The origins of Labor Day, which takes place the first Monday of September in North America, are somewhat uncertain. The holiday originated in Canada, born out of the worker’s rights movement there in the 1870s. By the 1880s, it had spread across the border, and the first organized Labor Day celebration in the U.S. was held in New York City in 1882.
Throughout the 1880s the honoring of Labor Day gradually made its way throughout the U.S., until it became a federal holiday during the administration of President Grover Cleveland in 1894. Rather than being a day of rest for the worker, however, Labor Day was initially a day of activism. Early celebrations relied on parades and festivals centered around union organizations and their workers. Homage was paid to the rights of these workers and their incredible importance in the growing industrial economy of the country.
What is certain is that since then, the world of work has changed dramatically. The American worker is migrating from the factory to service and knowledge work. Union membership is falling. More and more of us work for small businesses, or even ourselves, instead of large corporations. Read the rest of this entry »
Stealing on the internet is easy. It takes very little effort for someone to copy your work and slap their name on it. Almost every month I hear of a photographer, blogger, or designer I know whose work gets used without their permission. With all this copyright infringement going around, I’d be surprised if a majority of WWD readers claim that this has never happened to them.
When it does happen, what should you do?
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I recently had an email exchange with a photographer. He was unhappy that I used an image from his web site on one of my blogs without a proper credit or link back to his site. I took a look at the blog page in question – from 2005 – and noted that indeed, I did not credit him or link back to his site. So I removed the image immediately and replaced it with a Wikipedia Creative Commons image.
The photographer was not satisfied. He asked that I pay him retroactively for using his image. I argued with him that the blog was not a commercial one, it didn’t get very much traffic at all, and even though I did not link back to his image, it was embedded using the actual image HTML code from his site so all anyone had to do was view the image to see the source. He persisted. After further research, I learned that I was in the wrong.
To find out more about photo rights on the Web, I turned to a lawyer, Deena B. Burgess, Esq., Managing Partner with the Law Offices of Deena Burgess, and gave her a few scenarios to comment on. Here is what she had to say.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
