When is a stolen photo not a stolen photo?
Earlier this week I was just about to post an item to del.icio.us, when I came to a shuddering and furious halt. No, not because the post I was about to bookmark was giving away the python code to break the captcha of my favourite social bookmarking service, but because of the header image on the Blue Hat SEO blog.
It was one of my pictures from my travels around Europe a couple of years back!
Now, I was sure that it was probably under a Creative Commons licence on Flickr, but I think it also required attribution, and I scrabbled around on the Blue Hat site furiously looking for my credit.
Failing to find it, spluttering with outrage, and mentally composing a stinging rebuke email, I started trying to track down the image on Flickr. Given that I only have a very slow dial-up connection at home here in Greece, that took around 15 minutes, until I remembered that it must be in my set of my favourite images from our travels.
And lo and behold, there it was - a man wearing a small rucksack with his back to the camera, as a metro train sped by....oh hang on...it is a completely different photo after all...just a bit of a co-incidence in the composition resulting in 15 minutes and some moral outrage wasted. D'oh!
Glad to hear I didn't steal your image. It's actually a default template that comes with wordpress called Fast Track
No worries. I'm sure that I must have seen the theme lots of times, it was just the other night it set off whatever synapse remembers my own picture from Berlin. Plus I thought it worth mentioning as your blog deserved more than a passing del.icio.us bookmark.
That's funny, I can see how you would do a double take.