(Or anywhere on the internet really.) People will find your images, copy them, and use them for their own purposes.
I mention this because I have just heard about Flickr user “Lara Jade” who recently discovered that a self portrait she photographed when she was 14 years old was used as the cover for a pornographic DVD without her knowledge. The responses she has received from the DVD company border on the bizarre and betray an extremely warped sense of morality and personal responsibility.
Sadly for Lara Jade, she cannot afford the legal fees necessary to pursue the matter, especially since she lives in the UK and the photo was misappropriated by a company operating in the USA.
Read her story here.
Those of you who post personal or family photos are advised to publish them as “private” photos — viewable only by people you name as family or friends. This is not something I've ever worried about on my blog, but I am now wrestling with the idea of marking some of my photo albums as private. If that happens, anybody who wants to view those albums will need to create a reader account so I can add you as an approved reader. I haven't decided what I am going to do. This could be a good opportunity to just switch to Flickr. I'll have to think on it.
There's a reason that many of my Flickr photos are only visible to friends. This is part of that.
It's sad, but it's the way things are.
some people just upload the small version of a photo so that people can't use the higher res of the large sizes. Of course, if you process them in any way at all (I always do…cropping can improve ANY photo) you can add a watermark.
This girl DID add a watermark. It was removed when they did the DVD cover.
One thing to know about Flickr: I really like the site, have been a member for 3 years and have a Pro account. However, Flickr seems to be a major dramatic focal point on teh intarweb.
Not that I have any argument with this story, but if you hang around the groups long enough you'll find that there is always some sort of outrage that people are rallying against. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but with some issues you see a lot of drama and over-reaction.
Last month it was outrage over the shakeup at JPG Magazine. Before that, it was somehting else… some other plagiarism, some arguments about what sort of concessions the “old skool” members were getting… long before that there was the whole “old skool” merge… but it's always something.
Perhaps it's because of the way people feel strongly about their images, and the way so many people post their self-portraits so freely that leads to an excess of drama. It certainly is worthy of outrage when someone has their work plagiarized, of has their self portraits exploited.
But I often shake my head about how quickly the level of drama escalates, on little info, to the point of craziness. There is a lot of snap-judgment-making, bandwagon-jumping and hand-wringing.
Other than that Flickr is great.