In my last post I was talking about a problem with a guy using some of my pics to advertise his club without permission.

Thankfully all is fixed now, as you can see in this photo.

The guy answered to my IM apologizing and saying he replaced the texture on the signs, of course I teleported to the place where were the signs and that’s what I saw.

He said me that he found the images on Internet (they are published in Flickr, but that two with a copyright license) and liked them a lot, so decided to use them. Of course all is OK now, I mean, the guy did what he had to do, but all that makes me think about sometimes all we download and even use images or stuff we find in Internet, because is cool or we just like it, forgetting that, possibly, all of them are protected with a copyright or some kind of license.

I don’t know too much about legal stuff, but for me is OK if someone wants to download one of my pics to his computer for private use, I mean, as desktop background or something like that. For me the problem is the commercial use, but again, I presume that legally even “private use download” is not right.

Thief!, originally uploaded by Raul Crimson.

Yesterday I was working on a project when my friend FiDa Pau IM’ed me. After talking for a while about this and that he asked me if I was modelling a lot lately. I was confussed for the question, then he told me he was exploring the grid to find some rental homes and he found a place where they had some pics of me.

In the first moment I thought it may be some of the framed images I have in some gallery for sale, but anyway I asked him to TPme.

And when i arrived I saw THIS. That guy was using not one but TWO of my images to advertise a Gay Club, of course, without my permission.

The images are copyrighted and published in Flickr, as you can see here and here.

I asked the guy to delete the images as soon as possible, talking about my rights over them, and i really hope he will delete them. That is the reason to blur a bit the name of the club and not to say (for the moment) the name of the “image thief”.

What pisses me off is just that if someone ask permission to use one of my pics I normally say yes (except if it is for commercial porposes, then i say yes after talking about money), so before using the pics he may ask.

Of course i understand that some people is having really BIG problems with “content thiefs”, and mine is just a small problem. The point is that he was not just downloading the pics to his computer because he liked them, or using them as frames at his virtual home (I can understand this kind of “personal” use, even is not legal either), he downloaded my pictures, edited them a bit, and uses them for commercial porposes (advertise, in this case), and that’s wrong.

Thanks to all the people that shown his support, it was really helping, because yesterday I was feeling upset and sad, all that support helped me to feel not alone.

UPDATE (Apr, 01 2008): Yay!! All fixed, take a look at next post to see the solution.