Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat

Yeah, we live in bizarre world of copyrighted conflicts…  It seems like someone is always trying to exercise control over “their content” and using copyright as their bludgeon.

First, let me clue you in to a secret.  I’m a car nut.  More precisely, I love the engineering of cars - and once delighted in documenting esoteric details of engines, transmissions, and chassis on Wikipedia.  I still delight in seeing unusual engines, and have been known to take the odd photograph of them, too.

Others also suffer from this engine fixation.  Witness the regular “Engine of the Day” feature over at Gawker Media’s popular auto blog, Jalopnik.

I love reading these stories, but today’s entry (on Ford’s bad Windsor V8 engine) seemed awfully familiar to me.  Or rather, the photo did.  See, that photo was taken by me, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Jalopnik.  It’s ripped off from Wikimedia Commons, where it’s licensed GFDL and CC-by-SA.  This means that professional publishers like Jalopnik can’t use my image without attribution.

Now, some people might be flattered by this kind of use.  In fact, I was flattered by this the first time it happened.  But this isn’t the first time Jalopnik has used my photo without attribution.  It’s not even the second time.  No, this is the third time Jalopnik has used a photo I took without attribution.  I bet Gawker wouldn’t be happy to have someone use their copyrighted content without permission or attribution, but it seems just fine for them to do it!  I even offered these photos for free use as long as they attributed me, but even that wasn’t satisfactory…

I previously wrote about my experience with photos used by a German newspaper who used one of my car photos, as well as a well-known Linux hacker who ripped off an article I wrote for his book.  This stuff happens all the time, in fact.

What can we do?  I’m not sure how to fix it, but one thing I will say is that I’m certainly not happy with Jalopnik or Gawker Media.  If anyone has a suggestion on how to deal with this situation, I’d love to hear it.

Update: Murilee Martin, writer of these three entries, has added attribution to me for two of them after I emailed him, Ray Wert, and Nick Denton.  Will they do a better job in the future?  We shall see…

Techdirt’s I Learned It From Watching YOU, Big Content, pointed me to a Washington Post story, Hey, Isn’t That… about how the big old media companies have been repeatedly caught with their pants down, stealing content from us little guys.  This got me thinking again about my own similar experiences.

See, I’ve had my work ripped off by big content providers repeatedly over the years, but never could put into words why it bothered me so much.  I mean, it’s not like I was profiting from that snapshot or HOWTO document, so why should I care if someone else does?

But once you juxtapose the attitude of those same companies about my fair use rights of legally-purchased content, the grain that’s been chafing me becomes clear.  Media companies seem to think it’s ok for them to steal from the little guys (either by choice or through a lack of rigor, but they’ll come after me if I try to do anything at all with their content.  The article’s anecdote of a stolen dog photo used in a sports broadcast surrounded by ominous copyright warnings really sums up the whole situation!

The first time I experienced this was back in 1997 or so, when I received an email from a fellow Linux hippie alerting me that a recent Linux book contained a number of online texts, mine included.  The book, Linux File Systems, was “written” by Moshe Bar, better known for his work on OpenMosix and Xen, but also known as a writer for a number of other books and a columnist for latter-days Byte.  I confronted him about his wholesale copying of my LVM walkthrough in his book, and he apologized, claimed he’d run out of time (which is easy to believe, looking at the book), and blamed his editor.  The publisher, McGraw Hill, claimed the book wasn’t selling well anyway so they couldn’t offer me any compensation.  Being young(er) and foolish(er) at the time, I let it drop.

Over my later years of writing columns and articles for Storage Magazine, InfoStor, and others, I became aware of wholesale unauthorized translation and reprinting of English magazines in other languages.  A number of my articles were published in Russian magazines, for example.  Again, I did nothing but chuckle about seeing my name in Cyrilic.

So why the picture of the Saab 900 above?  Because just last month, I was notified that that exact photo was used by the German paper, Süddeutsche Zeitung, (Nov 23th 2007, page 11) without permission and in violation of the license.  This has happened to a number of my other Wikimedia Commons photos, with appearances in a number of papers and magazines that I know of, and probably more besides…

What’s to do?  I suppose I should have pushed harder when these uses were brought to my attention.  I suppose I could have banded together with others to protest.  But I did nothing.  What would you do?