On the Ethics of Linking to Stolen Photos #
Fair warning: this is a useless rant about petty theft of novelty art by people who may not see their actions as such. It will not change any opinions and offers no solutions.
I like these dead fly drawings. They’re clever and fun and if I had reams of disposable income I’d maybe even spend money buying one. And I’d love if you saw them and had those 45 seconds of “wow, that’s pretty clever.”
But here’s the thing: I can’t find a single website posting them that doesn’t feel seedy. Not a single page I’ve found that displays these pictures gives any mention to who created them. Not a single one even offers a perfunctory “If you know where these came from, please tell us so that we can give credit.” None even offer that the original artist was probably Swedish. And clearly none of them are stretching what they’re comfortable with ethically to accommodate these uncredited pictures.
Almost all of them are clearly pageview-whores, who are desperately seeking a pittance of advertising revenue by stealing as much content as they can without receiving a cease-and-desist. Linking to them feels at best like shirking my responsibilities to anyone who reads this.
But sometimes the content of such photos seems novel or interesting enough to merit display. Stealing it again it hardly a solution. And pointing to it is merely a lesser sin. So I sometimes do but mostly don’t.
All that said — this is a linkblog after all — and to illustrate that point, all the places I found at least five of these images without any hint of a faint desire for attribution in under five minutes of looking:
- AcidCow
- Australia’s Courier Mail (In their defense, they cite another obvious thief.)
- On Blogger: 1 (this is the one cited by the above, God knows why), 2
- One Large Prawn
- The Chive
UPDATE (10/14/09): Drawn.ca asked the right question and found out the answer. Mangus Muhr (who is indeed Swedish) is the original artist. (via Austin Kleon)