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Monday, May 14, 2007

Virtually robbed

An interesting debate is raging on Flickr, again initiated by my most favorite photographer _rebekka. Whilst surfing the net she found that a company was selling some of her landscape photos at a rather tidy profit, they had changed her name and of course had not been reimbursing her any money. Understandably she is rather pissed at this and talks of law suits are flowing in the comments to her posting. In the age of the Internet however, this kind of practice is all too inevitable? Posting your pic under an all rights reserved creative commons license does not ensure that someone will not pinch your stuff. It's frustrating, and unfair, and blatantly wrong, but having a go at suing the company's arse off will probably not benefit her, especially if she does not win. But on the other hand there is a matter of principle, if she nicked the BBC's logo, I'm sure they would take her to the cleaners, why shouldn't she sue? The publicity she is getting from all this (it has already made digg) is by no means bad though, may be she should think about selling some of her prints herself to pay for the legal action. I hope that she doesn't take the step of removing her photos from Flickr, that would be very sad. Good luck to her though, whatever she decides to do, it's certainly opened a great big topical can-o-worms.

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