I enjoy Moose Peterson’s photography and blog. He’s a great photographer and an interesting writer. However, he recently changed the way he embeds photos to “better protect them”. Instead of a simple image embed, he’s now using Flash.
We’ve made some changes here on the blog that you might not have noticed. The images are now being posted as Flash. This is curtosey of my bud Roger,RC (of Layers fame who also created the Moose Gallery) and of course my longtime webmistress Jan. We’ve gone to this because it offers the greatest amount of protection for the images in a web environment. (Oh yeah, forgot to mention, might mess up RSS feeds too.)
I’m not sure what he’s protecting exactly by using Flash for a tiny 350 pixel wide image?
I totally respect his rights as a photographer — that he owns the pictures he’s taken and he doesn’t want others to use them. But, hiding them in Flash just makes the honest people more honest … if you want to steal the tiny image, it’s still REAALY easy to do.
I’ve intentionally distorted the section of the blog containing the image and rotated it to show it’s so easy to do (I used SnagIt 9). It took me a total of 10 seconds to do the fancy work. It would have taken less if I just wanted to grab the bear.
(image and content owned by Moose — clipped here for editorial demonstration and distorted as an example)
What impact does this have on me? Well, as suggested in the quote above, the new technique is causing my RSS Reader of choice (Google Reader) to not show any of his beautiful images. And that’s a big loss!
I’d still recommend his web site and content nonetheless … but here’s to hoping he can find a better way to “protect” his images while retaining the ability for RSS readers to show the photography.
.
Thanks for the kind words and proof that my Paranoia is well founded. Here’s a prime example of my image, that’s right, a registered image having its copyright clearly and publicly violated and by a technique that shows clear intent of violation of that copyright in action. No mistake about it, you stole my image. Your impressive ten second grab could, if I wanted to push the button, cost you lots of money. That’s not the point. I simply am tired of dealing with theft on a daily basis and want simply to share what is mine and have it remain mine. I don’t take photos to lock them up on hard drives but to share. Why don’t folks get that simple intent? Thanks for proving my paranoia, couldn’t have done better job of it had I tried.
Moose Peterson