Facebook Hosts 4% Of All Photos Ever Taken In History

from the the-tools-of-creation dept

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For all the talk of how content creation is going down the drain due to lax copyright enforcement, it seems that everywhere we look, we just keep seeing more and more and more content creation. The latest is a report that Facebook currently hosts 4% of all photos ever taken . Specifically, it hosts 140 billion photos out of 3.5 trillion photos taken in history. Now, obviously, technology change is at work here. Photography really only showed up for real about a century and a half ago, and didn't really hit the mainstream until less than a century ago. And, of course, for most of that time it involved (sometimes expensive) film and the expensive step of processing it. Photography has exploded over the last decade or so with the rise of digital cameras, and, of course, high quality digital cameras built into mobile phones.But, really, that raises a bigger point: the tools of creation for all sorts of things have been changing rapidly and making it easier and cheaper to create content, whether it's a photograph, a song, a movie, a book or.. well... just about anything. We're being inundated with new creative works... at the same time we're being told that content creation is dying. Now, to be fair, much of the content production we're talking about is amateur production, but some of that is of fantastic quality, and is leading people into professional content creation roles. But, I guess this raises a separate question. What is the real purpose of copyright? Is it only to incentivize, or to incentivize content creation overall? Given the stated purpose is to "promote the progress," and to provide the public with more content, I would argue the goal is to promote more overall content, and it seems that technology is doing a much better job of that than copyright.

Filed Under: creation, photos

Companies: facebook