Social Media, Image Theft & Naive Cock-Jockeys
Saturday, April 29th, 2017
To share or not to share. It’s not even a question. I share a lot of erotic pictures on social media. Both contemporary and vintage. And, yes, I’ve shared a hell of a lot of images that lack the photographer/model credit.
But I’m not going to change my ways because some simple-minded cock-jockey asserts every unattributed photograph is a direct act of theft. If they think that I’m a thief then they seriously misunderstand images on the World Wide Web. And the nature of social media in general.
As an amateur photographer I do understand the desire (even need) for attribution. Intellectual Property is a serious issue. However, people also need to understand how (particularly vintage) pictures wind up online in the first instance.
Step one usually entails an unpaid entity scanning and uploading a picture to social media. If that person fails to acknowledge the publication the picture was scanned from, the photographer who made the picture, or the subject matter… it is beyond my control to easily discover that information from the image.
