October 22, 2008

Raiding the commons  

Today for the first time I ran into one of my photos being used illegally. Jason Kottke linked to this piece about celebrities who have been homeless at one time or another in their lives, and the blog he linked to has one of my photos as its banner. What really makes it obnoxious is that the photo in question is actually listed under a creative commons license that only requires attribution for a non-commercial use. It's not like he had to steal it to use it.

I'm going to fire off a friendly email to him now asking him to either take it down or put the attribution in there somewhere. But it sure does make me wonder what else of mine is floating around the web unattributed.

UPDATE: The owner of Homeless Tales writes back to say it was properly attributed in the past but that the attribution was lost in a recent server move, and I take him at his word. He's added the attribution information to the sidebar on the main page.

Comments
Paul  {October 23, 2008}

It's funny - I saw that photo yesterday via the Kottke link and thought it looked very familiar, but I just couldn't place it.

That's really disappointing.


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