Flickr & Pixsy

Flickr has teamed up with Pixsy to help protect images on Flickr. Pixsy is a service that will scan your photos. then using reverse image search and some Ai as well will periodically review and report on any other locations around the web your image is being used. Some are legit but other can require take down notices and possibly seeking damages or payment for licencing images (these are more legally complex and really focussed on US based copyright registration).BTW pixsy does get paid unless you do.

I think something like this is well overdue and will add some teeth to Flickr’s licencing (its the only social media outlet I know that still display the licencing details with the detail photo display). There are still  creative commons options as well as full copyright. Importantly Pixsy can send legally binding takedown notices.

If you are new to flickr you might find it wise to turn off the download options to discourage “inadvertent steeling” of your photos . Alternatively you may also wish to change your privacy for Friends &/or Family.

This Pixsy service is only being offered to FlickrPro subscribers, and really does value add if you want to use flickr as a place to share your work to a wider audience but are worried about image theft. I’m going to stay with my free account because I already signed up to a free versions of pixsy monitoring connected to my flickr account quite a while ago and you can still independently do this but there are limits.

How many is too many?

This post on “Are There too Many Visual Artists Online?” by artpromotivate, touches on a few key issues that has been bugging me.  Flickr, Instagram & google+ are pumping out masses of imagery, …but

• How much of it is really art?
• Are there even enough collectors and collections to sustain the apparent explosion in artists and photographers?

The first key issues is that an image on the net is usually not the art work. So many think that once they see a small image on their screen they have seen the art. However this is not true the original art work has a physicality, that relates the scale it is produces and how its surface reacts in different lighting and position. A blown up photo hanging on a gallery wall will look quiet different to its reproduction on the net, no matter how much colour calibration has been done. I expect the true art and photography collectors and curators know this already and they are carefully about purchasing off the net. In other words physical art and brick and mortar galleries still have a place.

The second key issue is the decline of originality, this is really a personal view. The social web and the “look at me” celebrity obsessions are actually producing and facilitating an explosion of imitators, ok copy cats, and a lot of plagiarist (they just steal and  repost your work as their own). What was once original suddenly floods the bandwidth with lesser but superficially much the same works and boredom takes over. The general lack of attributions means that it is pretty much impossible to find the creative individual behind the avalanche of imitators. For a collector this is a real buyer beware situation. If you are a creative and have something really unique, but easily cloned, it might not be a place you want to set your work free within.

The final issue is simple exposure. Yes posting your art on the net can potentially get it seen by a much wider audience, even an international one. So go and join the online throng but remember the real buyers might be wary, and still prefer physical exhibitions and galleries. There is a real potential to have your creations copied into oblivion. Staying original and creative may be easier if you don’t join the crowd and support your local gallery.

Avoiding the Black Hats & Spammers

I have become aware that at least one of my blog posts has again been “scrapped” and reposted as an exact copy of my original post, including picture and layout, on a spam site (I will not give you the link because you should not go there, and specially never every click on links you find on these dodgy looking “content farms”). At worse they will contain links to other spam and potentially malware. At best these lazy spamdexers are just trying to attract innocent links, thus page views and a higher google ranking, to their site using lots of plagiarized (aka stolen) content. It is a dishonest practice, and sorry I can do nothing about it.
What disappoints me most about all this black hat SEO trickery and blog scrapping is the fact that Google in many cases is paying the very spammers and thieves for the stolen content! The content farms have mostly been greedy & also monetized their site using Google’s own adsense. So try reporting this Google??? I have found there is a massive blankness, no response from anyone. You may remember my previous post on a lesson of theft versus sharing. Well that site, which looks a lot like a legitimate camera review site, still exists, it just keeps changing its name slightly, its ISP, its country of origin and its owner name, so that DMCA notices to cease and desist also go unanswered. At least that low life now acknowledges my posts and links back to my site (he may think technically he doesn’t breach my Creative Common Licence, but what he does is still not legal because he is expecting Google to still pay him for my content and my CC license is for NON commercial).  I can not find him, but Google obviously still can because he still displays an adsense badge. Am I being too cynical about Google’s apparent hypocrisy and will to fix this? Rant over for now.

As I indicated above there is little I can do, but there might be something you can do if you use chrome as your browser, Google has released an add-in that gives you a personal blocklist of such sites as you come across them. It will also transmit your blocking patterns back to Google, in theory they will then get a good crowd sourced blacklist of such websites and thus downgrade these undesirables in their famous search algorithms. Let us hope Google will follow through on this.

A lesson in Theft versus Sharing

You may have, or may not have, notice the little CC logo on the right hand side bar, it is a creative common "license" and it has very specific conditions (you can click on the logo below to see the conditions). I have choosen to use the creative commons approach because I believe that grown up people should share ideas and not get bogged down in legalistic conditions that end up only benefiting the managers & agents, not the artists. The internet and its various sites and communities are a wonderful way to display your work and share your knowledge for the greater good. But the interweb utopia is being spoilt.

I think those that blindly cut and paste blog posts (even with a link back to my site, to fullfil the attribution aspect of CC) and use that as content to draw users and get "click through" revenue are just being lazy. It is plagarism pure and simple. At best they are not contributing anything, just wasting bandwidth and everyone's time, at worst they are yet another examples of the rot that is setting in as people try to monetize Web 2.0 (I am starting to translate that particular phrase into sucking the blood out of the true content providers). If you realized you have arrive here after seeing my work in such a site, please understand that you should stop viewing that website and definetly remove any RSS subscription to it.

To find copy & paste plagiarist is not that hard you can type in a characteristic phrase from your blog (especially one that may have contained an unfortunate spelling mistake or typo) to your favourite search engine, or use a service like copyscape (is free)

PS:: Mr Daniel Mendes (with the made up address and probably name as well). CEASE & DESIST :: YOU ARE SPECIFICALLY FORBIDDEN FROM EVER COPYING ANY OF MY WORK AGAIN.

Wandering in the Light by
Norm Hanson is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License.

The really dissapointing part of all this is in the fine print, and how much support google are going to provide. Oh that's right they are paying the plagiarists for doing it!