It’s more than tattered and a while since I blabbed about the spurious nature of online practices of attribution.
I was somewhat inspired here by interesting analysis of Why I Attribute made by Stephen Downes (who’s busy biking somewhere, why do I need to write this?) based on a simple series of online posts/shares that goes down a layer signal to noise thought stream.
I remain more on the ABA — Always Be Attributing, more on the side of gratitude. But ya can’t expect it at all.
This unraveling came from the report from pixsy report that lets me know of places my flickr photos are matched “out there”. I know pixsy’s rap is bad because nefarious entities use it to set up take down scams. I only check it to peek at where my images appear, just for my own curiousity, and I never click any buttons to harass someone because, heck, I give away all my photos under mostly a CC0 license.
It just get’s interesting, and top of the report tonight was this fun photo of Felix in the first year I had him, with a tattered toy in his mouth.
And look, I am ridiculous because (a) I am attributing my own photo, I don’t HAVE to do that, right; and (b) It’s shared into the public domain where the rules say I don;t have to attribute.
But I do because it puts the practice out there. If I just follow rules, I set an example of non-attributing.
ABA.
I digress.
My head swam when Pixsy reported matching this photo on 536 web sites.
With CC0 for me it will always be 0s all the way across– Cases, Income, Takedowns. That’s not what I’m after here.
And sure enough I can find Felix and his chew toy on a blog “My Dog Killed a Raccoon! 4 Tips on What to Do Next“, a facebook post by Best Buddy Trainer, and on it goes. My photo, all the way down. I can’t count, but pretty much all results are unattributed, or have useless ones like attributing to other photo sites.
My heart is not broken, I am not seeking the credit, I am more curious in the habits people do when making their web pages. Heck, actually I am proud of how far that cute photo has flown. That people will socur the web, find the photo somewhere, and say, “that’s the perfect photo for my post!”.
And it goes even more wider on a reverse image search in Google, where Felix appears on “There’s No Such Thing as Negative and Positive “Reinforcement” , All You Need to Know About Resource Guarding (And How to Reduce it), Fast Facts on Foreign Body Ingestion, and out to where I tire of scrolling.
No matter what you do with images, or the way you license them, if you put ’em on the web, they will get used like this. And you know what, I’m really okay, because it just shows how vast and wide the web is, you think you see a lot, but you don’t.
And if you think you can really “control” what other people do with your stuff? Good luck. My mode has been to just give up on it, and enjoy the weirdness of it. Yes, it’s weird to see my dog’s photo on 500+ web pages, but I get the better end of the deal.
I get to be with the dog.
Featured Image: My dog, my photo, go ahead and slap it on your web page! 2016/366/121 “Damn, I am Cute” flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Good dog