I am sitting in my hotel room in Seattle researching all the sites that used my photographs from yesterday’s Microsoft announcement in violation of my Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial license. I broke a story with high-resolution photographs and commercial websites decided not only to use my content without attribution but in one case a site was selling prints of my photographs.
Breaking news is very competitive and everyone wants the scoop in their search for full and in-depth coverage. Unlike a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge or something artsy I feel like these sites already have benefitted from my work and I don’t really think anyone is buying a 4×6 print of Dean Hachamovitch. I have heard a few suggestions that I should watermark my photographs to prevent this from happening but I think that just results in ugly images and I want to share content I hope is enjoyed by others.
I know this same problem happens every day to content producers across the web and I just wanted to share my personal frustration of having it happen to me to the benefit of large content producers.
That sucks but why are you using Flickr to store your news-related photos? It wasn’t designed for this purpose. You should move to a specialty service like NowPublic if you want to protect your material.
That sucks, man. Hope you get it resolved – keep us updated!
BTW, I was sitting in the row in front of you at Gnomedex. I never got a chance to introduce myself, but I’m a fan of the blog!
Hi Niall, how would I search for which sites used your work in defiance of your offered deal…?
jd
I found out about the sites after Gnomedex attendees and Microsoft employees told me how popular my photographs had become and I went looking for the sites they mentioned.
I did not mention any of the sites in my post because I wanted to first contact the authors and let them know I was unhappy with their use of my work. The worst offender, bink.nu, has still not replied to my e-mail yet received hundreds of thousands of visitors as a result of its use of my photos.