Getting it wrong – Twice
Browsing through the Straits Times this morning, I came across a photograph that was attributed to “flickr.com”:
Attributing the photo this way is wrong in a couple of ways:
1. Flickr is not the organization that “owns” these photos, it’s merely hosting them.
2. If the photo was licensed under a Creative-Commons license, the Straits Times should have attributed the photographer in the article, under the terms of the license.
I decided to look up who had posted this photo on Flickr to determine which license the photo had been made available under – that’s when it got really puzzling.
I couldn’t locate this image on Flickr and it was only when I broadened my search to Google that I located this image:
Blog post with original image.
Looking through the source of the page, I can’t find any link to Flickr – only to a Japanese-language webpage that has very little information.
So it appears that not only has the Straits Times screwed up how attribution should be done for photos taken from Flickr, they have actually sourced the image from some other website and forgotten to link to the correct website.
This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on March 21, 2009 at 5:57 pm antrix wrote:
On a completely random note: you need a macro lens
on March 22, 2009 at 1:18 pm Balaji wrote:
antrix: And here I am thinking I managed a reasonable approximation of macro shooting with my dinky toy-camera
on March 23, 2009 at 10:39 am Adamu wrote:
As the original blog poster, I feel I should explain:
If I recall correctly, I found that image through Google Image Search at a time when my blogging skills were much less refined. I certainly should have attempted to attribute the photo as accurately as possible, but as of now I couldn’t say where it came from.
on March 24, 2009 at 10:25 am Balaji wrote:
Adamu – thanks for clarifying. It seems to me that the Straits Times have grabbed the image from your site. Even if it isn’t clear where the image originated from based on your blog post, at the very least they could have given attribution to your site. Instead they have linked to Flickr (which is wrong) where this image isn’t even available (even worse!).