Hillbilly Festival and the borrowed photos
So I thought I’d clarify my somewhat ambiguous and cryptic Google+ post about stolen photos, since it all sounds rather sinister (it’s not) and I sound kind of butt-hurt (I’m not). First of all, I don’t think it was an official promotion - it was a MySpace, back when people other than crackheads and LOTE-speakers still used it.
Most of the photos I took on my Flickr (majority of the photos on there recently are by my wife) that aren’t personal are under a creative commons attribution license. If you’re not familiar, the CC-BY license basically means they can use my photos (that aren’t personal family ones) for anything as long as they give me credit.
So far, that I know of (notifying is not required, but appreciated), photos from my Flickr have been used in a memorial cook book (who used a photo my wife took of my sister in law’s cookies and were nice enough to send us a PDF copy for free) and someone used my all-time favorite non-Duncan picture for a school project on rats. That’s all pretty cool, and obviously I don’t ask for much in return - just a by-line.
But the jamboree MySpace used the photos with no such attribution, and if I remember correctly they even used a personal photo of my very young brother in law with an animal on his head - not cool (Update: I was under the impression this picture was not CC, apparently it is - but it’s licensed non-commercial only).
I contacted the user and politely asked that they abide by the license, to no avail. It was at this point I got my so-far only experience being on the content owner side of the DMCA, and after some messing around I filed a DMCA take down request, which once I worded it correctly MySpace complied with very quickly.
After that, the user wrote me back apologizing that they don’t check that account much and blah blah blah (as I recall it they responded awfully quickly once MySpace did the DMCA thing, but hey). I didn’t bother responding, because the pictures are still under creative commons and free to use if they abide by the license, so there’s nothing to talk about.
