Generosity, (Dis)Honesty and Copyright

For the last couple of decades, I have published my photographs under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-nc-nd licence. This licence allows anyone to reuse the photos as long as they credit and link back to me, without making derivatives, for any non-commerical purpose.

It’s been quite amusing in its own way – I used to get emails via Flickr asking whether someone was “allowed” to use my photos for their blog, to which the answer is “answer already given!”, and favourably so at that. There was also the evening, some time in the Covid-19 Lockdowns of 2020, where a speaker visited a local society to speak about the Environment; I was watching from home via hybrid Zoom and pleasantly surprised when a familiar photo appeared in the middle of the presentation – complete with copyright attribution naming me in the corner – the story-arc of the speaker migrating from the other hemisphere to working as a journalist for the Atlantic to coming to Scotland in order to show me my own photo was amazing.

It’s almost like qualified pre-emptive generosity in a world of “all rights reserved”.

However, I have become aware of commercial uses sneaking in, without organizations having the decency to approach me to negotiate use in advance. To that end, a couple of years ago I signed-up with Pixsy to track uses of photos.

I’ve only checked its “matches” a handful of times, but recently it found a new swathe of image misuses – so I signed-up, paid my £19 and sent off a batch of takedown notices.

There’s also one particularly egregious misuse of one of my photos.

It transpires a company “Kenko Imaging USA” – I won’t give them the credit of a link – are selling a circular polarizer filter, the webpage of which abuses one of my images made in 2016 – not just using it but actively and deceitfully modifying the left half to fake the effect of not using a filter. Needless to say, to my certain knowledge, I have never published such a manipulated image anywhere.

So I went back to Pixsy and tried to use, not the regular “takedown” system but to open a case, as befits commercial exploitation.

Pixsy asked a load of questions concerning whether the image had been licensed via a stock imagery site – it’s listed in a couple of places but has never sold, which was OK with them – but as soon as I said it was available via “a CreativeCommons license” their website refused to allow me to proceed, instead saying that only a “takedown” was possible.

So much for that. Particularly, so much for Pixsy – they want an expensive recurring monthly subscription and are obviously aware of some legal intricacies, but instead choose not to support people relying on CreativeCommons licences. Unsurprisingly, I cancelled my subscription immediately.

Don’t use Pixsy.

And really don’t buy from shady dishonest dealers like “Kenko”!

The real photograph, “Perfect Moment” at Loch Etive, can be purchased as prints and a variety of other products through my website, shiny.photo.