The value of an image

Technology Guardian of 27 November 2008 has a story about a church which used a couple of pictures on its website which were sourced from the Getty picture agency but without paying for them. Getty sent the church a demand for £6,000. I’ll talk about the rights and wrongs of this a bit later but it reminds me of one of my own experiences.

Some time ago I was involved in arranging a weekend meeting in a certain town (I am being coy about the name to avoid raising any legal hares).  We had to produce a booklet with the programme of the meeting and we wanted a cover picture which would attract people to the location. We gathered all sorts of images from websites, publicity brochures and so on and the one we all liked appeared on the town’s publicity brochure and, I think, their website. It was of a statue seen through droplets of water from a fountain, all glistening in the sun.

We could not have simply copied the picture even if we had wanted to, as we needed an original to get the required quality. We were going to ask the town publicity department – after all, we were going to publicise them. But then we had second thoughts: we were very short of time, the town might not have an original and they might not even own the copyright themselves. So a friend went out and took the very same picture and we used that. I think he even took the publicity brochure with him to make sure he got the angles right. I think we were legal there. I understood that it was the actual physical image, not the idea, which was copyright.

To come back to the church. I don’t know the details but they must have been very careless. They may have been in the wrong but the actions of Getty seem not less than rapacious – the article claims that the cost of actually licencing the pictures properly would have been just a couple of hundred pounds. And presumably the images were of their own church, so why did they not take their own pictures? My own company website has a picture of a well known local landmark. I took it myself but there must be very similar images in various picture agencies. I am sure I can prove I took it but perhaps I had better look for the original…

Showers and acupuncture

If at all possible, I take a shower every morning. Now you may be thinking that my personal bathing habits are a bit too much information but bear with me. Quite apart from any hygiene considerations, I feel much better after a shower. To a large extent that is understandable, particularly if I awake feeling a bit stuffed up. I guess it’s the hot moist air that helps. But there is something else. Even taking account of the difficulty of making objective judgements based on self-observation, I am convinced that having hot jets of water on the back of my neck give me an additional boost in addition to all the usual benefits of a morning shower.

I’ll return to this but first a digression on acupuncture.

A very good friend from university days, Stephen, became a GP although he is now retired. Some years before his retirement he did a course on acupuncture and operated a successful acupuncture clinic as part of his practice. Now, Stephen is a very rational person and I am a bit of a cynic about complementary therapies so I asked him once what it is all about. He replied with two points. If you itch, you scratch. A bit counter-intuitive that. You have an irritation which presumably arises from excessive firing of nerve endings and you cure it by stimulating those nerve endings even more. Second point. The classic acupuncture texts show diagrams with some sort of lines of force and key points (forgive me, I do speak from some ignorance here).  If you look at an anatomy textbook, those acupuncture diagrams are very similar to the diagrams of the nervous system of the human body.

So is acupuncture just a way of stimulating nerves? That sounds simple but I guess that knowing which nerves to stimulate is the difficult bit. Stephen also said that you don’t have to do it with needles – simple pressure can work. But needles do seem to be better. Maybe more stimulation or perhaps there is just a bit of psychology as well?

Back to my morning shower. I mentioned this back of the neck effect to Stephen and he said that is one of the key acupuncture points. So have I been giving myself a little acupuncture session every morning?