What to do about copyright infringement?

Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 11:50pm

While looking for a photo of an Apple CD300 to clarify an eBay auction I ended up at a page on Wikimedia Commons.

The Apple CD150 image caught my eye. First because I thought that it was actually a photo of an Apple CD300e Plus, and then because it was strangely familiar. How many other people take photos of items against an old blue sheet?

Sure enough, it is my image from the page in my collection for the Apple CD300e Plus. But my name isn’t “Marco Mioli” and this site isn’t called “All About Apple”.

Did someone change my name when I wasn’t looking? I hope not…

I did some further digging and found that there are at least five photos of mine that have been put both on the “All About Apple” site and on Wikimedia Commons. Only the misnamed CD300e Plus image is still part of my site following the update I did last week. But that doesn’t excuse the clear copyright violation.

What annoys me about this is the license statement that was specified on Wikipedia Commons. It is blatantly incorrect, and is deliberate.

I do know of a couple of sites that have mirrored sections of my site. In one case they asked first and in the other they didn’t. But in those cases I didn’t mind as they attributed me as the author and included a link to my site.

Right now I need to go to bed, but tomorrow night I will contact the “All About Apple” site AND find out how to report to Wikimedia Commons that the images are being used without permission and with an incorrect licence.

Related to this is that for a while now I have been meaning to apply a Creative Commons license (probably Attribution-ShareAlike) to this site…

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