Aug 19 2009 written by Michael Biven
Sites like A Continuous Lean, A Time to Get and the impossible cool show wonderful images of people and things that for me evoke a classic style. Each of the three are in my feed reader giving me a series of photographs that I enjoy, but over time I have noticed that they unfortunately fail to credit the photographer on a regular basis.
Reblog, Repost, But No Credit?
Opinion
Aug 19 2009 written by Michael Biven
Sites like A Continuous Lean, A Time to Get and the impossible cool show wonderful images of people and things that for me evoke a classic style. Each of the three are in my feed reader giving me a series of photographs that I enjoy, but over time I have noticed that they unfortunately fail to credit the photographer on a regular basis.
The material used on these sites can be pulled from anywhere; Flickr, old magazines and other websites that have images licensed from All Rights Reserved to Creative Commons, or images in the public domain. When I've approached bloggers on this they usually reply that it would take too much time to find the name of the photographer - the copyright holder - and credit the work. I don't understand this excuse a valid reason to not properly give attribution, especially when there are bloggers like Scott Beale at Laughing Squid who credit the photographer and follow the license of the image or images used. I would venture a guess that as a starting point, in many cases, the information needed to credit the photographer could be found on whatever site the images were pulled from. And that the tools - bookmarklets - available for WordPress, Tumblr or Posterous or other services make it so easy to pull content from someone else that the time needed to credit the photographer and even check to see how the work is licensed is thought to be a burden.
- Photographer George Skadding - May 1951 LIFE Magazine (For personal non-commercial use only)
The image above is used in today's A Continuous Lean post, Life Archive | The Pentagon c.1951. In that post there are no links going back to the original work. I showed that image to a friend and asked her to find the original photograph and the photographers name - she found both in under two minutes.
Simply linking back to the site where the work was found cannot be considered a form of attribution. In a different ACL post A Beautiful Life Michael Williams writes "this man's flickr photostream" as his attribution. This is not crediting the photographer - there is no mention of the photographer's name and in this case all of the images are licensed as All Rights Reserved. If he did not have the time to credit the photographer you have to wonder if he even asked permission to use the images in the first place?
Everyone wants their work to be recognized and respected. That means asking permission before using the image if it's licensed as All Rights Reserved or following the requirements if used under one of the other licenses like Creative Commons (which are often more complicated in scope than what you'd imagine). The bottom line is: if you are using content that you did not create, respect the restrictions the artist has placed on its use, and give credit.
- Michael B.