I picked up a copy of the latest Boston Phoenix on my way to work this morning, and found this article about Dorkbot Boston, the multimedia art collective Noah and I belong to (whose tagline is "people doing strange things with electricity"). Looks like they were writing-up the Halloween show to promote the Presidents Day show DB has planned for the 19th. While it was good to see DB finally getting some press, it was *bad* to see that they had used a pilfered picture of Noah's Flora Mortis to advertise it.
Bad for two reasons.
First off, the article itself mentioned nothing of Noah's project, not even in the list-three-examples-of-dorkbot-projects-in-order-to-give-the-reader-a-feel-of-
what-it's -all-about line. Which is kind of a slap in the face, I think. I find it hard to believe that the author couldn't come up with a succinct caption that would explain the piece pictured, and as far as the printed version of the article goes, there was plenty of room to have done so.
Secondly: what? No credit to Noah? As an artist first-and-foremost, but, I mean, failing that, they could have at least been decent enough to credit the photographer (in this case, also the artist). I think she was just being lazy. I mean, the photo that was lifted from his flickr account wasn't even taken at the Dorkbot show-- it's actually a photo of his submission mounted in his bedroom as he was working on it. The journalist didn't even have to be at the event: the contextual discrepancy (a picture taken in someone's own bedroom as opposed to at the actual event) is only one manifestation of a growing trend.
So essentially, it's okay for journalists to outsource, or rather crowdsource, key aspects of their jobs to the population at large. And for the most part, I'm all for it. But just because his photos are part of the Make pool doesn't make them fair game. This was definitely an example of the typically good-natured 2.0/copyfighting/Creative Commons community being taken advantage of by the media we loyally support. Better luck next time.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
The Phoenix stole Noah's picture!
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1 comment:
The Senior Editor has just apologized and promised to update the photo with an attribution/link.
To hear him say it, it sounds as though my flickr URLs were provided to the writer as sources she could use, so this may have been the result of an intra-Dorkbot confusion.
Thanks for the hype, though, and this doesn't diminish your points about crowdsourcing or attribution in general. When I was searching the flickr help forums to see if this was also a violation of their terms of use (it sort of is, except this photo is also on my own site), I found many instances of other users appropriating photos but few mentions of a for-profit company doing it.
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