Nikki and I had an interesting thing happen to us this weekend. We took about 60
pictures of Eva using a makeshift background with a purple bedsheet, then moved
the pictures from the camera's memory card to our hard drive. Then we burned a CD,
went to Walgreens, and got them developed. The next day, we wanted to pick out a
couple of the pictures that we really liked so that we could get more prints made
and give them to family members. So we brought in the CD again to Walgreens and
asked for 18 copies of one of the prints.
When we came back to pick them up, the photo technician refused to give us the photos.
She claimed that they were "professional" and that we needed to supply proof that
we brought in the original digital image and did not scan the original. A couple
of thoughts come to mind at this point:
- Thanks for thinking that the pictures were professionally produced. We did it in
our own home with our own camera, so we'll take it as a compliment.
- These are our own pictures. I am the artist. I am the proof.
Now give me my fucking prints.
Upon politely asking the technician what they would take as proof, she said that
we would need to bring in the camera so that they could look at the memory card
and see if the original image was on it. I then showed her the 60 prints we had
developed the previous day and said that I deleted the pictures from the memory
card. I asked if the 60 prints were enough proof to show that they were our own
pictures. She skimmed through them and said "Oh, yeah, there's no way you would
have scanned all of these". Evidently that was good enough for her and
she gave us the 2nd set of prints.
I then told her that we typically delete pictures from our memory card immediately
and just burn the pictures we want to a CD and bring them in that way. I asked if
that wasn't the best way to do it if they always need proof of the original, and
she said that burning and using a CD would be just fine.
I understand Walgreen's position on this. They're at the front lines trying to prevent
theft of someone's copyrighted work. But the measures that they take to enforce
this policy are very, very week. According to them, either the camera's memory card
or the burned CD would have been enough proof. Someone please explain to me how
they can tell whether a memory card or CD contains a digital image file that has
or has not been scanned from an original. I mean, I could have gone home and put
the image back on the memory card and brought it in. Or I could have scanned the
image, put the new file on the memory card and brought it in. The technician wouldn't
have known either way.
Their enforcement measures are weak. On the other hand, what other alternative do
they have? Just like music or any other software, it's difficult to prevent the
spread of file sharing. I suppose that they just want to make their customers jump
through a few hoops to discourage real perpetrators who aren't technical enough
to exploit the loopholes.
But perhaps the worst part of the entire event was that we were the artists of the
photos, they didn't believe us, and there really was no evidence in the world that
could provide hard proof that we shot the images.