As some of you  know, I’ve recently started taking photos more enthusiastically. I’ve always been half-heartedly interested in this stuff, but eventually I bit the bullet and bought a Nikon D40 for $260 and a couple of lenses for another $400. Those of you who have already looked at my photos will be aware that they’re not, by and large, very good. Hey. I’d probably have spent the money on beer otherwise.

One of the more fun things about getting involved in photos has been getting involved in Flickr. Whenever I look at my photos on Flickr I can see how many views they have had, who added them as favourites, et cetera. As always with new hobbies (or dental mouth guards), I discovered that everyone I knew was already doing this Flickr thing.

And what was the great achievement that a Flickr photographer should aspire to? Ahah! That will be getting on “Explore“. Explore is a collection of the most interesting photos on Flickr – they take a thousand per day, I believe. The picking algorithm is kept a closely-guarded secret by Flickr staff. Of all my photography-enthusiast chums, I believe only two of them (Dougerino and AlexBrn) have gotten a photo onto Explore. There’s no way, therefore, that I am going to get into Explore by using my raw photography talent.

I decided, instead, to work out what the algorithm was. That seems like something I’d be better at. Well, after nothing more scientific than a couple of hours of buggering about refreshing the Explore page, I can officially announce here that I’ve got it sorted out. I am going to go out and deliberately take a picture that will get on Explore. I even have a pencil drawing of a couple of possible variants, and a prop set aside.

Why haven’t I done it yet? Well, obviously I wanted to make the prediction first, dimmy, as it otherwise wouldn’t make any sense.

Also I am not going to take it until the end of October, when I will have two more required props at hand. I will post this photo on Flickr sometime around the 5th of November, after which it will get into Explore. If it’s not in by the end of the year, I will be willing to call this prediction a failure.

More to come, of course, but the gauntlet is laid down. It’s on, Flickr. It’s on.

Like any other mobile phone owner, I occasionally take photographs of things that I find amusing. Often, like other irritating pedants, these are linguistic mistakes. More often than not, they involve things in quotations. These just languish on my phone… when I get a new phone, I copy them to it, and then they languish there instead. Occasionally after a few beers I get into one of those “everyone show each other the funny pictures from their phone” sessions, which is the only time they get an outing. Well, not now. Now I’m giving them to the world!

And, well, here they all are. They’re from a mixture of countries and date back to 2000 or so. Perhaps I’ll start a brand new collection, and blog about that in 2020.

That’s all, folks. Get back to work.

The purpose of having a blog, as we all know, is to complain about stuff in an acerbic fashion without proposing solutions. Today, we’re going to talk about SOPA.

SOPA, as we all know, is a bill going through the the House of Representatives in the United States right now. It is intended to stop online plagiarism of intellectual property of various sorts, and proposes implementing this by allowing the police to delete Wikipedia,  shoot internet service providers on sight, and detain potential suspects without trial indefinitely. No, wait, that was something else. Well, you get the general idea. It’s not a very well thought-through bill and I hope it fails.

SOPA inspires me to become grumpy about two things. Firstly, I’ve heard several times that this bill is being forced through by the film industry, who are incapable of waking up to a reality of digital distribution. And, of course, Viacom, Warner Brothers et cetera are all supporters of SOPA. It’s certainly true that these companies stand to make money if SOPA passes. But the list of companies that oppose SOPA isn’t a list of companies that have the best interests of the glorious internet close to their cute little altruistic hearts. It’s just an equivalent list of organisations that will lose money if this passes. It’s the companies who’ll have to spend a ton of money vetting user content, screening their output and adding infrastructure for reporting and monitoring. Facebook, Microsoft, Google, et al. The fact that some of these companies had the muscle to black out a chunk of the internet on January 18th is something of a confusing message, but I think we should disregard the corporate sponsors on either side and think about the bill itself.

The second thing I’m grumpy about is the fact that there’s far too much online piracy, and the death of this bill will probably mean the continuation of that. People justify ripping off films, music and software because they’re just taking it from a big company and they’re all bastards anyway. And I can see why that justification is socially acceptable most of the time. But this rampant stealing from “the man” has left people my age with a similar disdain for intellectual property rights in general. How many of us have needed a picture of two rabbits having sex for a work presentation, Googled “rabbits having sex“, taken the first image and stuck it in the presentation? Sure, it probably belonged to someone and they had some blah on their site about attribution but it’s only a presentation and, hey, they put it on the internet for heaven’s sake, what do they expect? My generation is habitually stealing this sort of content with only the merest hint of shame.

What I only really realised this week is that people younger than me are doing this with no idea that it could actually be wrong.

My friend Doug takes pretty nice photos. He doesn’t do it professionally, and he states on his web page that you can use his photos for noncommercial purposes as long as you give attribution, and should contact him for commercial use. He’s a nice sort of a chap. I suspect his total income from this has been less than the price of a nice lens. Doug doesn’t go off looking for stolen copies of his photos, but he’s a good enough photographer that he or his fans regularly just come across them.

 Doug’s most stolen photograph is probably this one. It was turned into this by a gentleman, who unashamedly added a copyright message for himself and then posted it all over the internet. This week it was posted on one of those “funny thing every day” Facebook pages – Doug spotted it, and pointed out that it was his stolen picture. The usual mixture of YouTube-style comments (from both sides) followed, but what really struck me was a comment from the original poster who was incredulous that someone could be so “up-tight” about “A FUNNY PICTURE POSTED ON THE INTERNET”. This hit a raw nerve for me – I was kind of okay with us having a society that ripped off each other’s internet content the whole time, but we’re breeding a society that has no awareness that this is even wrong.

Ten years ago or so, I used to occasionally search for plagiarised versions of my own web site. I’d send them an email asking them to link to my actual site as well, and they’d normally reply saying they were happy to. I thought I’d have another look today, so I searched for a reasonably distinctive phrase which appears in my definition of “bollocks”. Rather disappointingly, my own site is the third result after copy-pasted versions on The Urban Dictionary and DictionarySlang.com. Other highlights were a Facebook page which seems to consist of nothing other than unattributed chunks of my book, several copy-pastes of swathes of my site content and the rather glorious version of my entire paper book that the Chinese search engine Baidu has, complete with a handy reader app, some colour added and “Mr_doody2004@yahoo.com” carefully written in the footer. Sorry to disappoint, ladies, but this is not my email address.

 

Shall I mail all these people asking them to attribute me? Probably not, because there’s every chance these days that these are people who are genuinely unaware of such a thing as copyright (well, except for Baidu). If I did this now I’d probably get incredulous replies wondering why on earth I’d try to shut down funny stuff posted on the internet.

People ripping off Doug’s photos and my book doesn’t really make a difference to the world.   Although we both make a little money from our enterprises, we’re not trying to make an income and we’d both still do it if there was no money at all. But what about my sister, Joanna, who is trying to start a career as a professional photographer? What about my friend Nick, who makes a living writing online Excel training?

As I mentioned towards the beginning, I have no solution to this problem. Maybe it’s not SOPA, but we need something to teach our kids that going to a web site and hitting Ctrl-C is the same as going to the library, selecting a book, taking it home and starting typing from it verbatim.