Old Thanet pictures and a few pictures of today in Ramsgate

Do you recognise this bit of Ramsgate?

What do you think of the holes in the harbour gates?

I wonder what they do, let the water out? or even in, of course it could be they have manage to stop the leaks so well that if the tide doesn't reach the level of the water in the inner basin, they wouldn't be able to open the gates at all.  

Not conventional lock paddles but large pipe valves, in fact very big taps

Everything today isn’t quite what it seems as I have been trying to see what happens if I publish the blog as a conventional website, just in case I have to.

Here is the link

I think there is the likelihood of some fairly major changes to blogs and social media platforms like Facebook over the coming year. This is to do with copyright law and the internet. Which sounds above my pay scale but I think is probably already changing the way you get to see the old and new photos on Facebook.

The underlying problem is about how people get paid for putting their own work, music, photos, artwork, videos and writing on the internet. I suppose that most people assume that people should get paid for what they do in this area.

My own take over the years has been that bookshops and local history publishing, which is what I do, don’t make what anyone would call a profit. I would say to anyone considering opening a bookshop or publishing local history about a very small area like The Isle of Thanet. “If you already have some money and would enjoy doing it, then it makes part of a living so slowly your reserves of money will decrease over time, but there is a lot to be said for doing what you enjoy.” I would also say. “In the books, arts and literature there is a lot of grant funding and for the most part this is best avoided unless you are mainly geared up to that being you prime source of income.”

With the blog and linking to various Facebook groups, I assume that the content, mostly local pictures, art exhibitions, paintings, local issues and books with a bit of local politics thrown in, is what the people going there want to see, the groups that see this as advertising soon ask me not to post and I don’t.

Anyway with the blog, which at least reminds people the bookshop, art galleries etc. are still there, there is a sense in which I feel that I partially get paid for writing it, feel I can justify what I am doing to the other seven people who work in the bookshop.

So having writ, photographed whatever, the copyright takes hold and having taken hold, it remains until seventy years after I die.

Now in theory at the moment if you copy what I have written here or the photos I have taken today and publish it to your blog, Facebook page, Twitter account etc then I could prosecute you. In practice my solicitor charges £195 per hour plus VAT and if I paid him to ask you to delete something and you did so I wouldn’t really have a case.

In practice I publish a certain amount of stuff on the internet where I am not certain of the copyright situation. Mostly this is old local photos, either because I don’t know how old they are or because I don’t know who took them.  I don’t think there has ever been an issue over this, event to the extent that anyone has asked me to remove a photo.

I suspect that a lot of this relates to the possibility of vast sums of money being involved is pretty much non existent.

Now however it looks like the law is going to change so that it will be the social media sites like Youtube, Google, Facebook and Twitter who will be responsible and they do have vast amounts of money. At the moment they seem to be saying that they won’t take the risk of prosecution so that for the most part they won’t be prepared to let you put a lot of stuff on their sites.

I think that most countries will bring in some sort of legislation to change copyright laws, many of which date back a very long time, to reflect the new situation of having the internet and most ordinary people publishing material to it.

The EU legislation, Article 13 is well on the way through the legislative hoops.

At the moment the effect of what hasn’t happened yet is that the way automatic publishing to secondary sites works seem to have gone wrong and the linking to Facebook in particular has become very unpredictable.

For a long time, probably since Facebook started, when I pasted the web address of the day’s bog post onto the post form of a Facebook group, then the top image, the post title and the beginning of the post appeared and stayed where I had put it.

Also if I commented on a post with a link to relevant material and or pictures, then at least one of the pictures appeared.

Now things are very unpredictable and I think the main social media site are trying various strategies not to find themselves involved in expensive litigation.   

For me I can of course publish to one of my own websites and I think I may have to, the main issue there is that writing conventional web pages takes much longer than using blogger 

Here is the link to the books we put out today