Love this story about a photo, taken by a nice American family for their Christmas cards and shared on the net, getting ripped off and used in a shop window in Prague.
As we share more and more of our personal lives on the web this kind of
thing is bound to happen more often. A quick Google image search for 'family' and you get a whole host of suitable shots. People crave visual stimulation and it's tempting to just use the ones you find online. And not everyone will ask first, like the producers of Iron Man did.
I tried to navigate the confusion of the Creative Commons framework for copyright and gave up. I'm assuming most people don't know about it, or don't understand it either.
That said, if I'm walking down Bratislava High Street and I see a photo of me in a shop window, I like to think I'd be chuffed.
3 comments:
Bratislava is in the Slovak Republic, and there's no High Street per se.
And everyone there is grumpy! At least they were when I visited last December. I tried not to take it personally.
There is a serious point behind this and that's the "different country" thing. I've got to know a little about the cultural differences that still exist between us here in the West and the former Eastern Bloc countries.
I'm sure it wouldn't cross many people's minds there to even question why they shouldn't lift an image off the web and use it.
As broad a generalisation as that is, it's based on my visit there and converstaions about this sort of thing I had with people in Slovakia and Slovaks here in the UK - not a conclusion I arrived at after reading teh Dally Mail!
I know - just chose another Eastern European example. Was trying to be comedic with the 'High Street' comment...
Good point. Cultural differences, particularly the understanding of intellectual property and copyright, are often to blame in these cases.
I was attempting to send myself up a little being uber-pedantic! :-)
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