Ethics/Legality of Shorpy
I’m going to start off being completely honest and let you know that I feel like the legal concepts we learned about in the readings for this week went completely over my head. Much to my former-lawyer-father’s dismay, this is something I’ve always struggled to understand. It’s as if legality goes in one ear and out the other. That being said, I’m more interested in the morality of Shorpy than it’s legality.
When I opened the website, the first thing I saw was a very old photograph of a china doll giving a piggy-back ride to a kitten. Adorable, right? You can look at it here. Then I realized that the website has an entire section devoted to cat pictures and proceeded to waste a significant amount of homework time looking at hundred-year-old pictures of cats. And it was awesome. Anyway, my point is that I clearly was able to quickly enjoy this site without thinking about the legality or morality of it.
I think from the standpoint of the cats, these pictures may have questionable morality. I mean, if I was one of those cats, I don’t think I’d be thrilled to be dressed up in silly outfits and have my picture taken. But I guess that’s not so much the point here. I’ll start with this: these photographers are all dead. The pictures were taken almost a hundred years ago, and the photographers had no idea that something called the Internet would exist one day, and that through it anyone who wanted to would be able to view their photos. So does it have questionable morality? Yeah, I guess so, since the people to whom the art originally belonged never gave consent for its distribution (to the best of our knowledge).
But I don’t think that’s the only question worth asking. It’s important to consider the point of photographer. As a photographer, I want my photos to be seen by as many people as possible, because that’s basically the point. Why would I be shooting photographs if I didn’t want people to see them? I recognize that there are certain pictures people take that they don’t necessarily want to share with the world, but these are not those photos. Basically, if I was the photographer, I would be really, really happy that a well-known website wants to share my pictures with everyone, so long as it was acknowledged that it was my work (which, by the way, this website does).
The long and short of it is that while the morality of this website is probably arguable, I think most people would agree with me that it’s essentially legit.
(I’d like to add as a sidenote that Shorpy does have photos that are not of cats, but let’s be real, who on the internet looks at photos that aren’t of cats when they could be looking at cat photos? Not me.)
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