Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

Yes. I fell off the radar… again.

K gif­ted me my annual dose of mucus-filled ick. She’s gen­er­ous like that.

As a res­ult of her own case of ick, the fort­night annual leave expan­ded into 3 weeks. The down­side of the elong­ated extra com­pany was that the first 2 weeks of my Big Scary Cre­at­ive Writ­ing Course has got­ten off to a bit of a false start. The upside is that between all the cough­ing, splut­ter­ing and snot­ting, we’ve actu­ally man­aged to com­plete around 80% of this year’s Christ­mas shop­ping. Joy.

So, besides buy­ing pressies amidst a flurry of Kleenex, Post-It Notes and an industrial-sized tub of Vicks Vapo-Rub, what the Chuffin’ Nora have you been doing with your­self whilst skiv­ing off from blog­ging for almost a bleed­ing fort­night, I hear you ask?

In truth, try­ing to find the most suit­able way to broach a well-worn sub­ject: Copyright/ownership on the Inter­net. I’ve writ­ten and re-written this post count­less times and for the life of me, it just doesn’t seem to want to come out “right”.

You see, Flickr is very much “bring your own” type of get together, our pho­tos are the bottle of plonk that we take to the Flickr house-party, if you will.

The thing is, once we’ve come in, chucked our coats on the bed and the booze on the kit­chen counter, can we really in a room/house packed with names and faces we might recog­nise but don’t neces­sar­ily really know, be aware as to who’s drink­ing what or if some cheap swine’s neck­ing the Bailey’s you brought along thus, leav­ing you all night nurs­ing a White Light­en­ing and Cherry­ade? Admit­tedly, we all brought along some­thing in the spirit of being “social” with it, but let’s face it, no-one enjoys bring­ing a £15 bottle and then spend­ing the night drink­ing a dodgy alco­pop so cheap it would turn you blind. And right now, I’m start­ing to feel like I’ve been lumbered with some ropey home-brewed hooch whilst some joker has a “double” on me.

There’s been much noise of late about Flickr streams. Per­mis­sions, exploit­a­tion of people’s chil­dren, theft and copy­right infringe­ment. Just in the last week or so, one of my all-time favour­ite blog­gers has had to resort to set­ting her beau­ti­ful pho­to­graphic illus­tra­tions of young fam­ily life to “private”, con­duct a mass screen­ing of her audi­ence and com­pile a “safe list”. All of which, was seem­ingly car­ried out in fear of the Flickr/Orkut-related con­tro­versy involving the illegal theft and exploit­a­tion of pho­tos depict­ing young chil­dren. I don’t wish to com­ment on this par­tic­u­lar con­tro­versy as I’m cur­rently only on the fringes of under­stand­ing the events sur­round­ing it (hav­ing only read from a hand­ful of sources) and I think a topic that gar­gan­tuan in size and import­ance needs a whole other blog to itself in order to do it justice.

One point such con­tro­ver­sies high­light is that by pub­lish­ing our pho­to­graphs online, we open work up to every unscru­pu­lous whim of Mr/Ms. Ran­dom Internet-Stranger.

Flickr, by defin­i­tion, is a photo “shar­ing” util­ity and for the most part, people get con­sumed with the warm and fuzzy com­munity build­ing of it all per­haps for­get­ting that “share” has more than one definition:

share /ʃɛər/ .

–verb (used with object)
to use, par­ti­cip­ate in, enjoy, receive, etc., jointly: The two chem­ists shared the Nobel prize.
–verb (used without object)
to have a share or part; take part (often fol. by in).

–noun
the full or proper por­tion or part allot­ted or belong­ing to or con­trib­uted or owed by an indi­vidual or group.

Source: Dictionary.com

“Share” in its verb form, involves us all doing a bit of a “Show and Tell” and play­ing together nicely in a big group hug. Bless. Let’s con­sider that second defin­i­tion. You know, the one I’ve bol­ded that involves every­one stak­ing a claim on a piece of the action.

It seems that some of the less desir­able Flickr users are opt­ing to blatantly ignore any pres­ence of copy­right state­ments and the terms of vari­ous pub­lish­ing and dis­tri­bu­tion licenses and are instead tak­ing the atti­tude of “Well, if they’re ‘shar­ing’ it for free and if it’s free to look at, it must be free to keep and do as I wish with too”.

Well no, actu­ally. It’s fuck­ing not.

You, you degen­er­ate streak of piss. Yes, I’m talk­ing to YOU that goes by at least 3 dif­fer­ent iden­tit­ies on eBay, you stole lit­er­ally hun­dreds of pho­tos from dozens of dif­fer­ent Flickr­streams, includ­ing my very own. You then claimed them as your own and sold them on eBay time and time and time again (as of today, I’ve coun­ted at least 56 times in total). All the while, not only did you not have the per­mis­sion of the ori­ginal pho­to­graph­ers, but you then had the bare-faced gall to state in each listing:

(Note — any prints pro­duced must be made for per­sonal use only
and are not to be sold on ebay or else­where. All images remain copy­right of [insert alias here].)

No, they don’t retain your copy­right, they retain MINE and every other poor bas­tard that pub­lishes their gig pho­tos online for free, without any form of fin­an­cial gain, that you’ve sub­sequently stolen from. How DARE you take my pho­tos and SELL them for a fee? How dare you mar­ket them as if they are yours only to then sell ME low res­ol­u­tion ver­sions of MY OWN damn photos?

Yes, that’s right folks. I paid for my own pho­tos. Shit, low res, Flickr­stream ver­sions of the very same pho­tos that are still to this day sit­ting on my memory card in my cam­era. You couldn’t make it up.

The par­tic­u­lar pho­to­graphs I’m refer­ring to were taken by K and I on the 7^th August 2007 at a Prince con­cert and can no longer be found on my Flickr account in accord­ance with this request released a week later on the 13^th August 2007 by Prince’s camp:

We r respect­fully ask­ing fans and fans­ites 2 abide by the per4mers and the management’s wishes… please do not use cam­eras of any sort 2 record Prince’s per4mances at the O2. We r respect­fully ask­ing the fans­ites not 2 host any of the pho­to­graphs obtained in this man­ner. Thank u 4 ur support.

© 3121.com

My pho­tos were removed in line with this respect­ful request and my cam­era stayed at home for the rest of the tour, although it appears the pho­tos were ganked dur­ing that week and have been sold for a cur­rent col­lect­ive grand total near­ing £300.

When I first saw the list­ing on eBay, I recog­nised some of the pho­tos from those pos­ted by mem­bers at Prince fans­ites HQ and The Org. Nat­ur­ally (naively?), I took this to imply that the seller/photographer must have been a mem­ber of the sites. This is noth­ing unusual. Just last week, I bought Prince CDs and DVDs from people I’ve since come to real­ise are fel­low ‘Quakers/Orgers and we’ve gone on to have nice little Fam¹ chats about gigs, albums and so on.

Upon receiv­ing the hun­dreds of images that belonged to count­less fans that prob­ably don’t even real­ise their pos­ses­sions are being exploited and clock­ing what was going on, I repor­ted this per­son to PayPal and eBay and kicked off until I got my money back. Within lit­er­ally a couple of minutes of me fil­ing a PayPal dis­pute for fraud­u­lent goods, the spine­less weasel issued a full refund. Sadly, eBay doesn’t seem to give a shit and des­pite my com­plaints, has con­tin­ued to let this per­son rake in hun­dreds of pounds using stolen photos.

And, it’s not just Prince gigs. This per­son is selling pho­tos from count­less other shows by vari­ous other “big name” artists that were no doubt sourced in the same way. This per­son is mak­ing a fuck­ing mint from the com­fort of his com­puter chair and all he had to do was right-click his mouse/use “print screen”.

For all of you that haven’t quite “fallen in” yet, the fact that all my pho­tos were uploaded under a full Copy­right license and my Flickr per­mis­sions were set to dis­al­low down­loads count for noth­ing. Not a saus­age. Same goes for yours too. It appears people can do whatever they like, regard­less of whether you bother to notify any­one of copy­right infringe­ment. Nice.

Admit­tedly, my images were set to “pub­lic” (mean­ing that any passer-by could see them), but there is actu­ally hardly any point in set­ting images on Flickr as “Friends and Fam­ily” or “Private”. Why? Because Flickr’s per­mis­sion and pri­vacy set­tings are an abso­lute joke. Don’t believe me? Let me demonstrate:

Recently, whilst K was on annual leave, we went to Southend On Scum for the day. A chance to remin­isce, eat “proper” fish and chips and try our luck on the fruit machines. It pissed with rain, blew gale force winds and cost a bleed­ing for­tune. Whilst we were there, I thought it would be “funny” to doc­u­ment just how rot­ten it was and took this photo of the beach: see this photo on its Flickr page.

What’s that? You can’t see the Flickr page? That’s because I’ve given the photo Flickr’s highest pri­vacy rat­ing (me only).

But hang on a minute, try using the image’s actual URL instead.

What now? You can see an image of a pissy, dirty beach in the middle of Septem­ber, even though I didn’t change the per­mis­sions and only I should see the photo? Wow. With pri­vacy like that, it’s no won­der all those Mums set their pho­tos to “Friends and Fam­ily” to safe­guard their kids. They’re as safe as houses now. Ori­gami houses, I mean.

Is it just me, or shall we all give up on this self-publishing lark now and just be done with it?

1. The term “fam” is short for “fam­ily” and is the pre­ferred term, when refer­ring to a Prince Fan, as Prince has voiced his dis­like of the word “fan” due to it being derived from the word “fan­atic” [back]