Wednesday 1 August 2012

Tales of Hoffman: Part One

Northern Voices promised to give Mr. Hoffman a fair crack, and an opportunity to put his side of the story in his dispute with Freedom Press (see post below), over their use of his photos without his permission.  Below are the ruminations and comments in an e-mail from David Hoffman about the circumstances of his copyright claim with Freedom.  Members of the Freedom Collective may well question some of his allegations here, but Northern Voices will refrain from further comment at this stage:

Sadster that I am - I am on the computer a great deal of the time.  If you wanted facts you could have had them in a 5 minute phone call.  Clearly you don't.  WGAF (Who gives a fig).  You might mention the Freedom have £1m plus asset squirrelled away in a holding company just like any City fat cat.  They don't need an appeal for money, they're just greedy.  But you won't.  You might mention that Freedom used stolen pics for the (rather crap) book ['Beating the Fascists'].  But you won't.

You might mention that I spent 3 months trying to settle this for just a few hundred quid but Freedom wouldn't negotiate.  But you won't.  You might mention that at the meeting where the publication was discussed (before they went ahead) they discussed the copyright position and knew they were ripping off myself and several other photographers.  But you won't.  You might mention that the (Freedom) collective were deeply split on whether to go ahead with this ripoff of our work (voted to publish by 1 vote).  But you won't.

I could go on but you've already decided what you want to write and have limited time.

If a handful of armchair anarchists want to be rude about me then I expect I can take it.  I've had my teeth knocked out by cops, had my life threatened by genuine BNP murderer (and by a dozen others from '70s NF [National Front] to 2012 EDL [English Defence League] ) and I've survived every major riot in the U.K..

Two more things - Jayne ... was one the best of the bunch, honest, open and a thoroughly decent woman.  And Dean Talent (the guy who really pushed for the publication [of 'Beating the Fascists'] told me apologetically that it was all his/ their fault.  They then slung him out of the collective.

To be biblical - (not my usual style) 'The giggles of fools are as the crackling of twigs under the cooking pot'.

Nobody whose opinion I care about will do anything but laugh.

David.

1 comment:

Dean Talent said...

Just to clarify my position. I have met David Hoffman only once and spoke to him very briefly at Freedom bookshop in the company of others members of the Freedom collective.

I did say it was our fault in regards to a) it wasn't the fault of the authors that the photos were used without the photographers permission and b) it was our fault that we did not check properly the copyright status of those photographs.

I was slung out of the collective, that much is true, but this had nothing to do with the book Beating the Fascists, or the use of the photographs and the issues surrounding that particular situation.