artd
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 p.1 #6 · *MY* images found on other websites, witout permission!? | |
Well, I take a philosophical perspective on this.
The only time I am truly upset is when people take my photos and then blatantly claim them as their own work. Once, I had a guy who took an artistic portrait I had done, boosted the contrast up to +100, and then called it a "painting" he had done and was reselling "giclee prints" of it on ebay. (The image he posted on ebay of this "painting" still had my original camera exif data embedded in the file.) That kind of thing is what I can't stand.
As to the other stuff, people reposting my images on their blogs (not claiming them as their own, just putting it there as a "cool image", doing creative photo manipulations with them without my knowledge or permission...well, that kind of thing just has to be expected these days. It doesn't do much good to get worked up about it because it is impossible to stop it. Sure, I could put big ugly watermarks all over my photos. Some people do and that’s fine. I don't, because I prefer my images to be seen the way I created them to be seen.
So, philosophically speaking: we make photographs to be seen by other people. If nobody sees the photographs, then they don’t serve much purpose. The Internet is a double-edged sword...it lets your photographs be seen by more people than would be possible otherwise. But, you can't control who the audience is or what they do with the images upon seeing them.
For me personally, I find the benefit of wider exposure to offset the unwanted “repurposing” of my images. So I try not to stress out about this issue too much. While I am not pleased that my images get reposted or reused somewhere without my permission, I continue to post images on the Internet because I feel that is still fulfilling the original intent of why I do photography…namely, to have the photographs be seen by other people.
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