matt buchanan is a thief
While imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, outright theft of copyrighted images just pisses me off. That's a photo taken BY ME at the Lucky Oliver party earlier this year. (See the All Rights Reserved photograph proverbial ball and chain). And it's being used without my permission, and with no attribution, in a post by Matt Buchanan on Gizmodo. It has been downloaded to their asset server and is being served up as if it was taken by Matt or is stock photography owned by Gizmodo. Which it sure as hell is not. I believe that is copyright infringement. Law friends, help me out here...
How do you think I should handle this, dear readers? I could email him at matt@gizmodo.com, I could contact Gizmodo, I suppose I could even contact Gawker Media. But right now I'm a little hot under the collar, so I'd appreciate any sensible, cool-headed advice you can give.
UPDATE: See the tiny orange link at the end of the post that says "Flickr"? That links to the photo in my photostream, and I guess they consider that adequate attibution? I don't. If you use my photos, the page should explicitly give me photo credit. They are definitely going to hear from me.
Labels: copyright infringement, low-down dirty thieves, photography, wtf
posted at 4:37 PM
3 Comments:
I think Gizmodo authors should know better. I think you should contact the editor of Gizmodo and let them know that your digital rights are being violated and that you have a CC attribution request when using your photos.
It's not like you are asking for $$$ for this photo, just attribution.
7:21 AM, September 14, 2007
What part of "© All rights reserved" do they not understand?
Even if you'd posted the photo somewhere WITHOUT any copyright notice, that photo is protected by copyright the moment you created it. Until such time as you release any rights to the image, no one has any right to use that photo in any fashion whatsoever (with some very limited caveats, having to do with fair use.)
Further, even if you'd offered up the photo under a Creative Commons license most of those have an Attribution requirement. Generally speaking, a mere link to someone's website does not constitute attribution. This is a MOOT POINT however since you did NOT offer up that image to the Creative Commons in any way.
Your recourse?
You've done one option -- publicly calling out infringers is an option, especially when said infringer is of the "Should Definitely Know Better" variety.
Other steps include notifying the infringer's website owner (if different than the infringer), the infringer's web host, and Google (to get the page(s) that contain your illegally used work removed from the index--best reserved for folks who are scraping large blocks of content or numerous images, since it's a huge hassle thanks to our gov't, requiring a DMCA request which must be faxed or Snailmailed... basically the owner is punished with extra work while the infringer gets to infringe in the meantime.)
There's some other options, and where you are you could probably find a friendly lawyer to draw you up a nice intimidating "cease and desist" letter.
It's a bigger can o' worms when the infringer isn't even in the USA. Believe me, this crap keeps me up at nights... if you want any more info, email me.
Too bad they didn't hotlink your image. I love doing htaccess rewrites and serving up nastiness (or at least an ad to one of our other commercial websites) to sites that hotlink our work. ;-)
12:19 PM, September 14, 2007
Oops. Seems I'm a little late in reading this post. Shannon has it right though. Send an email asking them to give you credit. The best legal action is the one you do as the interested party without any lawyer. We call that "self-help." It's fun and free! Well, i'm also free, for you, but only you :)
Another good starting point is to read the terms on the Flickr page. When in doubt, read "the writing," which in this case, is the set of terms you agree to when posting pics on flickr.
10:34 PM, September 21, 2007
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