Arrington's post about photography and copyright is excellent.
Of of all the media wars: Video; Music and Images - photography is the most important. The reason - everyone is now a photographer with unlimited film and photographs can't be quoted as a snippet.
1. Zero cost trial and error creates professional looking results. The photography marketplace is decreasing.
The zero cost ubiquity of digital images mean that the sum total quality of amateur output is often better than the sum total of professionals. Search on Flickr for something that you would normally buy from a stock library.
The professional photography market is moving from a craft dominated industry of recording events to an artistic one with room for a minority of top creatives, in the same way that it did for painting in the 19th Century.
The same number of photographers are fighting for less dollars.
2. The Internet creates cheaper publishing costs, more media is produced. The perceived photography marketplace is increasing.
The biggest recent change to online publishing is the ubiquitous inclusion of images and clips in things like blogs posts. Gizmodo launched without images, today every post has an image or video.
Video is sometimes ignored by the copyright owner if it is a clip, but a photograph cannot be clipped. Since there is no real mechanism of cheap pay per view photographic distribution even people who want to pay cannot afford the rates or the time it takes to purchase distribution rights. The whole industry is geared around print production and professional publishers. Gizmodo can afford a Getty subscription but most Tumblr bloggers can't.
Overall usage of images in media is increasing, because of the internet and zero media distribution costs, meaning that photographers perception is that there should be more dollars.
3. You cannot quote a photograph. There is no Internet compromise with teaser clips, as there is for music and video.
The final problem is that other media have settled on a compromise which benefits professionals in a digital age - distribute a teaser. But there is a problem, you can listen to a clip of a song and a video and you can quote a piece of text.
A shrinking marketplace is perceived to be increasing. The current law is on the side of the photographer but the de facto practice isn't and there is no available solution for those who want compromise.
This is why there will be war.
Fair Use Vs. Free Speech in the Internet Age: The Lane Hartwell Problem
Amazon SimpleDB has just been released as a Beta, its like S3 but for databases, allowing structured queries.
What this means is that you don't need to worry about database clustering or possibly backup (although I have never gotten a decent answer to the question of whether you still need to backup S3 data).
This potentially provides a beautiful solution for startups - EC2 as application servers, SimpleDB for structured data and S3 for binaries.
It is not clear whether SimpleDB can be used, somehow for efficient full text search.
If only S3 had a front end like Squid to enable automatic cache on demand for binaries, and there were a better front end to instantiate, configure and manage EC2 instances, then Amazon would be the default choice for most startups.
There seems to be a worrying trend of people who actually believe that the Internet is benign. That it contains primarily useful information and will make stars out of people who make wooden educational toys or sincere bands from Portland.
Those of us that have been working in the Internet since before the Web, know a different story.
Here is a Newly discovered map of the Internet with accurate statistics. And here are the names of the authors to help you find it in future: "Amazing Britney S. Crotch and top 10 definitive Brad CSS Tableless 911":
Internet traffic and content by percentage:
The World Wide Web:
Porn: 22%
Paris Hilton, Brad Pitt, Lindsay Lohan, Ron Jeremy, Eric Estrada: 21%
Finding Porn or Paris Hilton: 14%
Trying to Find other stuff: 8%
Information about how to build web sites without tables and with rounded boxes: 7%
False Apple rumors: 6%
Self Referential Internet and technology news: 8%
Clips of Lindsay Lohan, a cat that can flush a toilet and a guy that lights his own farts dressed as Han Solo, while miming to the Numa song : 5%
50,000 million copies of images of the same 5000 people and places: 4%
Comment spam and fake weblogs: 2%
911 conspiracy theories: 1%
Information about how the Internet benefits mankind and how you can get rich wallowing in the vast profits of the long tail: 1%
Useful or intelligent information: 0.7%
The long tail: 0.3%
Email:
****
Spam email: 95% (true)
Lists you signed up for by mistake and never read: 3.5%
Stuff you read when you really should be working: 1.4%
Useful email: < 0.1%
Archie, WAIS, FTP, Gopher, Group V fax over IP, plastic cups and string: Huh?
Woodstock is a curious place. It is famous for a concert which it never held and as the spiritual epicenter of free thinking in the 60's. Yet despite the occasional sign saying 'hippies welcome', on a snowy December evening before Christmas it looks more like a Republican fantasy of small town America. The setting for 'A wonderful Life', perhaps.
The hippies are old now, and they line up to protest the Iraq war as the bus to New York passes through.
In the background, an apathetic youth with hoodie and baseball cap perches on a mountain bike: gormless, slack-jawed and vacant.
If young people are less radical than their grandparents, society is abnormal compared to historical trends. More importantly, the historical precedent is that this kind of society is more likely to stumble into large scale conflict.