There’s a post here where some of the UK’s best cartoonists and visual creators are discussing issues around the ownership and selling of art. The resulting comments are well worth a read – number four excepted.

To start the thread, I pulled a newspaper trick of posing a deliberately contentious idea – that all stock libraries of imagery are a bad thing for creators of images.

I used to believe this absolutely – and indeed, one of the contributors and I spoke at length at a public meeting against adding content to stock libraries almost ten years ago. I guess I’m getting older because my (and our) ideas are changing now. At the time, I could only see that very cheap access to quality imagery would destroy existing markets for people like me – and I would still argue that over the past decade it has.

However, the marketplace and its demands are remorseless and at some point you have to stop banging your head and start using it. So, read on … and a hearty thanks to my friends, colleagues and contacts for piling in so willingly.

Beau Bo D’or on the issues surrounding photomontage and mashups
Morten Morland on self-syndication
Alex Hallatt on the problems of self-syndication
Royston Robertson on the usefulness of image libraries to the gag cartoonist
And Matt Wardman on a possible solution for every creative – multiple income streams.

Will anyone ever invent a digital micro-payment system that works and gets large scale customer buy in? Perhaps, someone already has … I’d like to know!