In 10 years I’ve posted a few thousand images on the Internet through this site. It has been a ton of work. Now in one fell swoop Google announces it is adding ten million images from the archive of the defunct LIFE magazine, 97% of which have never been published. The first thing I did, of course, was to see if there are any from New Hampshire. Sure enough, about 200 black and white photos popped up in my first search – just the tip of the iceberg. (Continued)
No one can accuse these guys of thinking small. The LIFE photo project, according to the Google web site, is part of its mission "to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible." Among the images we will be able to access instantly are classic photographs by Alfred Eisenstaedt and Margaret Bouke-White and other LIFE staffers. We may even see the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination that LIFE bought within hours of the tragedy, although it may be among those held back from public distribution. Classic LIFE images of the Beatles, space missions, sports, WW II, movie stars, as well as early historic images from the Civil War owned by the company will be posted in large format online. About 20% of the collection went online the other day with the massive archive to be available within the next year or two.
Amid the gush of gratitude for this generous act, no one seemed to be talking this week about the inevitable issues of copyright. Of course, Time -Life retains ownership of their iconic images. That is a given. But what happens when modern readers, who often seem oblivious to the laws and penalties of copyright infringement, begin grabbing these classic pictures for commercial use? Can you post them on your blog, but I cannot post them on a site that has advertising? Is Time, inc., a la Napster, going to track down every seventh grader who prints an image on a T-shirt and sells it at the church flea market?
Right now readers can order a framed printed copy of any photo starting at $80. That’s a good deal for a masterpiece. But Web users tend not to pay for what they can get for free, and even if that trend is reversed, the income generated certainly wouldn’t cover the scanning, posting, and hosting costs. Staci D. Kramer of PaidContent.org (on WashingtonPost.com) suggests that Google and Time-Life plan to share revenues from advertising that will appear onscreen when the pictures are viewed in the future. That might bring in a few more bucks, although Google is facing the same problem drawing money out of its hugely popular, but financially neutral site YouTube. Time, Inc. says its primary goal is to use an existing resource to drive traffic to its web site Life.com.
VISIT LIFE PHOTO ARCHIVE hosted by GOOGLE
OK, so I went there. At the moment you cannot even get past the homepage of Life.com without giving them your email address, and who knows what else. So I left, preferring to access the pix via Google. The brilliance of this, of course, is that these 10 million pix will appear in searches that will pull readers to Life.com. Sadly, they may also push independently generated pix, like mine, off the charts. We’ll be seeing, it seems inevitable, more of what Google gets paid for us to see as the Wild West of the Web begins to tame down.
Whatever happens will be carefully watched, since the whole media world (myself included) is waiting to see how online content turns into cash. In the meantime, chalk one up for the whole world, and especially for us history fans. We get to see in large format from home what was lying around in the basement of the Time-Life building two years ago. Among those images are the 200 currently available of New Hampshire, largely black and white pix of political figures and winter scenery. Among them, however, is a fascinating series showing female ROTC students at the University of New Hampshire shot by Alfred Eisenstaedt himself in 1942.
I wonder whether, if this experiment bears fruit, they will next digitize and stream THE MARCH OF TIME. This, of course, was how our local Seacoast hero Louis de Rochemont made his name in the documentary film business starting late in the 1930s. Many of these classic newsreels, shown in theatres for decades, were released on VHS tape years ago. I managed to buy dozens of these videos before they went off the market. The original films are still part of the Time-Life library, and have as yet, not been released in any digital form I’m aware of. Louis, your revival may finally be coming.
Thanks to Bill Roy for tipping us to the Google archive.
© 2008 by J. Dennis Robinson at SeacoastNH.com. All rights reserved
Seacoast History Blog #13
