Cheeky beggers!

The Houses of Parliament just after sunset, uploaded by Mark Sweeting.

I was rather surprised to find that someone else posted my photo to their flickr photo stream, passing it off as their own.

When prompted by someone else, the person did at least admit that they “found the photo on the web” (so that makes it alright?). Once I’d recovered a little bit from a rather odd feeling (I can’t describe how I felt — it was very odd), I emailed the person and asked them to remove the photo.

That they did, but not without saying they thought I was over reacting slightly.

The single biggest thing about flickr that annoys me is all these people constantly posting and reposting the same photo, either found from the web or pinched from another flickr user. I really don’t understand what the point of it is — how can anyone feel proud of someone else’s work?

This goes on such a lot, and there really isn’t an easy way to report it to flickr.

I know that if you put something up on the web then the chances are someone somewhere is going to download it and copy it etc., and for private use I guess I don’t have a problem with this.

But what gets on my goat is people taking something that isn’t theirs and either passing it off as their own, or even worse making money or some other benefit from it!

In this particular case, the copy of my photo got explored (quite an achievement on flickr — it means your photo is one of the most interesting at a given point in time), and I didn’t get any credit for it.

Ahh well, my sounding off is complete. Something like this makes you realise what these musicians and other artists must feel like when their music is distributed on the web for free… But that’s discussion is for another time!

Tags: flickr, annoyance, copyright, theft