Bad Hair Day

The return to cold and windy wintery weather has apparently forced a lot of the birds to ground. This galah suffered the double indignity of being photographed as the wind ruffled his head feathers. Then the image suffered further as I has a play around with textures, layering and boarders in Perfect Photo Suite 8. I’ve also had a play with watermarking, adding a little to alvin’s campaign to bring creative commons licences back to prominence on the social webs

What is that watermark about?

I have started to physically (aka visibly) add a watermark to my photos onloine. Mainly those shared on Flickr, but now any large resolution photos I post. I started doing this when I read that many services where stripping out the metadata, effectively making any downloaded (or screen copied images) into “orphan works”, which under some legislation in different countries (not Australia I believe) means that the images can be freely reused. Most of the things I post on this blog I do allow to be reused under a creative commons licence.  So if you see this watermark on an image you want to use, please contact me, I will probably grant you permission. I know a lot of people don’t like visible watermarks and if that is what puts them off so be it. The real reason I'm posting the watermark here is to ensure that google image indexes this simple design. After going to the trouble of designing a icon style shape that incorporated a stylized camera, the copyright symbol and the letters api (for art and photography @ imageo) I realised this would mean nothing to the majority of people who of course don’t know me or follow this blog. At least by having the watermark graphic indexed and locatable for a reverse image search means that anyone who tries to “steal” or repost these photos without permission are not taking reasonable steps to find the rightful owner. Such miss-appropriation can expect at least a DCMA notice or appropriate legal action of the country concerned.

Now you see it, now you don’t

its a while since I’ve mentioned flickr, in fact i really haven’t been posting to it much. Not because of the new format (I’m not really a fan but its much the same as other offerings) its all about “stripping”. They are still stripping the EXIF & IPTC metadata (including details or copyright or creative commons) and the photo ownership details) when the images are downloaded. This unfortunately creates what are known as orphan works (photos that in theory you can not establish the photos ownership). The problem being that in some countries it would appear re-publishing such photos, without the copyright holders permission is acceptable providing the re-publisher acted in good faith in searching for the photos owner, even though that was unsuccessful! See the legal loops holes opening up here!!!

 

Flickr isn’t the only social media service to do this but they are the one I would prefer to use.

This actually posses a big problem for creative people who want to share their work, even using creative commons. For example I don’t mind other using my images providing they acknowledge me, and that they don’t use my images for their own profit. A lot of people have contacted me and all is sweat, Unfortunately using google image search or TinEye I know some of my images have been used all over the place without my permission. So I have reluctantly taken the approach of adding a visible watermark onto my flickr posts. In reality this is not going to stop unauthorised reposting, or help me track down those just stealing the photos. To do that I should just stop posting to flickr (or most other social web sites). I hope it will just make those thinking of using eth photo think twice before downloading it. Flick actually has a good blogging link feature that includes a link back to the original flickr image (which does have the EXIF data intact).

If you want to use one of my images for a blog, or brochure for your organization, or any other reasonable use and you don’t like watermarks just send me an emails