No, not just for that. The founders understood that the society would be a much richer place if artists didn't lose their incentive (the ability to make a living if their work was compelling enough to draw a paying audience) to invest the time and effort (and materials, and hired talent, and a million other variables) in creating thing that it takes a lot of time to create. You're thinking of "photographers" as "service providers," but that's only a small sub-set of that sort of work. That's like saying that the guy walking around tables at a restaurant playing a violin for tips is the same as the first chair in a studio orchestra hard at work on a soundtrack project that it will take her and 100 other people two years to complete - long before the paying end customer (the movie fan) ever spends a dime.

Copyright protection allows people (sometimes by themselves, or sometimes including literally thousands of people) to gamble on the long term efforts required to produce more than an on-the-spot performance or hourly service.

You always needed a contract. What are the fruits of the labor? What degree of post-production is supposed to be included in the delivered results? How many hours before/during/after does "the check" represent? How many photographers are supposed to cover the event? Is there a "required shot" list? What are the cancellation terms? Who pays for transportation? Who is liable for things going wrong, in what way?

You're only addressing the "work for hire" aspect of a complex process, and only as it relates to the ownership of copyrights. Anybody doing such work without a contract to govern the entire relationship is no professional. And it only takes a couple of lines in that must-have contract to also address ownership of the rights or licensing, etc.

Contracts are written precisely to minimize the amount of non-productive energy spent.

Commercial photography (including social events, of which weddings are a sub-set) has been part of how I make a living for about 30 years. I've watched markets and business models come and go. I know a lot more about it than you do.

If by "wedding photographers" you mean "amateurs who don't need to make a living at it," then, maybe.

Are you writing from some alternate universe, or perhaps through a wormhole connected to 1978? Like I said, this is something that you don't know much about.

The fact that you're not even using the right words, here (hint: it's not about the files, it's about transfer of copyrights, or work for hire, or licensing), suggests that you need to study this more.

There are wedding couples who pay $300 for a full day's work with a DVD and full rights, and there are wedding couples who pay $30,000 for what amounts to a small movie production company to spend the entire weekend with them - and what they get is a limited license to a version of the finished body of work. Likewise there are commercial clients who write work for hire contracts (where the photographer never has copyrights), and those that merely want to license an image or two from the entire shoot.

Except that the things it costs hundreds of thousands or many millions of dollars to create wouldn't exist at all without the ability to bring back those costs (and the profit that makes it worth risking all of that money) sometimes many years after huge checks are written for talent and production budgets. Don't like it? Just stick with the artists who are willing to give away their copyrights immediately or after a short period of time. If you're right, and the giving up of copyrights shortly after a work is completed is the morally right thing to do, then there should be all sorts of right-thinking artists happily walking away from their copyrights. Surely enough to keep you entertained without having to buy entertainment from an artist or publisher that distastefully hangs onto their own rights for much longer. Besides, how could you enjoy entertainment made by someone whose judgement and moral character is so abhorrent to you? Presto! Ignore them, and stick with the give-up-the-rights-early crowd. Surely they make enough movies, music, novels and texts to appease you.

No, now you pay for whatever the contract between the two parties says. You know, the think you both talk about and agree to before anyone signs anything or any money changes hands? If you don't like what a photographer charges, or what they're willing to sign over to you (license-wise) as part of that transaction, just go strike a deal with any of the thousands of other photographers looking to compete. Who cares what the default is? Do you sign contracts or spend thousands of dollars on professional services without looking things over?

The one who wants pet entertainment slaves to make them stuff for free. That's who.

Please explain why that would be.

Yeah, like wedding photographers, jewelry artists, poets, screenwriters, game producers, web programmers, novelists, small film makers - nothing but control freaks!

The most freakishly control-minded people I seem to meet are those who want "control" over the people who create stuff because they entertainment on their own terms (meaning, free), rather than on the terms that the person who has created it has offered their work.

The people who create things want to control how they bring their work to market. You want to control the people who create things. Who's the control freak?

The whole point is that it's designed to report whatever people feel like reporting. It's mean as a tool of intimidation, just like the interactive who-owns-guns maps designed to make legal owners feel increasingly threatened by theft, etc.

This whole string of responses relates to ADs. Not public "brandishing." Stick with one topic, or make it clear you're having more than one conversation.

No, it's used as short-hand for the general bundle of sensibilities that give rise to the urge for a Nanny State approach to things. Collectivist thinking, where people born with or raised to have a work ethic are, by definition, slaves to those who aren't, won't, etc. It doesn't matter where you draw the line between Communism and Socialism, because they come from the same ideological place: they call for an elite group of people to spell out how the efforts of some people will be confiscated in order to dole them out to other people. Structurally, permanently. The harder you're willing to work, the more of a slave you are.

Right... because words have actual meanings, and we have entirely different words that mean "handling" or "loading" or "storing" or "testing" or "fumbling" or "cleaning," etc. Lack of precision in the language surrounding the nature and use of firearms is a non-trivial problem (see so-called journalists who interchangeably - and cluelessly - use "machine gun" and "assault rifle" and "semi-automatic" and the like).

brandish [bran-dish]
verb (used with object)
1. to shake or wave, as a weapon; flourish: Brandishing his sword, he rode into battle.

I don't know anybody who would refer to, say, handing someone else a gun (say, while out plinking cans in the woods) as "brandishing."

You typically wouldn't be handling a gun in public pretty much ever. But around strangers? Say, at the range? Loading, cleaning, etc., happens all the time around other people. As a range officer, I can assure you it happens all the time.

Maybe once. But if they keep calling them for no reason, they'll arrest the caller for wasting their time and harassing the legal gun owner. Most cops are very familiar with the habitual paranoids and whiners on their beats.

This is, as they say, so wrong it's not even wrong.

Close enough that the witness also thought that his dad being there in the house, or not, was relevant. She pointed out that though Martin was there, his dad wasn't. Which is important because if we're talking about Martin being half a block away (not "right by"), the dad being in the house or not would have been meaningless.