Legal-ease: Facebook, copyright violations, & the “create your own album cover”
4 Mar
I don’t mean to be a downer, but this whole trend of “create your own album cover” on Facebook is really making me cranky. Honestly, it’s a pretty fun idea -the instructions tell you how to go into Flickr and randomly choose a photo, hit up Wikipedia and randomly get a band name, etc. Put it all together, and voila! Your own album cover! This leads to some interesting combinations that more often than not actually seem to work out. Some of them are interesting enough that I’d probably check the album out if it were real.
The issue I have with the whole process is the photo. Yeah most people don’t care, and people use photos (i.e. steal) from the internet all the time. I can’t say I’ve been 100% perfect either – those LOLcat pics come from somewhere! However, how hard is it to link to the photographer? Check to make sure they have Creative Commons on the photo. These simple steps would at least make things more legally plausible.
The original - even watermarked with my copyright
The ripoff - copyright cut off, no permission given, no credit
“But it’s fair use!” No, no it’s not. Just because it pops up on a Google image search or Flickr does not make it ok for you to take it. However, many people on Flickr do have Creative Commons. What is Creative Commons? The Creative Commons website states that they “provide free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”" Basically people are allowing the viewer to use their work as long as it’s not being modified or taken for commercial use. It’s easy to spot. The symbol is two c’s in a circle. Sort looks like the © that means a work is copyright protected. The Creative Commons website even has a great search tool that lets you search places like Flickr for work with this license.
Now, I’m well aware that most people just take what they please and nothing ever happens. As a photographer myself, I can tell you how much this bothers me. To put it in perspective, I took some photos (with permission) at a Hold Steady concert. A few months later my friend Andrea went to the record show at the VFW in Minneapolis. Lo and behold, somone had taken my photos off Flickr and used them to create a CD cover on their bootleg of the show. They were selling this CD and making money off something that took me time and energy to produce. If he’d emailed me and asked (my email is readily available via my Flickr profile or in like 50 other places online), I’d probably have been willing to work something out. After hearing this, I went to the record show the following month and confronted the guy. Asked him where he got the photos and basically told him he didn’t have my permission. I asked him to take them off the table and stop selling them immediately. He did, but I’m sure they were back up at the next show. It’s frustrating. Photography is something I don’t just do for fun. It helps pay for my rent, my internet access, my groceries, etc. So it’s a big deal when people steal from me.
This album cover idea basically does the same thing. Sure, it doesn’t seem as big a deal, but stealing is stealing. It’s not too tough to link to the photographer underneath your lil’ album cover, is it? My basic hope is that more people think next time before they take. Credit the photographer, the artist, the poet. People work hard to create what you’re enjoying, and for that, they deserve a pat on the back – or at least some credit.
Kudos on putting this out there. When I did my Facebook album thingy I made the extra step of crediting the photog and putting a link to their original photo on Flickr (which is also a Flickr TOS requirement, btw.) I added that step of crediting the photog into the instructions. Hopefully more people will do that.
I did the same thing and then posted and additional comment asking all credit the photgrapher -S5
all it’d probably take is for people to change the initial instructions a bit to include attribution when they post theirs, so that the next person who does it will pass it on, give credit, etc.
but good points
Yes! Totally agree with you.