Jeff Thought It would Be Cool To Steal Content, Now Jeff Looks Like an Idiot
For the last few weeks Tim King has been providing some great wallpapers. Tim offers these wallpapers free for personal use under a creative commons licence. Now before he started this he also did a few others. This being one of them. Now personal means non-commercial and not on a web page. MySpace does not fit this category at all. So Tim was a bit pissed when he found out that some guy on MySpace has ripped off one of his wallpapers and used it as a background for his page. Not only that he is leaching the page directly from Tim’s server.
Now not only is this bloke breaking the law with a blatant copyright violation he is stupid. Because the image that he is using is on Tim’s server, Tim has made a few modifications to the image. It now reads: “I AM A CONTENT STEALING WHORE”. Nice one Tim, I love your work.
The irony in all this is that if the bloke had actually approached Tim and asked permission to use the image I am sure that Tim would have considered it, especially if he was intending to give credit to the author and a link. I will use a good example. We here at the Global Geek approached a musician for permission to use part of a song in our promo for the show, which was freely given. Creators of content usually don’t mind their stuff being used as long as they receive the credit for it.
Now the second lesson in all this is that it is just plain rude to not only steal content but then to leach the image off a server that you don’t own or have permission to use! This guy is lucky that all’s Tim did is change the wording of the image. If it was me I would have put a giant set of testicles on it, as well as the text! By the way that goes for any image that you intend to use, download it (with permission) and host it yourself. Not only does that give you complete control over your content, it also means that if the image changes location or is substituted your site doesn’t change with it.
Moral of the story is don’t steal content you don’t own. Right about now JEFFREY MENDOZA is looking like an idiot. Tim has also blogged this, take a look at his take and then have a look at this idiot’s site. Be quick though I am sure once he notices it will change.
The world is full of idiots and they give the rest of us a bad name. Hopefully for this dude it will be lesson learned, but probably not. It also demonstrates some fundamental differences between bloggers and MySpacers - just have to read the comments on the Digg story to see that images that are “just found” on the Internet are Okay to use.
Please Digg the story, so that Jeff looks really, really cool when it gets to the front page!