I May Not Know Much About Art…

After our last post I was mourning the superseding of our beloved Orbital Banana – in a healthy, “The King is dead, long live the King!” kind of way – when I came across a story about an “art” project that is, in its own way, even more outrageous. It’s not publicly funded in the usual sense, so it doesn’t really compare to the Orbital Banana, but in a very real sense it was crowdsourced – that sense being that the “artist” in question is using images and likenesses belonging to dozens of other people without bothering to pay for any of them…

If you missed it the first time around you can find the Washington Post story about it here. What I think is the really outrageous part of the whole story isn’t so much the theoretical copyright violations – although the author tells us that previous attempts to stop similar projects through the courts have failed – as it is the fact that people are apparently buying enlarged photos of Instagram pictures harvested on line. And even that pales compared to the fact that somebody is apparently willing to pay $90,000 USD apiece for photographs of images available online with just enough alteration to be considered “transformative” rather than stolen…

The legal defense in this case is apparently that if you take a picture and alter it in some way (presumably in some way that makes it artistic, if it wasn’t already) that is constitutes a new work and is therefore not a copyright violation of the original. That might be difficult to argue in this case, since the only changes the “artist” has made is to remove the original captions and then add some apparently random comments of his own. But if the people whose pictures he’s using want him to desist they will need to take legal action of their own, and that’s not going to be easy considering that the artist has just made $90,000 a pop selling large photographic prints of other people’s photos (you could hire a lot of legal talent with only a few of those sales), and also considering that Instagram itself will not help them…

When asked about this project, and its legality, Instagram basically announced that they will help you if someone is displaying pictures stolen from your account on the Instagram site itself, but other than that you’re on your own. It’s difficult to blame the company for that, either, since they are neither a law-enforcement agency nor a court; short of creating a large legal department of their own and then providing legal services to their users there isn’t much the company could do about events that happen outside of its domain, even if it wanted to. But it does mean that anyone whose pictures were stolen who decides to take action is going to have to go it alone against a guy who routinely makes millions of dollars selling “transformed” images for which he does not pay…

Now, I don’t need really to tell you that anything you let loose on the Internet is probably going to be stolen, or at least used without permission, at some point in the future – or that there is no outer limit to how long things might remain kicking around somewhere in cyberspace. For years it has been a truism that you shouldn’t post anything online that you wouldn’t want printed on the front page of every newspaper in the world that is still printing, and I’ve brought you any number of stories about people who suffered various misfortunes because they forgot that. There was even a new case this week, when a Spirit Airlines flight attendant posted a picture of herself standing inside the engine pod of an airplane, resulting in yet another career-threating online incident. But this time none of the people being used did anything wrong beyond not having a very esoteric understanding of how copyright laws work…

I’m not sure where all of this is going to end, either. But as someone who creates content and offers to share it with anyone who comes by to take a look, without even monetizing the site with display ads, I’ll admit that I don’t like where this trend is going – or what it could potentially do to the online community…

The Ethics of Pornography

As with our earlier post on the Ethics of Gambling, I don’t intend to debate whether the creation, distribution or consumption of pornographic images involving consenting adults is morally right or wrong; if your personal belief system forbids such things that’s your business, and no affair of mine. But the question of whether the creation, sale or consumption of such images is ethical from a business standpoint is another issue – especially considering the case from last month where a young couple had turned to creating amateur pornography (of themselves in the bedroom) in order to pay their mortgage and support their infant daughter. So, if we can, let’s leave the prudes and the perverts to their usual internecine warfare and take a closer look about the ethics of this often maligned business…

To begin with, we have to consider that many of the negatives cited by those who oppose this industry are already criminal (and in some cases, civil) offenses; the use of under-age “performers” or “models” is illegal, as are the use of coercion, drugs, and potentially fatal working conditions. The fact that such conditions do exist within the industry is not irrelevant, to be sure, but it’s not an indictment of the industry by itself, anymore than the prevalence of drunken driving is an indictment of the alcoholic beverage industry or the use of gasoline in firebombs in an indictment of the petroleum industry. If there are individual companies – or even individual people or couples – who are making money, paying their expenses, making a living, paying their employees and suppliers and creating both profit and personal benefits, can we dismiss the entire industry on the grounds that some people within it are abusing their employees, exploiting our right to free expression or committing crimes in order to make money?

On the other hand, there is definitely merit to the argument raised in our Ethics of Boycotts case, that any failure to extend proper respect to another person is wrong, and that the ongoing practice of doing so is degrading not only to the people being exploited but to our entire society. Despite what some of our more wild-eyed critics seem to be implying these days, most businesspeople are not actually willing to do anything for money, and most of us are, in fact, concerned with trying to make a living while remaining within reasonable moral and ethical guidelines. As much as we might all want to enable struggling young couples to raise the money to feed their children and decent business leaders to pay their employees and vendors (and return good profits to their investors), can we accept the consequences of doing so when the products they are producing have this much potential for long-term harm?

Obviously, this isn’t a new question. The actual creation of pornography predates the invention of the camera by at least three thousand years (probably longer), and elements of American society have been obsessed with the question of what is or is not smut for longer than the U.S. has existed. And while it’s doubtful that the Founding Fathers were specifically thinking about pornographic movies when they wrote the First Amendment, there can be no doubt that they found the idea of government-imposed standards for publications to be abhorrent, and were planning accordingly. So in addition to the usual questions of moral good versus commercial/economical good, we should probably also ask if curtailing the civil liberties of our citizens because some percentage of our society does not like their materials is ethically supportable – and if it is, where do we draw that line, and who gets to draw it?

I’m not advocating the creation of dirty pictures (or books, or movies, or .jpeg files) anymore than I am any of the other things I discuss in these ethics posts; I’m just raising the questions. Does the good done by this industry outweigh the harm it causes? For that matter, does the good that might (or might not) result from eliminating it outweigh the harm that would certainly be caused by state-sponsored censorship and the imposition of somebody else's standards of morality on the public? You can consider this industry (and its output) as vile, reprehensible or harmful as you like, but do we, as businesspeople, have any ethical responsibility to anyone to eliminate it (or its output)? And even if we do, can we take any such action without violating our own Constitution?

It’s worth thinking about…

License to Blog

An article on the Business Insider web site this week was talking about bizarre government regulations, at various levels, which led me to this story on The CNN Money Page about the City of Philadelphia requiring bloggers to pay for a business license if operating within city limits. As the license is $300 (or $50 per year) and most bloggers make rather less than that (I have yet to realize any profit on this one, for example), this probably seems a little harsh. On the other hand, there are blogs that make money; there are a few of them that make quite a lot of it. The larger question is really about businesses licenses, and who should or should not pay them, and that seemed like a subject worthy of a closer look…

First off, most cities and some counties require business licenses in order to fund city operations. The logic is fairly straightforward: if your business operates within city limits, then you are benefiting from various city services (street maintenance, police and fire departments, pro-business advertising campaigns, various public works) and it’s only reasonable that you should chip in for those. Things that are regulated by the county will usually be licensed by the county government instead, such as in the case of food preparation health certificates being issued by the County Department of Health. Here again, you want the place in which your business operates to be known for food that is safe to eat (and to actually HAVE food that is safe to eat), so it’s not unreasonable to ask you to help pay for those regulatory agencies. But what if your business places no demands on city, county, or state infrastructure whatsoever?

For the most part, a blogger operating in Philadelphia has exactly the same impact on city and county services as a blogger operating on the other side of the world – which is to say, nothing. The person writing the blog might use some city services, but he or she is already contributing to the city’s finances through sales taxes, property taxes and other fees. Some cities agree with this position and don’t include bloggers in their licensing requirements, but others have pointed out that in order to be fair all municipal business laws should be applied to all businesses equally, and gone on requiring license fees. Complicating the matter still further, some pundits have suggested that blogging is protected as free speech under the First Amendment, and that applying any restrictions to it are therefore unconstitutional…

Personally, I am reminded of a client I worked with under the SBDC program who had gotten a letter from the City of Los Angeles demanding business license fees going back a decade or more, plus a ridiculous amount of penalties for non-payment all of those years. My client ran a small consulting business out of her home, and spent most of her time in the field – hence, did very little actual work in the City of L.A. The amount the City was demanding was out of reach – it was more than the business brought in over multiple years – and the letter was threatening prosecution and jail time if she didn’t pay…

I suggested that she try calling the City office (using the telephone number on the letterhead) and explaining the situation; if they could work something out it would be better for all parties involved than going to court would be. So my client made the call, explained that she hadn’t been working in the City hardly at all, and had only lived there for a few years in the first place (not the dozen or so the demand letter wanted her to pay for), and after some wrangling and arm-waving, the clerk she spoke with offered to let her purchase the appropriate license for that year (it was under $100) and pay an extra $50 or so to have the license back-dated eighteen months to cover the delinquency…

It’s not as perfect a solution as the City dropping the whole case, of course, but anytime I can shave three zeroes off the end of somebody’s bill (e.g., take it from $50,000 to $50), I always feel as if my day was not a total loss…

I don’t know how these various municipal blogging cases are going to turn out. Unless I’m very badly mistaken, these sorts of actions are going to precipitate whole new areas of case law, and it may take some time for all of the legal precedents to shake out. I just know I’m going to be very careful to check on the local ordinances if I ever decide to monetize this blog…

Spam Comments: Right or Wrong?

From time to time I’ll get a comment on this blog that doesn’t appear to belong here. Most of these are obvious advertising messages left by automated software (generically known as “spam bots”) attempting to trick the unwary into purchasing a $50 knock-off of a $500 clothing or accessory item that is actually worth less than the cost of shipping it to you – assuming that it is actually shipped to you, and they don’t just rip off your credit card information and steal your identity. It’s hard to imagine who falls for these scams in the first place, but people obviously do; even the famous “Nigerian Prince” scam nets enough new victims each month that people keep on trying it. You, my actual readers (assuming I have readers) never see any of these “ads” because Blogspot requires all comments to be moderated, and I usually just delete them as soon as they come in; any web page that is actively monitored generally does the same, destroying the vast majority of these efforts before anyone ever sees them. A much more interesting question is whether the senders have a legal right to post these things in the first place…

A recent post on the Consumerist website talks about a tool-review website that keeps getting hit with spam comments written in support of the Home Depot chain and its products, and the company’s (apparently mortified) attempts to distance themselves from these comments and deny responsibility for them. Several of the people commenting on this story mention legislation requiring bloggers to disclose their relationships to any company they write in praise of, but even if this sort of law were to be enacted, it’s hard to say how you could enforce it against bloggers or people who comment on blogs, even assuming such a law was constitutional in the first place. Certainly, there’s no legal grounds for keeping private citizens from commenting on a business or product they encounter, and there’s generally no way of telling where Internet comments are coming from in the first place…

Consider, for example, a case where a private citizen is so fond of a particular business that they visit websites, discussion boards and blogs where that business is relevant to the topics being discussed, and leave comments in praise and support of that company. The person making the comments has no financial connection or obligation to do this; they just want the company to prosper and grow, say the way I do with The Grand Traverse Pie Company . It would be hard to argue that my right to say “The Grand Traverse Pie Company is Great!” is not protected speech under the First Amendment (disclosure: I receive no financial, moral, or legal support from the Pie Company; I don’t even use their wifi to upload these posts). I like their products, and want to see them continue operations and open more locations in places convenient for my use. But suppose I had a relative who did work for the Pie Company; would this still be protected speech? Suppose it’s a close relative who might owe me money, and could conceivably pay me out of their wages; is that still free?

Now let’s suppose that an actual employee of any company goes on a few websites and leaves comments in praise of their employer. The employee is not being paid to do this; they are not using company assets or doing the postings while on the clock; they’re just telling people who might need the information about things their employer has available. Is this still a protected activity, or should it be considered advertising and regulated? For that matter, if a company starts paying people to tell potential customers about their products and services, should that be considered free speech? Does it matter if the products or services are important, hard to find, or have the potential to save lives? Or, to reverse the question, if your company makes a product that could potentially save people from unpleasant experiences (including death), should restrictions placed on advertising activities apply to your efforts to use social media to promote your business? And who gets to draw that line?

It’s a minor point, perhaps, but I call it to your attention because it’s a fact of life in our new world on the Internet. Perhaps one day all of these activities will look as quaint as the advertising methods of the early Industrial era do today, and new standards of business and behavior will have made spam comments too ham-handed and gauche for anyone to seriously consider using. A lot of that will depend, however, on how we react to these comments here and now…

Fair and Balanced?

I was online reading news stories this week, and I came across a gleeful piece about how Newsday, the Long Island daily paper, made a huge mistake in making its web side a pay service. The authors were obviously appalled that anyone would be trying to charge for web content – even as little as $5 per week – and were crowing that after three months, only 35 people had signed up for the pay service. The authors also mentioned the $4 million that Newsday spent redesigning their website, and calculated that the paper has grossed $9,000 – suggesting that the remaining $3,991,000 was a waste of money, and that the site’s readership has dropped from millions of people each month to just 35. If you didn’t already assume a healthy skepticism about anything you read on line, let me suggest that this article would be a good place to start…

If you actually read down through the rest of the story, which you can find in the New York Observer online site, you will find out that the drop in traffic to the Newsday site is significant – it goes from 2.2 million unique visits in October to 1.5 million in December – but hardly the disaster the headline would imply. You will also note that the site is available free of charge to anyone who already has a subscription to the paper or subscribes to Optimum Cable, one of the local cable providers (which happens to be owned by the same people who own the newspaper). Together, that’s believed to be something along the lines of 75% of the population of Long Island. We might also wonder if the drop is actually going to affect the long-term performance of the paper, since it has only been three months since it became a pay service…

Now, no one is claiming that charging money for content on the Internet is an especially successful business strategy; most of the companies that have tried it so far have met with marginal results at best. It’s especially problematic in the news business, since there are still a large number of free news services available online, and all of them will carry the same news stories – sometimes literally, as in the case of stories purchased from the AP, UPI, Reuter’s and other wire services. And it probably is true that if the traffic flow to the Newsday site continues to drop the owners will find it increasingly difficult to sell advertising space on the page. I’m even willing to concede that life has become hellish for the local reporting staff working for Newsday, and that they are desperately unhappy with the current configuration of their employer (to the point of resurrecting the nickname “Hellville” for Long Island). The headline is still deceptive…

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, it hardly matters if someone who runs a free-content website is complaining about pay-for-access sites; even assuming that they’re not jealous of the $9,000 in subscription money (that’s the equivalent of a LOT of paid Internet advertising, folks), they’re still right that charging for content is both obnoxious and silly – especially given the availability of alternate websites. I just can’t help thinking that if we’re going to hold up unpaid web producers (and bloggers) as some pure and unbiased reporting source, then we have the same responsibility for telling the truth and checking the facts as any other news source – and we deserve the same mockery and contempt when we slant the news to suit our own particular biases…

Of course, that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong…

Getting Worse?

Every few years we get treated to another talking head somewhere telling us how much worse the world has gotten since the last time we looked, and how all of this is the fault of whatever social, political, economic, racial or national group the talking head making the pronouncement is against. Most people pay no attention to this sort of thing, given that self-appointed guardians of taste, purity, goodness and/or righteousness have been making these pronouncements for at least the last 12,000 years (and possibly longer), and despite the dire warnings being given the world is still here and no one is being eaten by giant goat-eating cockroaches (except in certain parts of New Jersey). But then there are cases like the one out of Long Island, New York, this week about a mother using Craigslist to get revenge on one of her 9-year-old daughter’s classmates…

As reported by the local CBS affiliate station, a 40-year-old woman placed a sex ad on Craigslist and then gave out the victim’s first name and telephone number to men who responded to the ad. Needless to say, the mother in the case is protesting her innocence, and we should all remember that you shouldn’t believe everything you see on the local news, let alone read on the Internet. But in this case it doesn’t really matter, because we all know that even if this case turns out to be a hoax, somebody, somewhere is going to see this story online and decide it’s a good idea. Unless Craigslist stops taking sex ads (which seems unlikely; they didn’t stop taking those ads after it turned out a serial killer was using them to find his victims), this exact scenario is going to happen somewhere in America in the next year or so, and there’s no telling how many more people will get hurt…

People who are prone to that sort of thing will pounce on this case as further proof of the corrosive effect of the Internet on our society, but I have to wonder. No one was actually hurt in this case, and unless the girl being targeted and her parents are complete idiots, there was never any real danger involved; this would appear to be nothing more than an extremely high-tech version of the old prank of writing someone’s name and telephone number on the wall of a public restroom. The difference is that instead of a small local audience, this prank could be seen by anyone in the world who wanted to, and instead of hearing about it around the community, we’re hearing about it online (or on television), which tends to increase the volume (and the outrage) in these cases. The real question isn’t even whether this sort of thing is making our world even worse to live in, so much as it is, what do we do about it?

Granted that years ago a prank of this type couldn’t possibly be disseminated to dangerous recipients around the globe, years ago we didn’t have the resources to identify, track, report and defeat such outrages, either. Measure and counter-measure have evolved together, as they always do, and if the reach and impact of idiots like the offender in our story have grown, so have our abilities to fight them. The real question is how do you propose to prevent this sort of thing? We’ve established that governments will never be able to regulate the content floating around out here in cyberspace, and that means that there’s really no way to guarantee that someone can’t post prank ads somewhere, anymore than you could patrol every public restroom in the world with a rag and a bottle of solvent. With proper education (and vigilance) we should be able to keep anyone from getting hurt, but that’s still one more thing to worry about in an increasingly hostile new world…

So is our world actually getting any worse? Personally, I doubt it; I’ve often said that the world is getting more complicated, not necessarily better or worse. Unless somebody can actually show me that the percentage of idiots in our midst is actually rising, I have to conclude that the more things change, the more they remain the same. Even if it means that we’re going to have to invent the electronic equivalent of self-cleaning latrines…

The Ethics of Banner Ads

Since you’re reading this web log, I’m going to go ahead and assume that you’ve spent enough time online to have noticed the banner ads that appear on most free-content sites. This morning, for example, the weather site I’ve been watching has banner ads for Maytag appliances and some company selling radio-controlled helicopters over the Internet. I’m not sure either of these companies have anything to do with the question of whether there will be weather later today, but I can’t say I care about these ads being there one way or another. I believe in the First Amendment as applied to advertising, and I don’t see anything wrong with free content providers attempting to make a little money on the side. What interests me is whether any of you do…

Some time ago, the nice people who provide me with this blog space added a tab called “monetize” to the dashboard I see when I log in. This turns out to be less hype than it is a scheme by which I allow them to put up banner ads in the sidebar (and probably top and bottom, too) of the page this blog appears on; if enough of you visit the blog and click on those banners, I get a very small amount of money; if you don’t, then it’s just another collection of annoying banner ads clogging up the Internet. Which leads me to the above-referenced ethics question: If you are already providing free content to your readers, do you also have an obligation to keep your web page free of advertising? Or is the trivial inconvenience of having to see ads for washing machines and radio-controlled helicopters too much to inflict on people (even assuming that they don’t just ignore the ads the way I do)?

Before you answer that, consider the other half of the relationship. The folks at Blogspot are providing this space to me, free of charge, and while it could be argued that this does not actually cost them anything, they do at least have to expend a certain amount of bandwidth and storage space to keep this blog operating. In return, however, I have been giving them absolutely nothing for the past two years. Do I have any ethical responsibility to allow them to make their cut on the display ads that would appear on my blog, if I were to monetize things? I should note here in passing that they haven’t made any effort whatsoever to suggest that I do so; they didn’t even email me when they put the “monetize” tab onto the dashboard…

Of course, one could argue that since Blogspot is a service of Google, it’s therefore not exactly a financial burden on anyone. In fact, it’s probably true that Google benefits just from having the largest possible community of bloggers writing on the site they provide, which helps to explain why there is no charge for having a web log here and no pressure to put advertising on your blog page. Still, I have to wonder if any of that matters from a truly ethical sense. Put simply, do I have an obligation to my readers (to keep this blog page ad-free) or to my host company (to allow them to make money in exchange for hosting my blog for free)? Since the odds of getting enough traffic through this page for me to make anything are effectively nil, serving my own interests is not really an issue; the question is, whose interests should come first?

It’s worth thinking about…

Legal Weed

Here's another one of those cases of something that sounds like a good idea (or at least an innocuous one) at first glance, but very rapidly turns out to be more complicated than you'd expect. It happens that Federal law (which governs most aspects of the brewing and distilling industries) prohibits drug references on the packaging of alcoholic beverages. You might think this would be a good idea, in that it would prevent the liquor industry from trying to use the appeal of various controlled substances to sell a product that would almost certainly end up being abused in its own right. Unfortunately, once you allow any regulation to restrict free speech, the matter will almost always become more complicated than you wanted it to be...

Take the case of Legal Weed beer, made by the Mt. Shasta Brewing Company in Weed, California. The town of Weed has been enjoying the double entendre of its name for over a century now, with everything from T-shirts that play on the name to a sign at the city limits that reads "Temporarily Out of Weed." A famous tourist spot is the road sign that has "Weed" with an arrow pointing left, and "College" with an arrow pointing right (people like to get their picture taken in front of the sign). It's all made even funnier by the fact that the town is actually named for its founder, Abner Weed, a local lumber baron and state senator. No one is actually advocating the sale, possession or use of marijuana (often known by the slang term of "weed"), and everyone knows it...

Everyone, that is, except for the Federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which earlier this year ordered the brewery to stop marketing the "Legal Weed" beer that they had begun selling. Apparently unable to see the humor in the situation, the Feds threatened all sorts of civil and criminal sanctions, and only backed down when the huge storm of negative public opinion reached a crescendo. Video segments about this David-and-Goliath fight appeared on the news across the U.S. and as far away as Saudi Arabia, and over 1,400 supporters sent letters or emails to the brewery owner, urging him to stay in the fight. Eventually the Bureau, sensing the enormous potential for bad publicity and a lengthy trial reversed its position...


But not before sales of all of the brewing company's products (not just the "Legal Weed") had more than doubled. We've often been told that there is no such thing as "bad" publicity; anything that puts your company into the public eye is automatically a good thing, no matter how negative the circumstances behind it might be. Based on the events in this story, it might be true. But a much more immediate question is whether anyone else out there is considering launching an alcoholic beverage product with a drug reference in the name, and whether this story will convince them to go ahead and take the same risks, or rename the product "White Rabbit Lager" or something equally inoffensive...

And whether letting Federal agencies suspend a constitutional right just because they think it MIGHT help to suppress crime and/or drug abuse is a good idea in the first place...

On The Slope

There was an interesting story in the Los Angeles Times this week about a group of paparazzi who ran afoul of the local surfers in Malibu and got the crap beaten out of them. Anyone who grew up in LA should already be familiar with the concept of “Locals Only,” and in fact anyone who has spent more than a few days in the area has probably seen some form of sign, bumper sticker, or graffiti that carries this theme. For the most part, surfers just want to surf, and if someone who isn’t strictly “local” shows up and stays out of their way, minds his or her own business, and just surfs and goes home, they will leave him or her alone. A large group of non-local surfers may attract attention, but again, as long as they just want to catch a few waves and stay out of trouble, they generally won’t find any…

Problems with beach turf tend to occur when a group of tourists (and in this context, “tourist” may mean someone from five miles down the coast or three miles inland) insist on setting up an elaborate base camp taking up half the beach, creating a huge amount of mess and noise, and interfering with the local people who just want to surf. It’s true that no one owns the beach, let alone the surf, but people coming into your space and demanding that you respect their “rights” to be there while refusing to respect yours is not a scenario that is going to end well anywhere people are people. What makes this week’s case so special, and the reason it enters the purview of this blog, is that the crowd in question were not just fun-loving tourists; they were professional stalkers armed with camera equipment and out to make a fast buck…

Now, as you might imagine, I’m in favor of free speech, and of freedom of the press. Sometimes this means allowing people who you despise the chance to say their piece, and sometimes this means allowing idiots who just have to see “candid” pictures of their favorite celebrities to purchase trashy newspapers and magazines containing those images. Any law that infringes on those rights is generally a bad idea, if only because once you start limiting free speech you have stepped out onto the ultimate in slippery slopes and there can be no good that will come from it. But what can you do about people who will infringe upon your rights in order to exercise their own?

What generally happens is that when any industry begins to threaten the health, safety or standard of living of society as a whole, the government is forced to step in and pass laws regulating that industry. If the people who take pictures for the tabloid press are not willing to regulate themselves – and more to the point, are willing to risk the lives and safety of other drivers, risk the health and safety of their subjects, and totally disrupt the lives of innocent bystanders in pursuit of their business – then it becomes the duty of the relevant governments to impose regulation on them. The City of Malibu is already preparing local ordinances to deal with the situation, and the County may follow suit…

The paparazzi will undoubtedly challenge those laws on the basis of 1st Amendment rights, but I’ve read the Bill of Rights, and there isn’t anything in it about having the right to risk the lives and safety of others, risk the health and safety of photographic subjects, and totally disrupt the lives of innocent bystanders in pursuit of one’s business. The fact is that just like any other industry that has the potential to negatively impact the public good, these people (and the publications that purchase their pictures) have the simple choice of regulating themselves, or having the government do it for them. I don’t know what level of decorum should be required of this industry under the law, but just as a general rule, if something you are doing as part of your business is causing passers-by to assault you and destroy your equipment, you need to rethink your business model…