rubken

Stefanie Gordon took a striking picture of Space Shuttle Endeavour’s recent launch from an aeroplane window. When the plane landed she uploaded the image to Twitpic, tweeted it and (as far as she was concerned) that was that. It’s a great image and several news organisations started to use the image to illustrate their coverage of Endeavour’s last outing.

This has lead to a secondary issue, Gordon owns the copyright in the image and many of the organisations using didn’t license it they just downloaded it and published anyway. Gordon could have made a decent pile of coin for the image and there’s some tub-thumping going on about how it’s disgusting that she didn’t.

The key point is evidently Gordon doesn’t care about the money. She took the image, shared it and then went on with living her life. If she were a professional photographer no doubt she would have contacted an agency immediately and started trying to wring as much commercial advantage as possible from this, but she’s not and it seems she doesn’t want to be.

This is where folks like Bob Sullivan of MSNBC get a bit uncomfortable. Not everyone wants to be a professional photographer. Not everyone wants to go through the hassle of licensing everything they snap. That said it would not be hard to contact Gordon and offer her payment should they wish to.

Not everything that is created is about money and nor should it have to be.