While browsing CNET News.com this evening, I saw that one of the lead stories featured John Battelle. The photo of John looked eerily familiar, but I haven't talked with anybody from CNET in a long time about using a photo. Still, even though I've taken a bajillion photos of John Battelle, I couldn't shake the nagging feeling that it might be one of mine. It was like an odd kind of deja-vu feeling.

After a few minutes, I went over to Flickr and browsed through all of my images. And, sure enough, I found it. It's an image I took of John at Web 2.0 in 2005. Damn.

Of course, I was curious to see where CNET had picked up the image from. After all, on the Flickr page, it's clearly marked as "Copyright, All Rights Reserved". So, I dug a bit deeper. On a wild guess based on previous experience, I went to John Battelle's page on Wikipedia. Sure enough, there it is.

Now, Wikipedia only accepts images under certain licenses and they do try to make sure that they have some sort of record of what's what. On this particular photo, they have a page with a larger sized image along with the fact that Wikipedia obtained this image under the Creative Commons Attribution license. That sounds about right. I used the CC-BY license for a little while before switching off to the CC-BY-NC license and then removing my work from CC licensing altogether last year. Kudos to Wikipedia for keeping track of such things, even if they do bury attribution behind a link which I think is improper.

If CNET picked up this image from Wikipedia, then they forgot to give the required attribution. This wouldn't be surprising in the least, however. You actually have to look pretty hard to find on the Wikipedia image page to find the attribution and the CC-BY license statement. And that attribution doesn't even appear on the page about John Battelle which makes it even harder to know that the image is subject to an attribution requirement. Given the fact that I've tracked down many case of misuse of my photographs from people picking them up from Wikipedia and thinking that they are in the public domain, my money is that this is the likely scenario.

Another possible, though remote, scenario could have been that CNET was given the photograph by John Battelle, Federated Media, or one of the companies I work with when shooting the Web 2.0 Conferences. However, they've always been very good about making sure that they adhere to the agreements that I provide images to them under. As well, it'd be pretty coincidental of them to hand over the very same image that appears on Wikipedia, especially since that image is several years old now and, frankly, they've got much better ones at their fingertips. In any case, I emailed John and he quickly replied that he wasn't the source of the image. He followed up with his assistant who indicated that she had sent the credited photo that appears in the article, but not the photo that appeared on the front page. So, that pretty much closes that line of thought.

What are my next steps? Well, I'll be sending off a few emails to figure out what happened for sure and to inform CNET that there is an attribution requirement on that photograph. In the scheme of things, however,even if everything happened the way I think it did, there's not too much that can be done about it beyond correcting the attribution. The reason is that this is one of many images I've taken over the years that hasn't been registered with the US Copyright Office. Without that registration, my options are fairly constrained. (Note: my more recent images are being registered with the US Copyright Office which vastly increases the options available when a photo is misused. I may have been a chump in the past, but no more...)

In short, however, this is just another small example of a bigger problem that we as a society that produces and consumes content have to sort out on many levels. If you produce any number of photographs and place them on the web, you're going to run into them too at some point. Even if you use a license as permissive as the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Update 3/24 AM: I've edited this blog post as a result of my query to John Battelle on the issue confirming that the misused image wasn't sourced through Federated Media. I've also heard back from Dan Farber, Editor in Chief of News.com who said that he's forwarded my note to the news editors. As of this morning, the image no longer appears on the front page of News.com.

Update 3/24 PM: I've now heard back from an editor at CNET and received confirmation that the image was indeed sourced from Wikipedia. The reply indicated that a "newly hired staff member had found the photo on Wikipedia and, not fully up-to-speed on all the licensing niceties, thought it a reasonable image to pick up."

Indeed, it would have been a reasonable image to pick up if they had followed the license as indicated on Wikipedia. Furthermore, It's interesting that in almost every case of this kind of misuse, the blame always ends up being on a newly hired staffer. But I digress... The email went on to indicate that the photo will not be used on News.com again as the story won't make another appearance on the home page of the site. Because it won't make an appearance, the opportunities for attribution are limited.

While the CNET staffer should have seen the Creative Commons Attribution requirements, this exact scenario has happened often enough that Wikipedia needs to seriously reevaluate their methods of attribution. It is obvious that image attribution and license requirements aren't prominent enough the way they currently have things structured.

Update 3/25: CNET has published a correction on their site.

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