I don't think I've ever been the victim of copyright infringement, as far as I know., until today. At least I found out about it today. I was searching around on Technorati and I found a site that was supposedly linking to me. Except all that he was doing was stealing a photograph off this site and putting it on his own without any attribtution. He did link the photo on his site to the actual photo, but all that did was allow me to find him. Amazing.

I'm not going to make any money off this site or the pictures I post here, however my site and all the contents are protected under a Creative Commons License. It's one of the least restrictive copyright options and all it requires is basic attribution. In my world, we call that courtesy.

People ask me to use photos of mine for various things here and there and I always say yes and I would have said yes to this dude, if he asked. But he didn't even bother to do that. Just went ahead and snatched it. It's kinda messed up. Not only that, he didn't even bother to copy the photo and host it on his own server, which I how I caught him. I doubt he gets much traffic, but I don't need to be supporting his bandwidth. That's just totally uncool.

So, please, if you want to use any of my photos or anything else, please 1) ask and 2) credit. It's the right thing to do.