I'm proud of the local bubble burster and party pooper

There seems to be two kinds of creative folks out there.

The first set are happy to just have somebody appreciate their work, even if they are not getting much credit.

The second set are the people who've gotten sick of getting no credit, because clearly if our work is good enough to steal, it's good enough to pay for.

Lane Hartwell is a pro photographer in the bay area. She's a brilliant woman, with a style that's all her own, and a brilliant work ethic. I'd show you, but that's kind of a sore point for her at the moment. A group decided that they wanted to parody the current state of the "Web 2.0" industry and made a music video. They saw fit to credit Billy Joel and themselves, but they didn't think to credit any of the people who shot any of the pictures that they used. Now, parody is clearly a protected right (even though many parody artists find that it works better if they want to have a career in the music biz to ask permission) but it's also pretty clear that they aren't actually parodying Owen Thomas when they used Lane's picture.

Now, it's not like it's very hard for them to have researched all of the images they stole. They could have either mailed Lane directly, or they could have spent (and I timed this) about 60 seconds on Flickr's Creative Commons search to find a picture of Owen that's covered by Creative Commons so that they don't even need to ask any questions.

But they blew Lane off when confronted directly and then made some vague noises about researching where they got all of their images and posting a proper account eventually.

I have less sympathy than most because I've got a weird fixation with doing everything myself. To the extent that I've got some blog entries that haven't gotten posted yet because I'm still trying to take a proper picture to illustrate them with. But still. Say that these folks do manage to capitalize on the buzz they've created with their video. Shouldn't they be ready to reward all of the people they've stood upon to get popular? I mean, even the RIAA will give you some freebie lines of coke in return for a record-label-contract-shafting.

Comments

Oh, the best stupid platitude, as usual, is the line that if you don't want your images stolen, don't put them on the Internet. Do you really want an Internet that just has things that nobody cares about very much?

Of course, the most obnoxious image-thief I've encountered so far was a Holy Roller "Christian" type person who seems to have forgotten that "Thou shalt not steal" does, in fact, include not stealing people's photos.