Copyright Lobby Takes Subtle Approach

Advocacy on Capitol Hill is rarely subtle, let alone highbrow. But an event held June 23 by the Copyright Alliance, which lobbies in favor of legislation including the PROTECT IP Act, which focuses on intellectual property rights, was better suited to a museum or art gallery than the halls of Congress.

The brainchild of CA’s new executive director, Sandra Aistars, the event, Recording Our History: Faces Behind the Camera, featured three renowned photographers: Matt Heron, known best for his civil rights photographs (he calls himself “a social activist with a camera”); Denis Reggie, the Kennedy family photographer (his pictures include the iconic shot of John F. Kennedy Jr. kissing Carolyn Bessette’s hand after they were married in Cumberland Island, Ga.); and John Harrington, past president of the White House News Photographers Association, who has photographed presidents and other iconic U.S. subjects.

Interestingly, the panelists -- speaking to a room filled mostly with staffers and not politicians -- rarely discussed the copyright issue head-on. Instead, they showed their work and discussed their personal stories, a tack that turned out to be an elegantly subtle defense of their belief that copyright protects artists of all stripes in a digital world.