Turn the page to something as mundane as wedding photography. The old model was you hire a professional photographer to take snaps at your wedding, but you didn't "own" the negatives as you might in any sort of normal work-for-hire. Instead, he promised you one set/package of prints for the deal and if you wanted extras for Aunt Sophie and the gang, well, you'd have to pay him some extra absurd markup for him to print them. And the prints you got have the piffy phrase "Do not Duplicate" on the back of them.

What actually happens in households around the globe is those photos are coming out of the photo album, scanned on the trusty copier/fax/scanner/color photo printer, then cranked out as necessary and desired. I had a conversation with a couple two years ago who told me they had never gone to Wal-Mart before, but when they needed to duplicate some wedding pictures, they just drove down to the Big Box, fed their "copyrighted" work straight into the Kodak photo kiosk and zapped off a dozen copies without anyone checking anything.

They'd never go back to buy clothes, but if they ever needed to make copies of photos again, Wal-Mart was going to be the first stop. Other chains are more strict, stopping the reproduction of what they think are professional prints before they are printed out of the local kiosk, but they can't catch everything and it is unrealistic to think they could try.

If both photographers and buyers of their services would just convert the current business model to a simple "work-for-hire" contract, with all deliverables - such as the negatives in digital form - turned over to the buyer for one simple fee with maybe an extra $20-30 bucks tacked on for an "archiving" charge. Because if the prints are that precious, you likely want to have a secure backup somewhere. Then people could simply go get their prints done where and when they want them.

Instead, professional photographers seem to want to be control freaks living under the illusion that they can make an extra couple of bucks by squeezing families for picture printing but that anyone with a $299 scanner/printer is getting around

. Another amusing rant can be found in the motion picture industry, represented by the MPAA. The trade association has been running commercials letting people know how bad they are being in duplicating movies. Fair enough, but what the MPAA doesn't really address is that the vast majority of cases of bootleg theft and duplication pipeline straight out of the ranks of movie reviewers and theatre operators and their employees. Shutting down the duplication pipeline may end up meaning shutting down Oscar lobbying and much stricter and expensive measures to make sure that the minimum wage flunky running the movie camera isn't cutting a deal to resell prints for duplication on the side or just dragging in his video camera for a quick and dirty dupe. µ