Tawiskaro wrote:
Every once in a blue moon I punch some of my images into the TineEye reverse image search. One image I check is:
Quite some time ago Anfa came across it on a Christian website and passed his discovery along to me. I contacted the Reverend Whoever running the site and asked him to remove it or give me a credit line. He removed it. Good for him.
I ran "Golgotha" through TinEye this evening and was surprised to see more than 60 hits returned. Several are duplicates. Several are from defunct web pages. A fair number are atheist blogs or message boards. The majority are Christian websites.
Maybe it's just me, but I expect better from professing Christians--and atheists. "Thou shalt not steal" is a pillar of the faith (and should be for the faithless), after all. I suspect it is ignorance in most cases. What's really annoying is that some of these people have modified the image.
I was going to send e-mails to some of these abusers, including one in Australia and another in Greece, but the Australian offered only a public comment access, and the translation to Greek proved too time consuming. One site, indulgy.com, makes it painless for schlubs everywhere to upload images. It also makes it a serious pain in the ass to report a copyright violation. In the end I said, "Screw it."
It's probably a case of closing the barn door after the horse has galloped off, but I slapped a watermark on the image and modified the caption.
Has anyone else (besides Anfa) experienced this?
.
Yeah, I have no clue why people think it's ok to just use any image in this way. It's not just in Christian circles. It happens anywhere.
I know I've used images that are copyrighted before, back when I was a little less enlightened to how copyrights work. It is very confusing, to be fair to all the people who used your image. Some forms of reuse fall under the Fair Use policy, others do not, and the waters can get kinda muddy.
If one isn't sure, either don't use the image, get permission from the original creator, or
at least give credit to the original artist (the latter really only being an option if the reuse falls under the "Faire Use" policy).