Photo.net

[David F. Stein]

From the photo.net site: "Ownership of Submitted Material. All material You submit to any of our chat rooms, forums, and other public posting areas becomes the property of photo.net and may be reproduced, modified, and distributed as we see fit in any medium and for any purpose. photo.net claims no ownership rights in any image contained in any of your Photo albums. With regard to material you include in a public album, you grant a non-exclusive, world-wide, royalty free license to modify, publish and reproduce said material solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting photo.n

[pat krentz]

For me the answer is simple; DON'T GO THERE! Pat

[Terry_2293]

Of course, photo.net DOES have a preview feature that keeps your posts from getting cut off, and that would be ni

[Darron Spohn]

What is your point, David? And what does it have to do with large format photography?

[Terry_2293]

Darron,

The point is that all of the posts from members of this LF community (including everything you've written here in the past) could/would become photo.net's property, for the owners of photo.net to do with as they please (including publishing it elsewhere) if/when this forum is moved to photo.net (as is being considered).

A lot of participants in this forum aren't particularly enthusiastic about the potential ramifications relating to this prospect.

.......

[Ellis Vener]

...it also prevents other people from copying what you post in the forums to other forums. Yahoo! and other portals have similar copyright ownership notices and are far more likely to use your work for their ends. If you pick up any magazine you'll see that regardless of the contributors copyright claims the entire magazine & it's contents are copyrighted as well. Any image i post on these forums has a copyright notice attached to or embedded in it. The pupose of the notification is to put the bad guys on notice. Removing the copyright notice serves as legal proof of malicious intent.

[Darron Spohn]

OK, I'll agree with you there.

For the record, I'm one of the moderators at photo.net. I'm not as active here on the large format forum as I used to be because I sold my large format camera, but because I've been swamped trying how to make a living at motorsports photography without working endless 100 hour weeks.

I, too, oppose moving this forum to photo.net, primarily because it would raise the noise level on this forum and lead the daily questions that are well covered in the archives. One prime example was one we had on photo.net last week. Someone thinking of getting into large format wanted to know what hazards he should be aware of before making the plunge. I pointed him to Tuan's main large format page where there is an excellent article on the pratfalls of learning large format, and other excellent articles on using large format cameras.

[Terry_2293]

Darron wrote,

"I, too, oppose moving this forum to photo.net, primarily because it . . . would lead to the daily questions that are well covered in the archives. One prime example was one we had on photo.net last week. Someone thinking of getting into large format wanted to know what hazards he should be aware of before making the plunge."

But perhaps if this page were part of photo.net he would more quickly have found through a search what he was looking for?

I've often thought photo.net could make its opening page more welcoming for first-time visitors but no harder to navigate for regulars. In other words, make the forums a slight bit less prominent (so first-timers don't just jump in and ask oft-addressed questions) and the static content more prominent, especially distinctions between 35mm, digital, MF, LF, and perhaps videography (which I think will increasingly intersect with digital still photography).

"If you're interested in _____, click here" kind of thing. Maybe it's already there on photo.net; newbies certainly ignore the warnings on the "Ask a new question" page telling them to do a Search first, so perhaps it can't get any more idiot-proof than it already is.

But I think there are ways to integrate this LF page into photo.net without being inundated with inane questions. As others have noted before, photo.net's Medium-format digest is a fine example of this: that forum doesn't get nearly as many posts per week as the general photo.net forums do, and there are very few idiot questions in the MFD forum. I don't see why the LF forum couldn't function similarly there. Or am I missing something?

[Ed Buffaloe]

I thought dot-net domains were non-profit by definition. So long as they only use the forum material for "displaying, distributing and promoting photo.net" in a non-profit manner, I don't have a problem with it. If they were going to make money off my writings, I'd like to get a cut too, but somehow I don't think it very likely. You can find anything on any of the forums, free, by searching Google, so who would pay for it?

As moderator of the Film & Processing and Printing & Finishing forums, I see Photo.net as the lesser of many evils. It seems a bit slower than Greenspun.com, but I do like the preview feature. And I like the idea of having all the best photography forums in one convenient location.

[tim atherton]

I think it was originally .org was for non-profit, though it has largely now become ignored - anyone can registewr as .org, although there is talk of re-enforcing this.

basically, all sorts of commercial enterprises are registered as .com .net .org etc