Shafting A Flickr Thief
The entire premise of providing your work under a Creative Commons license of one type or another is to make it easier for other people to make use of your work, above and beyond the bounds of traditional fair use rights, without first having to clear it with you.
It’s for that reason why I think it infuriates me more when people steal work licensed via Creative Commons than it does when people steal work not so licensed. To wit: If we who create things go out of our way to make it easy for other people to make use of those things, there’s simply no excuse for just being a thief.
In my particular case, the license is simple: You can’t use my work for commercial purposes, you can’t modify my work, and you must attribute my work to me.
At issue are four photographs from the Twilight film shoot down the street from my apartment this past Saturday, which have shown up in another Flickr user’s account. It’s clearly not for commercial purposes, and they’ve made no modifications to any of the photographs. All they had to do to re-use these four photographs was properly attribute them to me.
They did not do so.
As a result, the photos now have shown up on a fansite credited to the thief, and shown up on LiveJournal credited to the fansite which credited them to the thief.
It’s problematic at best when copyright theft occurs in and of itself. But it’s galling to me that I can go out of my way to make it easy for people to re-use my photographs, in essence requiring only proper and due credit as the photographer, only to have people still not give a shit about demonstrating a little common decency.
In addition to posting a comment to each of the infringing photos, the Flickr user in question has been reported to Flickr’s copyright team.
At least they received some sort of notice from me, in the form of my comments to their stolen photographs. That’s more of a courtesy than they provided to me in the first place.