but where increasingly, making original data sets available is seen as a good thing.
When one publishes a non-fiction work with the goal being to sway public opinion, or increase the amount of knowledge or beauty in the world (as opposed to becoming rich from sales), one publishes the whole thing, not an abstract, or a 2:1 reduced precis.
I can understand completely that folk who are professional photographers, hoping to make an income by selling original images, don't want cheaters taking them for free.
But I suspect that the vast bulk of us on IIS are not going to make a lot of cash selling our images, and this is not really a concern.
Once, just once, someone reblogged one of our images, but gave us full credit. We were delighted.
If someone did steal an image and wrongfully published it under their own name, we'd just laugh, because anyone we care about knows our Kermit Green, not too over-sharpened, mid-contrast, not-too-HDR, 0.55 sec arc/pixel style. You have seen the image already, know it's ours already, and if someone submitted it as an APOD and won, all we need to do is to ask them to produce the raw subs, and off to disgrace they go, so we become famous, they rot, and who cares?
NASA make their raw data available to the public. ESO make their final images available as 1:1 TIFFs, assuming you have the gigabyte bandwidth to download them. People would just laugh themselves silly if you tried to steal one and pass it off as your own.
I find it intensely useful and valuable to download other folk's excellent images, register them with one of ours, and blink between them. Why?
The reason I love science is that it is reproducible. It is true and honest. What I say is up there, you can see is up there too. What you say is up there, I can see is up there also. That's different to politics, economics, what Deaconess Fuller taught us, and philosophy.
In Primary School in 1960 we were taught that marching up and down and pledging our allegiance to the flag would make us good citizen cannon fodder, and that sport builds character and makes you a man, but we've come to see that some heroes take steroids, fix matches for cash, ankle tap their colleagues, and get arrested for drunken sexual assault. But what we were taught in science, and what we read in our How and Why Wonder Books, has later turned out to have been at least honest, and still workable within reason and the specified framework.
Being able to see that the structures in your image are also in ours, and vice versa, is very important to my soul. Being able to get a feeling for what is unintentional artifact, versus what is real, is important. Being able to see where I can do better, go deeper, go sharper, is important. Seeing how well we've done with limited time, skies, weather, and equipment is important. Seeing another interpretation is valuable.
None of this interferes with artistic expression. Astrophotography is as much about art as science, but the two usually do not interfere with each other, and where they do, it's good to know.
We are makers, others are takers. Freeloaders, cheats, and liars. I am aware that one or two of us have had unfortunate experiences. However, it's my feeling that, commercial applications aside, holding our best cards secret against our chests is not the best solution.
If we have an image from a night of really bad seeing, it is fair to down-sample the image until the FWHM is sensible.
Notice that if someone really wanted to steal an image, it is a matter of a few minutes' work to use their 4K monitor to pan around the image, saving screen shots, and then reassemble. It works no better than using a hardened steel padlock in these days of battery operated angle grinders. Preventing download of the original merely annoys those who have an ethical and legitimate hope to properly admire your image.
Trying to zoom and pan around an image on the web using those awful scroll bars is nowhere near as satisfactory as using a proper image display program on a downloaded copy, where one can adjust brightness to see the faintest features that you've captured but not been able to show, or to try different processing (adjust the zero point, colour balance, contrast, etc) to help compare with other images of the same object.
As already mentioned, some of us have good commercial reasons for hanging on to our originals. Others have been bitten by the snakes and takers, and don't want to be bitten again. I salute and support both those positions, and don't want them to change even the tiniest bit. That leaves the vast majority of us.
I would therefore make a plea that when we put our images on Flickr or the like, that we don't tick those little boxes that prohibit downloading of the 1:1 original (disable right-click, etc) unless we have a really good reason for doing so. In my mind, it sends the wrong message.
I don't expect many folk to change as a result of this email, it's just my personal view, but I'd be very interested to hear what others think.
Very best,
Mike
When one publishes a non-fiction work with the goal being to sway public opinion, or increase the amount of knowledge or beauty in the world (as opposed to becoming rich from sales), one publishes the whole thing, not an abstract, or a 2:1 reduced precis.
I can understand completely that folk who are professional photographers, hoping to make an income by selling original images, don't want cheaters taking them for free.
But I suspect that the vast bulk of us on IIS are not going to make a lot of cash selling our images, and this is not really a concern.
Once, just once, someone reblogged one of our images, but gave us full credit. We were delighted.
If someone did steal an image and wrongfully published it under their own name, we'd just laugh, because anyone we care about knows our Kermit Green, not too over-sharpened, mid-contrast, not-too-HDR, 0.55 sec arc/pixel style. You have seen the image already, know it's ours already, and if someone submitted it as an APOD and won, all we need to do is to ask them to produce the raw subs, and off to disgrace they go, so we become famous, they rot, and who cares?
NASA make their raw data available to the public. ESO make their final images available as 1:1 TIFFs, assuming you have the gigabyte bandwidth to download them. People would just laugh themselves silly if you tried to steal one and pass it off as your own.
I find it intensely useful and valuable to download other folk's excellent images, register them with one of ours, and blink between them. Why?
The reason I love science is that it is reproducible. It is true and honest. What I say is up there, you can see is up there too. What you say is up there, I can see is up there also. That's different to politics, economics, what Deaconess Fuller taught us, and philosophy.
In Primary School in 1960 we were taught that marching up and down and pledging our allegiance to the flag would make us good citizen cannon fodder, and that sport builds character and makes you a man, but we've come to see that some heroes take steroids, fix matches for cash, ankle tap their colleagues, and get arrested for drunken sexual assault. But what we were taught in science, and what we read in our How and Why Wonder Books, has later turned out to have been at least honest, and still workable within reason and the specified framework.
Being able to see that the structures in your image are also in ours, and vice versa, is very important to my soul. Being able to get a feeling for what is unintentional artifact, versus what is real, is important. Being able to see where I can do better, go deeper, go sharper, is important. Seeing how well we've done with limited time, skies, weather, and equipment is important. Seeing another interpretation is valuable.
None of this interferes with artistic expression. Astrophotography is as much about art as science, but the two usually do not interfere with each other, and where they do, it's good to know.
We are makers, others are takers. Freeloaders, cheats, and liars. I am aware that one or two of us have had unfortunate experiences. However, it's my feeling that, commercial applications aside, holding our best cards secret against our chests is not the best solution.
If we have an image from a night of really bad seeing, it is fair to down-sample the image until the FWHM is sensible.
Notice that if someone really wanted to steal an image, it is a matter of a few minutes' work to use their 4K monitor to pan around the image, saving screen shots, and then reassemble. It works no better than using a hardened steel padlock in these days of battery operated angle grinders. Preventing download of the original merely annoys those who have an ethical and legitimate hope to properly admire your image.
Trying to zoom and pan around an image on the web using those awful scroll bars is nowhere near as satisfactory as using a proper image display program on a downloaded copy, where one can adjust brightness to see the faintest features that you've captured but not been able to show, or to try different processing (adjust the zero point, colour balance, contrast, etc) to help compare with other images of the same object.
As already mentioned, some of us have good commercial reasons for hanging on to our originals. Others have been bitten by the snakes and takers, and don't want to be bitten again. I salute and support both those positions, and don't want them to change even the tiniest bit. That leaves the vast majority of us.
I would therefore make a plea that when we put our images on Flickr or the like, that we don't tick those little boxes that prohibit downloading of the 1:1 original (disable right-click, etc) unless we have a really good reason for doing so. In my mind, it sends the wrong message.
I don't expect many folk to change as a result of this email, it's just my personal view, but I'd be very interested to hear what others think.
Very best,
Mike