@Bettina, unbelievable response from the Guardian. “For what it’s worth”…it’s worth the square root of fuck all.

There is a petition on the Number 10 website calling on the prime minister “to ban companies from grabbing the intellectual property rights to photographs in carefully worded competition terms and conditions”

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/PhotoCompetition/

At one time newspapers stood up for the freedom to report and manipulation such as Climate Camp would have been resisted and condemned. Now, “give us your propaganda” (and a rights grab) is the response.

The cure is more fatal than the disease. Why would anyone buy a newspaper that merely recycles a subset of what’s freely available on the web?

Climate Camp needs to be condemned for its hostility to open reporting. The virtue of the cause is no excuse. Fear of Daily Mail hackery is no excuse. Again, their cure is as bad as the disease.

Paul, how can we adapt to a la-la land society, where what is profitable (or at least free) takes precedence over honesty? Photojournalism is dead, not because of TV, nor public boredom, but because it’s inconvenient to all concerned. Photographers must either join the circle of fools giving the market what it wants or peddling propaganda. Either way it’s the same thing, a toxic media environment about which nobody cares except a few professionals.

“@wnjr – as you’ve rightly surmised, we don’t pay for these photos.

However, for what it’s worth, previous contributors to our Flickr groups have been very happy to see their photos in the centrespread of the paper and on galleries on guardian.co.uk, without being paid.”

Do the Climate Camp organisers know about this and do they condone such action?

However, you can understand their motivation and I’m sure the coverage they get will be compelling. We’ll just have to adjust to this sort of thing, me thinks. It’s a juggernaut.

Image gathering, be it still or motion, is so accessible to the the masses that there’s little we can do about it but adapt. That’s the way of it.