A space to post my thoughts and musings about anything. This includes but is not limited to community, politics, current events, relationships, LGBTQ+ issues, favorite things, and stuff that would make your dead relatives blush. I am not afraid to go there, as some can attest.

January 15, 2009

Copyright Issues?

One of my hobbies is to take pictures, especially of the things going on in my life.  To satisfy some of my blatant attention whoring, I have a Flickr account where I post my pictures for folks to look at.  The pictures I put up there are copyrighted by me since I am the original photographer, and on occasion I do get asked for permission by someone if they can use a photo I've taken for their website or whatever.  I have no problem with doing so, as long as I get credit for being the one who took it.

Therefore, I was very disappointed to learn from another Flickr user that my sports pictures were being lifted and put on a website as part of their own galleries without my permission, and without credit to me.  I am not the only one this is happening to as other users are finding their pictures on this series of sites as well.

If you are a Flickr user and you have sports picture that are publicly accessible on your photostream, you might want to take a look at the following and see if any of your photos are on the sites:
NFL
MLB
NHL

At the bottom of the sites (once you can get past the barrage of ads) are links to individual teams so you can check your teams out.  They seem to be swiping the photos and using the same titles you used on Flickr, so just use your titles in searches and they should come up.  If you find any, you could try E-mailing the webmaster to complain.  I would also complain to GoDaddy by E-mailing copyright@godaddy.com since won't be happy to hear that some of the sites they are hosting have blatant copyright violations on them.  I have already filed my complaint and hopefully GoDaddy will either kick their asses so the photos are gone, or just take down the sites. I kind of hope for the latter because clearly they're just a way for someone to try and make money off of ads, plus then it means I don't have to spend another few hours trying to search for all of my Caps and Orioles photos.

So I'll say it again, if you want to use my photos for something, you've gotta talk to me first.

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