Question: what do you call someone who campaigns for anyone to be allowed to publish a photographer’s work without permission, and then complains when someone publishes his wife’s photographs without permission? Answer: Cory Doctorow.

via The Russian Photos Blog.

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25 Comments

  1. Ha!

  2. There’s a certain irony here, too, in that if you decide to call someone out about misusing images, then use a Creative Commons photo of them to illustrate the article (as Jeremy Nicholl has), you should at least make sure you adhere to that photograph’s license:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cory_Doctorow_@_eTech_2007.jpeg

    The photo in question is covered by ‘Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic’, one condition of which is that you must attribute the shot to the photographer (Ed Schipul). Which Jeremy has not. Oh dear.

    • Sorry ManxStef, but that’s not where I got the photo. I downloaded it from flickr, where the CC license said:

      “Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).”

      The author hasn’t bothered to specify how, or even if, it should be attributed. Massive fail on his/her part.

      • In cases like this, where the actual manner of attribution isn’t specified, it’s generally accepted that you use something like a generic ‘photo by Ed Schipul’ and hyperlink his name to the source of the image (in this case, Flickr – *not* a link to the CC license page – though sometime people specify that you link to their website), then append this to the photo’s caption, if it has one, or put it as a credit in the footer of the article.

        Basic common sense applies really, the ‘Attribution’ part of Creative Commons means that the creator wants a name-check and link so that people will know who shot/created it (and, for example, can then potentially hire them for future work, or arrange a fee if it’s a CC-NonCommercial licensed image), that’s all.

  3. fits with something I think I heard some time back from Stewart Brand to the effect that : ‘those that say that all content and information “wants to be free”, generally are not the ones doing the creating’

    mash it up but NIMBY

  4. This is very confusing can ManxStef pls explain what this means and what Jeremy has done wrong pls …. I’m confused
    It doesn’t say any where that I have looked that you must attribute the photographer ?

    attribution – You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

    • Attribution=You MUST credit the photographer.

      It really could not be made any simpler. By the way, everyone here is referring to the “human readable” version of the licence. if you want to nitpick, go read the full licence.

  5. I find myself a supporter of Doctorow, both generally (I believe in relative information freedom) and in this specific case.
    Although the criticism towards his article might be correct (Don’t know if Doctorows fair-use defence is legally applicable or not, my specialty is Swedish law, not american) – Corys critique against The Daily Mail is fully correct given his stand on copyright. He has, to my knowledge, never pushed for free commercial use, and use in a newspaper is clearly that.

    • Use in a newspaper would be “editorial”, not “commercial”, though I can understand the confusion given that most rags devote most of their effort to punditry rather than objective reporting.

      • While that is certainly true I meant commercial as opposed to non-commercial, but now that you mention it I realize it’s a rather interesting gray zone.

      • In this licencing context, a newspaper equals commercial use.

    • They hypocrisy everyone is talking about is that HE uses images without permission to illustrate stories on BoingBoing. You can see him defending himself in the comments of the russian photos blog.

      • No, both in the comments on the original boingboing article and the blog post you’re linking to specifically mention his stance on copyright as the hypocritical point:
        “But could this be the same Cory Doctorow that has spent most of his adult life campaigning for the weakening of copyright laws? The Doctorow that tours as a poster boy for Creative Commons licenses that allow photographers’ work to be used without permission? The one that “rips off” photographs for his own articles?

        Well, er, yes; which is why a few of the responses to his article were less than kind, accusing him of hypocrisy.”

  6. “someone who campaigns for anyone to be allowed to publish a photographer’s work without permission”

    That’s an oversimplification of Doctorow’s view, which is far more nuanced. I don’t agree with Doctorow on copyright issues, but the above is not a fair characterization of his thoughts on this.

    If anyone’s interested, you can see his responses to critics that call him a hypocrite in the comments here: http://boingboing.net/2011/08/16/daily-mail-rips-off-my-wifes-photo-after-asking-permission-and-being-turned-down.html and here: http://www.jeremynicholl.com/blog/2011/08/22/boing-cory-doctorow%E2%80%99s-daily-mail-copyright-clanger/

  7. Hi Erik
    I love it when some barrack room lawyer type pulls me up on a point of splitting hairs … that’s what I thought we are about … defining what and what is not permissible
    I read it and it said
    Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).”
    If you are going to play by a certain rules then play by them … don’t then say … Welll they might say that but mean this … confusion rains and we all get wet…
    I have both worked as a photographer for 26 years and as a picture editor on a busy major UK newspaper
    If I find it difficult to gather the info in a short time knowing the industry then how the hell can we expect those who are new/busy/under pressure in the complex world of modern media to do the same … think about it … I’m sorry if you find my inquire so below your incredible intellect …

    • @Justin: I don’t think Erik was being confrontational at all, just trying to distill down what the ‘Attribution’ part of Creative Commons means.

      For a really quick, easy to digest overview of how Creative Commons is designed to work, this four page comic is genuinely excellent:
      http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Spectrumofrights_Comic1

      (I’m a big fan of Scott Mccloud’s ‘Understanding Comics’ and think the above is a great way to present the information.) As that should hopefully explain, CC licenses are NOT “licenses that allow photographers’ work to be used without permission” like Jeremy says in his blog post, they’re actually a mechanism to allow you to grant certain permissions while retaining other restrictions. Personally, I’m largely ambivalent about Creative Commons, but I think their licenses try to achieve an admirable goal, and I have used them for some images (such as artist portraits on Wikipedia).

      In a nutshell, what Jeremy has done wrong is not put any attribution (credit) whatsoever on the photo he’s used. To comply with this particular Creative Commons license, he could change the caption below the image to “Cory Doctorow: serious about copyright. Photo: Ed Schipul / Creative Commons” and hyperlink ‘Ed Schipul’ to Ed’s Flickr page (or website) and link the ‘Creative Commons’ bit to the particular license that Ed used on the Creative Commons website.

      This would mean that a) people know that Ed Schipul took the photo (so they could hire him, for instance, or contact him to ask what other shots of Cory Doctorow he has) and b) by linking to the license it tells other people how they themselves can use this particular image (say that they, too, want to write a blog post about the topic, reading the license would tell them that they could use it, within the licenses conditions).

      Anyway, I hope that helps. Oh, like Kai over in the comments at Jeremy’s blog, I also took a look through your website – you’ve got some exceptionally great photos up there! Get in touch if you ever find yourself taking shots of motorbikes at the TT races, or Top Gear film here again (Mr. Clarkson & his wife have a house here – she’s Manx), I’ll buy you a pint.

      • ManxStef wrote:

        “In a nutshell, what Jeremy has done wrong is not put any attribution (credit) whatsoever on the photo he’s used. To comply with this particular Creative Commons license, he could change the caption below the image to “Cory Doctorow: serious about copyright. Photo: Ed Schipul / Creative Commons” and hyperlink ‘Ed Schipul’ to Ed’s Flickr page (or website) and link the ‘Creative Commons’ bit to the particular license that Ed used on the Creative Commons website.”

        There’s so much wrong stuff there it’s hard to know where to begin; it would help if you would read what the CC license actually says, rather than what you want to believe it says.

        Firstly, the license makes no reference whatsoever to linking to the author’s flickr page, website or indeed anywhere else that might lead to the author. I agree that would be a sensible mandatory component of such a license, but the fact remains that it simply doesn’t exist.

        Secondly, the only link the license suggests is a link to the CC license page itself as a way to make clear to others the license terms of the work: I have already done this.

        Thirdly, as I’ve written before, the license states that I must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author. But in this case the author has been too lazy, careless or ignorant of the license terms to specify how the work should be attributed. It’s rather difficult for an end user to attribute an image as an author wishes if that author doesn’t bother to say what his wishes are.

        I’m not just going out of my way to be rude to the author. On the contrary, I actually went out of my way to find out how he wished to be attributed. How? By looking at the metadata in the downloaded image. That’s where any serious photographer puts their contact details & publishing requirements: it’s just standard operating procedure. And guess what? There was no metadata. Before you jump to conclusions, this is not a “flickr stripping data” issue. I have images on flickr & the data is intact; this is a simple case of the author not bothering to put any data in.

        It’s very hard for me to take seriously a photographer who can’t be bothered to embed basic data in an image or specify – as required by CC – how he should be attributed. Put bluntly, his behaviour shows he simply doesn’t care enough about the work to take even the most elementary steps to protect it.

        Having said all that, I probably will get around to putting a credit on the picture later, but that’s just a simple courtesy to the author. I don’t see any way that it’s actually required given how the author has mishandled the license.

        One final – and quite amazing – detail. The CC license you see on the web is not the entire license: there is a hidden, invisible clause. I know that sounds incredible, but you can check it yourself, just as I discovered it by accident. Go to the license page, copy it into a text app, and you will see an extra paragraph relating to attribution that is invisible on the web page.

        I find it quite extraordinary that CC can manage to publish a license in which all the information is not visible: that seems to speak volumes about the organisation’s incompetence.

        • You can’t just ignore terms of the licence that you don’t like. If a conventional licensing deal specifies that I must pay a certain amount of money to use a photo, I don’t get to decide that I don’t have the money, so I’ll just use it anyway. If you really feel that you cannot give suitable attribution, as required by the CC licence, then you are not meeting the requirements necessary to use the picture under CC terms, so you simply have no licence to use it.

          You may be correct that it’s actually impossible to meet the requirements, but that doesn’t make them go away.

          • Ewan, I pretty much agree with all of that. But if you’ve got a minute, please go to the blog post, click on the image, read the license terms, then come back and tell me what, if any, parts of the license terms I haven’t met.

        • “There’s so much wrong stuff there it’s hard to know where to begin; it would help if you would read what the CC license actually says, rather than what you want to believe it says.”

          Firstly, it would help if you’d noticed my use of ‘could’ – “he *could* change the caption” – which was entirely deliberate. I didn’t say *must*, because I was merely suggesting a possible form of attribution that would (more than) comply with the license. If you *had* noticed this, perhaps you’d have avoided your incorrect supposition that I’ve not read the short and long form Creative Commons licenses before, or your sarcastic ‘rather than what you want to believe it says.’

          Secondly, I’m fully aware that linking to the creator’s website/flickr page is not a requirement – unless they actually say that it is, which is the whole point of the ‘in the manner specified by the author’ part of CC Attribution – it’s simply a common courtesy to make finding more of his work and how to contact him easier. Forgive me for not suggesting the absolute bare minimum required to comply with with license, I thought we were all about being courteous and generous to other photographers here.

          Thirdly, is it really that much of a logical leap to conclude that if a creator hasn’t provided specific attribution wording, then you should just put their name in the credit?

          You rail against the photographer, are rude about him and question his seriousness because of his lack of EXIF info (uploaded in 2007, so maybe it was a Flickr stripping issue, or one of the many uploading tools at the time that mangled EXIF), say he didn’t do enough to protect his work, say you can’t take him seriously but that you *went out of your way* to find how he’d like to be attributed – even though his name is all over his Flickr page, where you mention you found the photo, and he has contact info in his Profile – but then you don’t even put his name in a caption? And then you flippantly say ‘I probably will get around to putting a credit on the picture later, but that’s just a simple courtesy to the author’? Unbelievable. Have you stopped to consider that maybe the problem here does not lie with the photographer whose work you still haven’t attributed?

  8. Actually it was attributed some time before you posted this; I guess it just suits you to ignore that.

    You’re upset that I question the photographer’s seriousness. Since I wrote my earlier comment I’ve seen his profile, which you also say you’ve read. You will therefore be aware that he says: “Photography is a hobby so I definitely try not to take this stuff too seriously.”

    I guess it just suited you to ignore that also.

    • My apologies, I only just noticed. But adding credit a day after the fact, after belligerently arguing to the contrary, then somehow trying to claim moral superiority, is ridiculous.

      I’m not upset, I just find you continual ad-hominem attacks distasteful. Never-the-less, thank you for properly attributing the man’s photograph and complying with his licensing terms.

  9. Oh snap!

    Awesome to see Leslie Burns “burn” Doctorow.

    Like many things in life, when one follows the money, the path seems more obvious. Doctorow comes across as cheap and greedy.


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