1: I was speaking from hearsay and ignorance without having done my research. I apologize.
2. My quick Google says that the law is unclear enough that a prudent professional photographer always gets a release. This is in no way the same as its being legally required. http://asmp.org/tutorials/property-and-model-releases.html

So, the situation wasn’t as I remembered it; the analogy is bad; it is still wise to get model’s releases if you’re planning on circulating the photograph.

posting those pictures on the Web (or publishing them in any way) requires a photographer’s release. (Not everybody remembers this.)

This is highly jurisdiction dependent. In NSW (Australia) the photographer’s rights summaries imply that you do not in fact need a release for publication unless you are using the photograph to endorse a product (ie, you do need a release to use the photograph in an advertisement, not otherwise).

Courtesy and ethics are of course a different thing.

I’m more likely to watch conference video if the production standards are high. For instance, I love watching TED videos because they are both interesting and well produced. The videos of talks at Google are also good that way. And yes, two cameras, one of them on the slides, and editing them together, is a big part of that.

Some people reported spending more time chatting in the hallway instead of cutting it short to leave for a talk because they knew the material would all be available. This implies that the schedule should say which talks are being recorded and which aren’t; otherwise, attendees might skip a talk intending to catch the video and discover too late that there isn’t any.

(I have my doubts about how much conference video gets used, anyway. I’m willing to be wrong, so if you’ve got stats, lay ‘em on me, but that’s my belief. Slides, yeah, lots, and sometimes well after the event. Video, not so much.)

We lose if we drive female speakers off the podium because they don’t want their likenesses splashed all over the intarwebs for creeps to comment on.

But as I said, I don’t think we’re necessarily in an awfully different place on this, just that I’m quite focused on #2 for various reasons at the moment and the focus is coming out in my writing.

#2 …well… Nothing is going to change if we avoid things. We have to be brave and take stands. When, where, and how to do that are individual decisions. Is it worth not having a talk filmed and shared on the Internet, where it can potentially benefit great numbers of viewers as well as the speaker, for fear of attracting some unwanted attention? I can’t answer that for someone else– for me the answer is “No.” I want to be visible to encourage other women. In fact I am several demographics in one– female, mid-life career changer, self-taught, gay, and old. (52) So dammit, if I’m going to stick my neck out I better have some company :)

Keeping bad things hidden works against us– fear and secrets have been used against women from the beginning of time. I would never try to make anyone do something she doesn’t want to do. But I think we need more voices encouraging bravery and visibility, and more cahootsing to figure out how to deal with the cruddy stuff.

I really don’t want to play into #2 in particular in talking about this.

Having said that, it’s clear that attending and speaking at geek conferences is fun and professionally advantageous and feminists can support women better in doing it. (I am not so sure actually that being recorded is all that important for non-keynote talks, and appearing on someone’s Flickr stream as “LOL this girl was at a Linux conference!! she’s kinda cute but I was too shy to hit on her” is probably without upsides at all.)

That conversation we should keep having, but it wasn’t emphasised in this post. I was largely taking it for granted: I’ve been part of a few conversations over the past year that were along the lines of “speakers who refuse to allow their talks to be recorded are selfish uptight corporate jerks, there’s no good reason for it.” As usual, if you ask some women about what happens when they appear in public, it turns out there’s a different story. A lot of conference organisers didn’t know that women were being harassed based on video footage. Now they do (well, when someone sends them the link they do).