My Hidden Room

I discovered today that a work of mine has been infringed upon.   Let me back up, and tell a story.  Long ago, months, maybe sometime last year, nowpublic.com (one of their interns, anyway) approached me about using a photograph in my flickr stream in one of their projects.   I told them no, and that they should never look to my photostream as a source of images.  I’m not interested in licensing them my photographs for merely attribution.  That’s why my flickr stream is set at “All rights reserved.“  Not some rights, all of them.

I understand that it can be a hard thing as a new media company to figure out what images online can be used, and the ones that can’t.  But I expect, and I demand that everyone who is going to do this operate as professionals. And being a professional means doing the work to figure out the source and the license terms of the images you want.

It’s very easy in the new web 2.0 world to hire an intern, and tell them, “Hey, go browse flickr for images that look like X, Y, and Z.”  Super easy, and you’d think, super effective at getting great content.  Given how many images that flickr has in their databases, you’d be right.

The image at right of the garlic is the one that NowPublic copied to their servers. I am an artist; my time and particular point of view are what make the things that I create have value.   I even have it available for licensing, but unless you speak to me *FIRST*, you’re stealing my work, and my effort, and my intellectual property.

Here’s what they did:  The copied my image, and put it on their server, in the hopes that I’ll either be overjoyed to have someone accept me, or at least that I’ll accept their use.   But that’s not the case.  My art is meaningful to me, and it’s not free for anyone to take and use.

Being new media means doing new things, creative things. But it also means respecting content creators and their rights.  NowPublic doesn’t appear to do this.  I’m really disappointed in them, and I know that I’m not going to think of them positively when asked about them.  How hard is it to ask first?

-Gabriel

Photography, Rants and Raves

I’ve made a few changes to the blog: I’ve switched themes to something that I think fits better with what I want htis to be, and I’ve updated my photography website to have a better portfolio set of images.  Go take a look.

Ramblings