I was just checking my RSS feeds, and saw an article from CBC News.
I thought to myself, “hey! I’ve seen that photo somewhere. wait a minute… I think I took that photo…”
Some quick poking around on my gallery site1, and hey presto. Yup. I shot it back in June, 2009, not far from my house.
Looking at the article on CBC’s site, there doesn’t seem to be any mention of that fact.
I’m guessing someone at CBC did a search on Flickr for “lightning in calgary” or something (back when I had a Flickr account), and found the photo. I’d also guess that it’s used whenever there’s a “lightning” story on the site.
I’m actually fine with CBC using the photo. I don’t even care about getting credit for the photo – please go ahead and continue using the photo if it suits your needs.
This whole credit thing is messy. They (likely) found a photo that was shared under a Creative Commons license, and decided to use it. They goofed on the credit (but, so what), but they were trying to do the right thing. If a news organization struggles with providing credit for a photo, how do we expect everyone else (teachers, students, etc…) to be able to do it? And, does it really matter?
- holy crap do I need to do a better job with my photo metadata [↩]
In what way did they ‘try to do the right thing’? I’m missing that part somehow. If you don’t care if they ignore your requirements for using your photo, that’s your business, but as to your question “Does it really matter?” If it were my photo, you bet your ass it does. I had one of my photos used without permission to promote a political candidate I had no interest in supporting. It mattered.
I’m pretty sure they started with a CC search – knowing the results were usable. Good intentions. Sure, they goofed on photo credit, but that’s not a huge deal for me. Also, if my photos are available under Creative Commons (which they are), then I don’t really get a say on who uses it, for what purpose. It’s either available for everyone, or not.
That’s not how CC works, actually.
I get how CC works. I’m just not going to get all upset because someone ignored (accidentally or otherwise) the attribution clause. it’s the spirit of the thing that’s important to me, not the letter of the law. If someone posted one of my photos and claimed it was their own, that’s a different thing, and I’d be royally pissed. But this isn’t what happened. They found the photo through a creative commons search, wanted to use it to illustrate an article, and used it. That’s fine with me. Sure, attribution should have been part of it, but whatever. Hard to get worked up about it.
My point was more about how it’s possible for a national news agency (or, more likely, a rookie intern working at a national news agency) to goof up about providing attribution, how can we expect it?
Hi D’Arcy,
Thanks for posting this. I shared it with some of the folks with CBC News to see if they can offer any insight, explanation and hopefully clear this up.
As a side note, that is a stunning picture!
Cheers,
Sarah
Thanks, Sarah. Also, please make it clear that I am not upset – CBC is free to continue using the photo (and any others they like). I was mostly just struck by the difficulty in providing the photo credit. I work at the UofC, and our instructors (and students) struggle with it too. In the case of the article I linked to – where would the photo credit even go? The photo was used in the RSS teaser, and on a sidebar. It’s not the primary photo in the article itself. Photo credit would take more room than the photo itself. Seems silly.
Nice to see somebody not go freakin’ apeshit over the arcane routines of copyright and “open” culture.
They should have attributed you though. Hope it was just an honest oversight and when they reuse your photo in the future that a few more people get sent to your gallery.
yeah. seriously not a big deal. I don’t even care about traffic, either. I don’t track it, so I’d have no way to know anyway 🙂