Blog entries tagged with "copyright"

An interesting choice of image

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011 at 12:34am

Six years ago we moved offices from the middle of Clayton campus to out on Blackburn Road. It took them six months, but eventually they renovated around us enough for most of us to move into a new open plan area towards the back of the building.

On the day we moved I took some photos, including this one of my old desk:

Empty desk

For a few years now I have had a Google Alert setup to notify me of mentions of my own name as well as links to my site. I haven’t received that many alterts, but most of the time I can immediately recognise it as a blog/twitter/flickr/etc post that I have recently made. Other times it is related to another Stephen Edmonds (there are a few around).

Today I got an alert referencing an article by ZDNet Australia titled Govt plans keep RailCorp CIO post empty. I followed the link, to see my i mage of an empty desk. Now, if that were the quality of desk that RailCorp is giving its CIO, then it is no wonder that it is still empty. Yes, yes, I know that my image is just being used to illustrate a point.

It is at this point that some people I know would be jumping up and shouting that they can’t do that, they should be paying to use your image, etc, etc. Bah, this is exactly what I wanted to happen by making the image available as Creative Commons – Attribution-ShareAlike – (CC BY-SA). By the way, regarding those people that would jump up and down, they hand over all sorts of personal info and photos to a US company known for questionable privacy practices, so you can guess what I do with their opinions on this matter…

Now, I wish they were using a better image – not what a camera club judge would refer to as a ‘record shot’ – but this brought a smile to my face as I think it is the first time that an image of mine has been used AND correctly attributed.

Tagged with: ,

Licensing my work

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007 at 09:49pm

A few days ago I finally got around to doing something about the copyright infringement I discovered many weeks ago: I asked the Commons Help desk and got a helpful response. However, before I uploaded my images to Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license I wanted to actually have this site under the same license.

A few additions (HTML head, blog sidebar, page footer) later and I am now stating that all of the content on this blog and in my computer collection is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

I also jumped over to my flickr account and set the license for all of my existing and future photos.

I think my next step will be to tag the photos in the collection, initially via the "Copyright" Exif metadata tag and then via XMP. Once I figure out what that is.

Scratch that. My immediate next step is to address the copyright infringement…

Tagged with: , , , ,

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…

Tagged with: , ,