These are not photographs

The screenshots taken above are not photographs.  They are screenshots of proprietary material, each and every one.  If I were to put these forth as an example of artistic effort, I would be laughed out of any art institution open today.  What these are...are souvenirs of different mmo worlds.  Again, the artwork does not belong to me.  Unlike taking photos in public places in RL, these mmo worlds are not public.  They all require some fee to access their content.

Somewhere in the process of mmo creation, Second Life has put forth the idea that people who take screenshots are artists.  I suppose it can be possible.  But for that to be true, they should be the creators of anything contained in the screenshot plus the screenshot itself.  Otherwise taking an mmo screenshot is the equivalent of taking a screenshot of a film.  No matter how much you crop it, edit it and put fancy effects on it via photoshop, the screenshot will never belong to you.

I too once thought that Second Life was different.  But it isn't.  It merely pushes forth it's underlying ethos of creative commons, info wants to be free meme.  Which means it subtly denudes creators of their copyright rights.  Recently, as I wrote before, Second Life has changed their TOS to decree practically all of SL to be a public zone.  Which means everyone has the "right" to go around and take screenshots. It cuts off creators from the right to control whether or not they want screenshots to be taken.  Its also worse since some landscape designers use creations from others and can not give permission for the items they only use not create.

What LL is attempting to do is blur the lines, to use it's customers as proxies to scrape data (much in the way CC zealots like to push forth music downloads), to take value from the creators.  In the process transferring the value from the creator to the screenshot taker.  Why is it so hard to understand the difference between say Renderosity (that sells material with some commercial rights attached), to the totally proprietary material in Second Life?  All the screenshots above are the same.  I don't own them.

Many SL users have had this smoke blown up their asses for so long, that they feel they have rights to sell their screenshots or claim artistic titles.  NO, no, no, no.  These are not photographs.  These are not the same as going into the RL street and taking photos with a theme in mind, with technique or inspiration.  This is more like RPing a photographer.  Which is why this article from New World Notes is so wrong headed.

If you have any talent or interest in photography, go out and take photos.  Those photos will be yours.  Those photos will have room to grow and open up to artistic efforts.  Screenshots are a dead end.  They are merely just a past time.  If computer art is your thing, then learn to create computer images that you own totally.

Just don't be a party to the big data scrape that ethics free Silicon Valley loves to support and make easy money on.