Ok, you have your spy decoder ring ready? Good, here's the scoop:
There have been several blogs recently about people 'borrowing' content from others. Generally these blogs are concise, articulate, and are predicated upon an ethical stance. They stress the importance of an individuals right to produce content, be credited for the same, and above all - be free from the fear that someone will steal their work and post it as their own.
In other words; don't take stuff that's not yours.
Straight forward, yeah? I mean, along with learning that paste isn't all that good to eat, we picked this concept up in grade school right? Sure we did.
Except there's one tiny problem:
This rule gets violated all the time. By a whole pile of folks. Constantly. Really. Even you maybe.
Allow me to explain:
"The Story of Mr. X" 
I ran across a post this morning (no, I'm not going to link to it, or even hint about it)... We will call the poster Mr. X to protect their privacy and show a little decency to boot.
Mr. X wrote a chest pounding, old school testament style blog about how bad it is to use other people's content. There was fire and brimstone, miracles, blind people could see again etc.
Further more, Mr. X sermonized his readers about how people who steal content really don't deserve much in the way of mercy. His basic argument was that using other people's content wasn't a lapse in understanding so much as it was a lapse in ethics (I agree).
The problem lies herein, Mr X. isn't quite as squeaky clean as he might think. You see the image he had posted in his blog was not created by him.
That's right folks. Images are copyrighted. All of them. Period. If you aren't the creator of an image...
...you need permission to use it. Or you need to pay for it. Or you need to use an image that has been released into the public domain. It's common sense, right?
Well, I decided to take Mr. X's advice to heart. After all, he seemed to espouse that we don't let this things lip by, when it comes to these heinous crimes we should stand up and do something...that said, I'm not much for blasting folks, so I simply said the following:
"Hey there Mr. Squeaky Clean, Thou Shalt Not Take Other People's Content Guy - where'dja get that dandy image? You have a license for that, right?" Then I put a little winky face, like this: ;)
(that's a paraphrase but you get the idea)
You won't believe what happens next:
Mr. X "super tough, let's go get them bad content stealer's and show them no mercy guy" immediately deletes my comment and sends me the following email:
"You must have posted that comment by mistake. I'm sure you meant to send it to me personally. I removed it because I prefer to avoid conflict."
Er, now you want to avoid conflict? Is that like the thief who tells the arresting officer: "I really would prefer to avoid all this unpleasantness, can we just forget the whole thing?". Um, yeah. Sure.
To be fair to Mr. X he later emailed me and indicated he thinks the image in question is in the public domain but did admit he has used images in the past that were not his. So I'm thinking to myself, Mr. X is probably an OK guy, he could be right about the image in the PD, sure he reasearched it after the fact but his heart is in the right place.
But there's more:
He then goes on to basically say 'everybody does it'. Whaaaaaa? Is 'everybody does it' a good excuse? Would you let your kids get away with that one? C'mon...
The moral of the story:
- Using other peopels content is stealin'. Sorry, but it is. Some of us artistic types derive 100% of our income from the images we produce. It hurts when people use them without our permission.
- The simplest solution is to just plain use your own stuff (example, every last image on my blog is mine)
- However, if you do need some quick graphic - clip art is probably a safe bet, but any other image content should be acquired through a reputable channel for open source images (like wikipedia for example), buy some stock, or ask someone nicely if you can use their images. (note google images are not in the public domain as a rule!)
- Even better, grab your camera and get creative! I bet you put together some neat stuff, it's probably better than you realize.
-B
Real-Estate-Photography
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