Intellectual Property

An interesting thing happened to me this week.  Red Tricycle is a company that creates free email newsletters for parents in major west coast urban areas, including Portland.  The idea is that they provide a free service by reviewing family-friendly products, services, and businesses, and make money from advertising revenue.  They are never critical of the things they write about, and in most cases, it seems likely that the majority of the content is paid advertising.  They send out emails several times a week, and I usually skim through them because they often mention upcoming family friendly events.  This week, I received one that I didn't bother to read until a friend drew my attention to it.  It had a photo of Jasper in it.  That in itself isn't that unusual.  We attend a lot of public events where pictures are being taken, and it's happened before that he's been pictured on various websites.  What really surprised me was that it was a photo I had taken, from this blog.  Totally without my knowledge.

I emailed them and explained that the photo had been taken from my blog without my permission.  I advised that I would have given permission for this particular use, if a photo credit had been given.  I also said that for the sake of myself and all the other bloggers out there who don't get paid for what we do,  please do us the courtesy of asking next time.  I did receive a quick response  that they would either remove the picture or add a photo credit, and I responded that they could do either.  I will be pleased to see their correction either way.  

Coincidentally, Wanda had a post written for today.  And in it, she was planning to review a couple of books.  Both have illustrations that are very detailed and were very painstakingly created, and she is very fond of both of them. She wanted to show some of the illustrations from both books, to compare the two.  After writing the entire post, she was doublechecking something on the website of one of the authors, and discovered that he clearly states that illustrations from his book are not to be used online for any reason, even for review purposes.  Without hesitation, we decided to trash the entire post.  

Copyright laws and fair use laws can be murky, especially on the internet.  There are confusing differences between what you have a right to do, what you don't have a right to do, and what you can get away with anyway.  Let's just all try to do the right thing.