Words to Lyrics Ben Ho's observations from the cloud

So yesterday was a relatively free night. Therefore, I spent some time looking around on Facebook at people’s photos. Only several minutes later, I noticed some pictures that I had taken on people’s profiles. This triggered a big thought.

I hate the photo nickers.

Now, I am a big believer of photographer’s rights. All the photos on my flickr are licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA. That means that you can use this photo for whatever you want, as long as you don’t make any money from it (unless you ask me) and you license your work the same. I believe that creativity is something that should be shared by everyone for them to enjoy. Almost in the same spirit that photographers have when it comes to sharing techniques.

The copyright laws in major countries around the world state that every self-made work is copyrighted immediately. So technically if you use a photo from a website where no copyright notice is placed, you are breaking the law. It’s that simple.

Anyway, back to the point. A good example of this was the recent Europe tour that our school choir and orchestra did last December. We had website (run by yours truly), with photos from some of the students, plus our tour guide, who is an accomplished photographer. Now, people nick these photos and dump them on Facebook or some other site, and people treat it as if they took that massively sharp and beautiful shot. There’s no recognition either!! I find that a bit disrespectful, really. It saddens me that people treat photos like that silly shot of your cat or dog. They don’t respect the hard work and effort that someone has put into composing and taking that shot.

There is my short-lived rant. I hope you understand to look into the copyright status of photos if you want to use them, then give the photographers credit where credit is due!