EPUK, the mailing list and website for professional editorial photographers, has launched Copyright Action, a website community and educational resource that aims to become the intellectual property equivalent of Crimestoppers.

Targeted at all photographers, both amateur and professional, Copyright Action intends to curtail the exploitation of photographers by unscrupulous publishers and rights-grabbers. We intend to ‘name and shame’ those whose business practices disregard fairness – including many of the UK’s largest media companies. The site welcomes the participation of all who care about photography and believe that photographs are more than just numbers on a corporate balance sheet.

Copyright is supposed to be a mechanism of fair reward, yet it is being perverted into anything but. The public despises and disregards what it perceives as primarily an instrument of extortion and monopoly in the hands of big business. Stuck in the middle are individual creators, to whom neither side listens. Photography itself is being emasculated by these opposing forces, reduced to a commodity rather than valued as a cultural asset.