Archive for the ‘Legal’ Category
|Photo published in Travel+Leisure but wait til you read this
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
We just had 2 days of intense debate over some shared content on my Posterous page when this email hits my inbox:
———- Forwarded message ———-
From: XXX XXXX <yyyyyyyy@aexp.com>
Date: Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 4:04 PM
Subject: Laduree
To: xxxxxxx@gmail.com
Hi Florian,
Please send me an invoice for $250 for your image of Laduree that ran a quarter page in our September issue. The story name is “Airline Food.”
Thanks,
Jessica
–
XXXX XXXXX
Associate Photo Editor
Travel + Leisure
1120 Avenue of the Americas, 9th floor
New York, NY 10036
www.travelandleisure.com
September 09 issue must have been published and sent for printing late August. I guess my picture of Ladurée macarons in Paris airport was picked up on Flickr. Even though my privacy and permission policy is stated on each picture no one contacted me on behalf of the magazine.
Nonetheless the picture was taken, cropped, published and printed without my permission. Out from the blue and a month after the fact I receive an email asking for a $250 invoice. hmmm talking about journalistic ethics and moral this is legend.
Why $250, why not $20 or $5000? I don’t get it. 
Wild guess is someone at Travel Leisure is following my Twitter stream and decided to make a move avoiding any bad publicity. Further down you will see they had nothing to fear.
100’s of my pics end up on the web everyday. Most of the reprints are on blogs, some ad supported some not. Recently I noticed an increase of my photos used on commercial news related site and papers. It’s very difficult if not impossible to track photos published in newspapers or magazines. On websites I can use some tools based on tags, keywords, search and events but usually viewers are prompt to alert me.
Below few examples of reprinted pics/videos on commercial websites posted without permission:
http://www.cafebabel.com/eng/article/29690/bernard-madoff-fraud-europe-victims-banks.html
http://varl.jp/i-see-stock/wordpress-plugin-photo-dropper
http://www.portaldenoticias.com/videos/yt-u4MaQ-LOFnw
http://www.nowpublic.com/tech-biz/diggs-kevin-rose-weve-got-be-more-relevant (no credit given – here is original pic)
Schmap.com (check pic of Ritz Carlton in Key Biscayne on right column)
and countless French, US newspapers and magazines.
I receive requests on regular basis asking for permission to reprint my photos. Honestly I don’t have the time and energy to deal with that. A couple of travel guides asked me for reprint rights offering money which I promptly granted for FREE.
One picture in particular caught public attention causing tens of emails.
Question: how many pics are used without permission in conventional press? Maybe NYT has the answer.
Now here is my position : you can use, copy, reprint, publish, distribute, share any of my original material – pictures, videos or texts with no limitation. I’m just asking you give me proper credit. You do not have to link to the original, you do not have to ask me permission. You do not have to pay anything. I would appreciate being notified of published images, texts or videos as an act of courtesy but you don’t have to if you don’t want to.
You can’t steal what is given freely. I call this sharing, not piracy.
PS: my reply to Travel+Leisure was obviously consistent with this post. No money involved, no permission needed.
Tags: flickr, laduree, leisure, magazines, permission, pircay, publication, rights, Travel
Posted in Art, Content, Legal, Photography, Pikchur, Travel | 7 Comments »
The Death Of Arrogance
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
I’d like to start this post with a statement: I’m not a journalist, I’m not a professional blogger, I don’t get paid – directly or indirectly – to write, I don’t have any ads on my Posterous or my blog. I’m just a nobody with a big mouth. Finally English is not my native language.
Yesterday a debate started on Twitter after I shared an article taken from Yahoo! Finance and posted in extenso on my Posterous page.
For those – like Charles Arthur- who do not know the way Posterous works, here is a small tutorial.
You surf the web – find an interesting post and want to SHARE it.
Then once you press the Share on Posterous button you have :
Et voila – content is shared and all credits are given to the original source here:
Basically Posterous sharing ie Digg, Techmeme, Google Reader is identical as a ReTweet of valuable content.
Now back to yesterday’s incident.
I shared the following: http://florianseroussi.posterous.com/ten-big-companies-that-are-veering-toward-ban reproducing EXACTLY what was posted on Yahoo! Finance page. Exactly. Giving credit to Yahoo! and Business Insider as per the original post.
You will note that Yahoo! has a generic link to Business Insider but not to the original BI article.
Charles Arthur then asked why didn’t I link the original Business Insider post. Tried to explain how I used Posterous add-on to share content but Charles didn’t know anything about Posterous.
Mike Butcher – Techcrunch UK editor- jumped on the bandwagon without checking the facts thinking I simply reproduced a paid content without giving any credits. Once Mike understood his mistake he blamed me for not finding the original post and manually adding a link to the Yahoo! re-post. It was simply a ridiculous claim but I searched the internet, found the link and added it to my shared content credit to appease boiling journo blood. As someone mentioned to me via DM – Mike Butcher was much more eloquent to defend the right to publish stolen documents on Techcrunch aka Twittergate. Journalist bullshit duty I guess.
Charles Arthur lost the plot, comparing cars, free content, source code and who knows what all together. Within hours- Charles tone went from arrogant to sarcastic to insulting.
Ilicco Elias tried to minimize the incident but Guardian editor was not ready to give up so easily.
My buddy Paul Walsh came to the rescue with a fair statement:
Charles still on a roll threatens to sue me and foresees a class action against Posterous starting soon (ahem)…
At last in a final act of bravery Arthur decided to block me and called me stupid after I mentioned The Guardian.co.uk had lost over £24M.
Mr Arthur – as the tech editor of The Guardian who do not have a clue what Posterous is – you should have a much more humble attitude.
Journalists – your current business model is SINKING. You are dying slowly with 20th century principles. Wake up! Look around. You do not have the monopole of information and sharing. We – your readers- have the ability to share, produce and rate content the same way you do. The only value added you can provide is by doing a better job – not by shutting us down.
Note: I didn’t want to go on the legal approach of copyright et al on this post. I’m not an attorney and IP laws (international laws should I say) are too complicated for a blog post. Yahoo! quickly replied to my email and stated they are not involved as no logo or Yahoo! material has been shared.
Hopefully Charles Arthur will use last pence of The Guardian to start a worldwide class action against Google and Posterous to prove his point and whatever the outcome shall be – we will burn in golden letters on The Guardian’s headstone : The Death Of Arrogance.
UPDATE Sept 24 : After an email exchange with Charles Arthur I have modified the Posterous post to an excerpt only – adding another link to Business Insider [there are now 2 links, one on header and one on footer]. It would be interesting to know the conversation rate between hits on my Posterous to links onto BI but my guess is we will never know.
Tags: charles arthur, copyright, ilicco, journalism, mike butcher, paul walsh, posterous, TechCrunch, the guardian, twittergate
Posted in Content, Economy, Legal, London, Newspapers, Social Media, TechCrunch, Technology | 91 Comments »
