The offending article was published in the January/February issue of the Journalist, the journal of the UK's National Union of Journalists (NUJ). In it, author and prominent freelancer Chris Wheal argues that the union's time and money would be more productively spent organising collective action and fighting for better rates for freelancers, and that journalists should be paid "a decent amount for the work they do now, rather than stringing out extra payments in the future".
Freelance photographers in particular are up in arms over what appears to be an attack on a significant part of their income. The email discussion group Editorial Photographers UK (EPUK) published a swift reply on its website.
Photographer and NUJ member Dan White is quoted as saying: "Photographers and photo libraries largely survive financially by selling a licence to use their copyrighted photographs. We don't live commission by commission. To base an argument on the idea that we do is not only offensive. It is plain ignorant."
Several members of the EPUK and NUJPhoto email lists plan to write letters of protest to Journalist editor Tim Gopsill and raise the matter at the next meetings of their union branches.
Mr Wheal's article was published alongside another by Mike Holderness and Phil Sutcliffe, which presents a counter-argument to his views. It concludes, with unfortunate wording: "Yes, we demand abolition of copyright. This is NUJ policy. What we want instead is authors' rights."
In fact, the NUJ's official position is that the UK approach to copyright needs to be abolished, not copyright law itself. The current system offers only limited protection to freelance journalists, it believes, and the union has a long-running campaign to replace the law with a system of authors' rights.
The Creators' Rights Alliance and International Federation of Journalists have also been pushing for a change in legislation and most European countries have already adopted the authors' rights system.
Copyright is transferable which means freelancers can be put under pressure to hand rights to publishers, whereas authors' rights are inalienable. This also means that staff writers retain the rights to their own work rather than their employer.
John Toner, the NUJ's freelance organiser, does not agree that freelancers would benefit from a one-off payment. Citing the example of the picture of footballer Vinny Jones intimately grasping is opponent Paul Gascoigne, Mr Toner said that journalists need to be paid for every use of a piece of work.
"It's impossible to put the right value on an image because you can never know how valuable a photo will become," he told journalism.co.uk.
"These individuals are just trying to get a fair deal. The real greedy capitalists are the ones trying to bully freelancers out of fair rates for their work."
Mr Wheal told journalism.co.uk that a small number of NUJ members depend on re-saleable work and said the NUJ would do better to spend money on campaigning for better rates for freelancers, rather than trying to recoup money from copyright abuses.
He said that most freelancers do not police the re-use of their own work and because most content is topical it has limited resale potential.
"If a plumber works in a house he charges a flat rate," he said.
"He doesn't continue to get paid every time the hot water is turned on. And he doesn't get paid more if Elton John happens to move in a few months later."
Mr Wheal said that his objective was to generate a debate about the problems of the copyright system.
The recommendation that authors' rights offer greater protection than copyright will be included in the NUJ's submission to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport's select committee on the impact of technology on the creative industries.
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