In the three and a half years that I have been running this website I have on several occasions fallen afoul of copyright issues. Now on almost all occasions the owner of the pics in question has simply contacted me and asked that proper attribution be given to their website as the origin of the picture. Not all however, some website owners have literally chewed me out for using a picture from their site and I am sure they are well within their right to do so. When this occurs I make the amendments immediately, whether that be properly linking in to the website in question, or removing the picture upon request to do so.
Recently I read a comment by Tony Elka in relation to pirated content being posted, however I don’t recall the exact words, so rather than guessing what he said, I will allow him the opportunity to do so should he wish. What I hope to do though is give my take on the issue and some of the responsibilities that blogger’s have when posting pictures. I’m not dictating to anyone here because I am sure I am as guilty as the next person sometimes when I post pics that I am unaware of the origin of, there may even be some in this very post.
These thoughts came to my mind yesterday when I was reading MarQe’s site. He had posted a pic that was of particular interest to me and had he not left the copyright link on the pic then I would never have known where the pic came from. Now because the link was left on the pic I was able to check the website out, and while I did not actually make a purchase, because the link was left on the pic there was a chance that I could have done. An awful lot of pics that are out there have been distributed by commercial websites as part of promotional packages and it is imperative that these pics are not altered. In fact I would go as far as to say that the practice of removing copyrights from pictures is the one area that gives spanking blogger’s perhaps the worst possible impression to commercial website owners.
Now I’m just a simple blogger, one who just happens to have a wealth of thousands of pics to share with the world. As many of you will see I always put my initials on pics that don’t have a commercial website address on them. I don’t do this practice to claim ownership of the pics, many of which have been circulating for years, I do this because I post so many pictures on my various sites that I am unable to keep track of what I have shared. By initialing the pic I am able to know that I have already shared that particular pic and I can file it away as being posted. Without bragging too much I think it is safe to say that I have a vast collection of pics that are rarely seen in the spanking world. Now to tie this in to the paragraph above, within the last week on three occasions there has been this spanking blogger who has altered the pics I have posted to crop out my initials, and has then posted them without the courtesy of attribution as to where the pic was found. This person once stated that he always gives credit when he knows where he got the pic from, yet there can’t actually be any claim here that the knowledge of where the pics came from because he has taken the time to edit out my initials. Not to mention of course these pics are also posted a few days after I have posted them.
In a way I guess that it is pretty flattering that the pics I find are of interest to others to post themselves, however there is obviously a dire lack of courteous behaviour going on by not stating where the pics came from. Especially considering when people such as Chross, Brushstrokes, Spankedhortic amongst many other members of the spanking blogger’s community go out of their way to recognize the work of their fellow blogger’s. Yes, even the blog in question gets its posts linked by Chross, yet this doesn’t provide inspiration to do likewise in return.
At first I thought this was personal because my character has been attacked by this person in the past, even though this individual has not met me in person, but when I look further into the issue it is obvious that I am not alone in not receiving the courtesy of a link when pics I have shared have been used, it happens to other blogger’s as well. All of that brings me back to the original part of my thoughts, and that is content that is shared by commercial website owners.
The 2000’s are no longer like the pics that were scanned from magazines. Most all of the content out there nowadays is the property of commercial website owners. These owners do put out promotional content for promoters such as myself to use, but they do this by knowing that there is a chance their pics will be used elsewhere. That is fine of course, that is a part of selling a product, but how can these companies sell a product when there are individuals out there who crop out the copyrights and website addresses of the owners of the pics. It is a horrific practice and I have no doubt in my mind that I have also posted pics that have been altered without my knowledge. In fact I know for certain I have done this because website owners have contacted me to inform me that I have posted an altered pic. And just so that you know, most of these website owners in turn send me the original, unaltered pic to post in it’s place.
I guess my plea here is for the benefit of the blogging community as a whole, please don’t alter out the website address or the copyright of website owners, it makes the whole blogging community look bad, when in actuality we should be being used as a resource to promote spanking websites. If I was a website owner and I saw my pictures constantly being altered I would be seriously pissed, and if you are a website owner and you have noticed that I have posted such content then please feel free to contact me and let me know that.
I’m not going to be a hypocrite here because I am almost certain that there is content that is posted on this site that has been culled from the world wide web. What isn’t in question though is my integrity and honesty because mistakes will happen. I encourage any website owner to contact me if they see their content used and I will make immediate amends whether that be providing a link or removing the content in question. It is a problem I understand because I have 100’s of personal pics out there myself, and I have been subject on numerous occasions to my pictures being altered to cut my own website address and name out of the pics. Not only that but because a lot of my pics are amateur in nature, I have even had people alter my pics and actually claim them to be pics of themselves when they post them elsewhere. Stupid I am not and I am fully aware that can happen, and does happen, though I think most people by now are aware of who I actually am. But there are others who post personal pics and it is easy for any of us to take these pics and post them ourselves without giving credit to the original owner. In fact just recently I came across a treasure trove of personal pics from a defunct website, however I don’t think I will post them because while the owner is no longer with us, I am sure the spankee’s in the pic are. That, my friends, is called integrity 🙂
Do you have comments? Please feel free to share them with me, whether they are for the positive or the negative. If the issues of pirated content are not addressed and discussed then there can be no progress made. This is especially important for website owners because I don’t think spanking blogs will be going away anytime soon, in fact I think they will continue to grow. If as a whole we develop a set of guidelines, unwritten or otherwise, then the blogging community can only grow in a positive light. There will be a few bad apples no matter where you go, but I think if the community as a whole banded together to be courteous towards commercial websites, and heck even their fellow blogger’s, then I think the spanking blogger’s community can actually grow in a positive light.
Feel free to share your thoughts, I’m a big boy and I can take it 🙂
pup,
seems to me that it would be easier to just give credit rather than go to the trouble of cropping or altering a pic. small minds i guess.
i’d like to see more whole sets. especialy when no face is shown in a single pic.
up all night long,
ddon
A difficult issue indeed.
I had some trouble with people taking the clips I create for my movie database for their blogs – without giving credit. I don’t mind people using them, really. I made them for the community. It takes quite some time to get the movie (hardest part), edit it, upload and share it.
It really got maddening when I found a pay site was using my clips to attract paying customers.
So I started adding a start screen to the clips. People may crop pictures to remove your initals – they even go farther and edited those videos to remove the starting credits. So I had to come with a different solution. I had to watermark the clips “inside”. In the beginning i added a small “www.moviespanking.de.vu” within the spanking scene. It is very very difficult to remove such a thing from a clip. It has not happened. Now I mostly use a small icon I have created for this purpose – an X with an h in it – to mark the clips. Looks almost like one of these TV station logos and doesn’t interfere so much with the video.
Long text, short message: I’ts pretty strange to what lengths people go to NOT credit their source. Sad really, but there are lots of good bloggers who are different, too.
Another example how bloggers can lose their fun creating blogs for people can be seen at
http://britishspankingmagazines.blogspot.com/.
Oh yeah and I forgot to mention: we beat Britain in the World Cup, too. Or shall I say: spanked them 😉
Chross,
Your point is exactly what I am talking about!! Now none of the clips that you have in the database can be claimed by any blogger as ‘Copyright’, however, I fully understand the amount of time, research and effort that goes into making a single clip. Off the top of my head I am going to guess that there are 20 or more clips in the database that I found, created and edited. The big difference is, you ALWAYS give credit where it is due, even when the clip is of bad quality and you are able to make a better copy, you credit the original poster. You are a great role model on how to properly act within the blogging community. I love the community idea and I am glad to be able to add to various databases with unique finds.
In regards to the example you provided, I was aware of it and I can totally understand the frustration. As you know yourself based on our conversation here, part of the fun (for me it is pictures) is searching for and finding rarities that might not have been seen before. Because it is a hobby for me I can spend hours flicking through countless pages searching for rare treats. My frustration comes from those rude blogger’s who just troll sites such as this because finding spanking pics is easy for them. Those rare blogger’s come to my site to see what I have and are then “Okay, I will take that…… and that……….. good…….. now let me go over to MarQe and Isabelle and see what I can take from their sites.” So especially when I see that people are deliberately going out of their way to edit your work to AVOID giving you credit, that is where I have a little problem. That said mind you, I’m also aware that there are people who are insanely jealous over perceived success, whether that be success as an individual, or success as a blogger!!
That aspect has little to do with copyright and more to do with courtesy and respect!! Something that I think I can speak for the whole spanking blogger’s community in stating that you are a leader in that department. However, that can also cause frustrating problems for pricks like me, lol, when I see that you have linked to someone who has clearly ripped off a bunch of other spanking blogs and gets the credit as being recognized as having a good post……… even though that post is a combination of other people’s work 😉
The bottom line is how one was raised and how they deal with society. At a young age I was taught to show respect to others and that is something that is difficult to learn later on in life. The phrase “Can’t teach an old dog new tricks” comes to mind 🙂
Hi Richard,
I have a mixed attitude towards copyright in relation to blogs.
On the one hand, the law is simple: if you haven’t shot it, and you don’t have permission from the person who has, don’t post it.
On the other hand, the custom – and the whole point of spanking blogging, I guess – is to post pieces that are of interest to spanking enthusiasts, and from time to time this will include scans from newspapers, clips from movies and pictures found on the web.
Making sure you give credit to the source is the one way I found of having your pics, and your ethics too. Obviously, if you don’t *know* the source, you can’t do this, but a good system of recording sources of the stuff you randomly save off the web is very useful and not that hard to set up.
I’m not sure that sticking your initials on the pics you haven’t shot is a good system in the long run, because if I were the author of the pic, and I happened to see it on the web under somebody else’s initials, I would absolutely take it as somebody else claiming ownership over my work. (Not saying this to pick a fight or preach the one true way of spanking blogging, btw – just explaining my gut feeling.)
As for people slicing off your copyright… yep, they do that, don’t they? My recent favourite was somebody who posted a photo of me on their spanking dating site profile – and this as a 40-something transgendered schoolgirl! Kinda thinking she wasn’t actually hoping to pass as me if she got any date offers. 🙂
Adele,
You raise some very good points there, the most important of which (In relation to my own ethics) is the initializing of pics. It was like a light bulb that just went off as I read it, lol. There is a much better way of cataloguing what I post, and rather than put my initials on the pics that I post I can simply rename the pic itself, that way the original work remains the same. Thank you for setting my wheels in motion and that is a practice I will do from now on. I agree with you that if I was to come across one of my own pics with someone else’s initials on it then I would turn my nose up a little bit, so I will change that practice from now on.
The removing of copyrights however really is a serious issue in my eyes though, and I dare say that within the 1000’s of pics that I have shared already, I am sure many of them had been altered prior to myself discovering them. Likewise, mainly on dating sites, I have found numerous of my own pics being used on people’s profiles. One person even tried to add me as a friend once, lol.
As you said, when you use the WWW to find spanking pics, inevitably you are going to come across work that has been altered without your knowledge. Of course one way to look at it is to not post anything that you have even the slightest doubt of where it came from, but I think the best way is if no one altered the pics in the first place then proper attribution will always be given.
The place where my finds are copied on a regular basis has a lot of commercial pics posted, yet there isn’t a single watermark on ANY of the pics. Pretty much every spanking company is represented and I know fully well that these companies do put their copyrights on them. For the bigger companies I think most people know that those pics belong to them, but for the smaller companies it is a chance to have themselves promoted that goes astray.
The point of this topic is for educational reasons and being one who posts pics in large numbers, it is also something that I can learn from and alter my practices accordingly, starting with putting my initials on pics. That process I will discontinue and instead I will rename the pic, perhaps something as simple as the date they are being posted etc, or even simpler… posted1, posted2, posted3 etc, etc.
When ever anyone puts a picture out on the web thay simply have to take their chances. It is very easy to pirate a picuture.
That being said, leaving the copyright on the pictures has many times led me to new sites and models I would have not ever seen otherwise. That was how I found Dallas’ site, a pirated picture of Tikki with a copyright on it. I have been a member on and off for several years because of that one picture.
I guess my point is if they at least leave the copyright on the picture the site gets free advertising.
I couldn’t agree more, Poppa_Mark, there are many sites that I have discovered simply because there was a copyright left on the pic. Chances were it was promotional content in the first place, but even if it ended up on a site that it wasn’t designed for, it is still free advertising. I would hazard a guess that I have signed up for half a dozen sites over the years simply based on finding a pic with a website address on it.
It is one of the reasons why one dick has annoyed me for so many years. Aside from claiming that my personal pics were actually of him, he also crops out every single watermark known to man, thereby taking money out of the pockets of the rightful owners. I have seen perhaps 100 or more Punished Brats pics edited in this manner on the old MSN groups. No matter how many times he was told he would just create a new identity and constantly post the edited pics. That in turn of course circulates those edited pics and new people who discover them are unable to know where they originally came from, thereby denying the owners potential sales.
Both as a blogger, and now as a producer, I feel that the original creator should always get credit to their work. When I found some pictures of Cookie posted on another site, I wouldn’t be bothered by it if it either mentioned us by name, or linked back to us. On one occasion, though, I found a blogger using one such image and saying that it was a girl that he’d been meeting and spanking. I quickly asked (well, more like ordered) that he either recognize the true origin of the image, or take it down. It was down in just over a day.
On my picture blog, not only do I always leave the site’s trademark on the picture (unless resizing the image makes it unreadable), but I will write in the site’s address on the images that don’t have such a trademark or watermark. This is in addition to linking the picture to the original site (albeit, through an affiliate link, but a link just the same).
Intresting topic. On one hand i am glad to see all the various pics and thank all that post them. But i also have to wonder about demands to take down pictures as i feel once it has been posted anywhere it is no longer a property right of the website(as i feel if i bought it i have some right to share with whomever i want). i am glad to see credit given to who posted it, but on the other hand i have seen some pictures show up on several different websites within in moments of each other and since we all visit most of the same sites for finding pics, drawings, etc who posted first is always a concern. Your collection has been obtained over the years and i am sure you do not remember where some of them came from and thank you for sharing them. one other issue with copyrights is that many of the sites have the disclaimer that only orginal owned works are permitted so they (pirates for want of a better term) crop off the copyright to share it. I had a large collection, but lost it in a house flood (although if i still had it i would be posting it) i cannot think like a producer (which in a way all bloggers are) so copyright issues have been lost on me as i understand royaltys and keeping something as intended, but i also think of artistic license as a right as well. Thanks for your time
Jim
I think you are always doing or trying to do the right thing by the spanking community. You are always communicating and discussing. The other blog has come across in several instances as not thinking or caring about the community at large. The thing is there are the good guys and the not so good guys, there always will be. Keep doing what you are doing because it is appreciated.
I understand the issues of removing the copyright labels, I might remove some if I make a promotional image and always leave them in if I have a gallery, they are there for a reason. Usually if I make a header image it is directly related to the gallery so I think that is OK, obviously if a produver disagrees then I am happy to removee any offending images, I’ve had no one bitch so far. However, I had some issues with people using my own artwork to promote sites a while back and I got a bit pissed off, I can often spend literally hours working on them and they go and use them just like that, I even started putting my blog site address on a few at the time! think they got the message!
Now here’s a good example, my latest post is a bit naughty as it refers to a televsion channel and someone on there who has starred in spanking films in the past (it’s a good post…honest!!) I have used some images of theirs, I have posted links relating to them and I trust they don’t get heavy with me as I was using a few images to make a point. We’ll see, if they ask me to remove it if anyone sees it, then I will, of course.
Copyright under the DMCA 1998 is an issue that pirates have been largely getting away with though it’s good to see many producers fighting back! I’d just love to see a pirate fully prosecuted and ruined for causing massive loss of earnings to producers, I know of a few that are struggling and their stuff is constantly being pirated, it can’t help in these hard pressed times, what do the pirates want, to put these guys out of business, do they think all fetish and spanking producers go round in Bugatti Veyrons and smoke finest Havana cigars lit with $100 bills?
Anyway, I’m ranting…good points though, Richard!
Oh, and at least England weren’t as bad as the Argies! We scored 2 past the Germans, even if one didn’t count 😉
Chief
Richard, Great post.
The issue I think in many cases is the confusion about copyright to begin with and how it is abused by corporations in general. People (particularly on the internet) seem to feel that if they produced it in some way they have complete rights over it which is not the case.
Lets say you take a picture and you post it. Now lets say I take the picture and either Photoshop it in some funny way or post it on my blog making disparaging remarks of it. This is called Satire and it is no way a copyright violation. In fact it becomes a separate work which then I own the copyright to.
Lets say I download a video and take some screen shots and post it on my blog to review the movie. Again this is a protected act. Its called fair use. Now I can say that the movie sucked. But legally there is little the producer can do about my use of the images. This also applies if you are using a few pictures if you are reviewing a pay site
There are many other exceptions to copyright which I will not bore you with. Obviously cropping out someone’s copyright and claiming that it is yours is both wrong or illegal. Thank you by the way for your Kudos
Brushstrokes
An important post, Richard, and one that should inspire much commentary in our little community. First, I think you have acted ethically and responsibly with regard to copyrighted material posted on your blog. We do have a responsibility not to deliberately infringe on anyone’s copyright, but where a photo has been floating around for years and you have no way of knowing who (if anyone) holds the rights, you can hardly be blamed for reposting it. Attribution or removal upon complaint is the most anyone could expect you to do.
Second, Brushstrokes raised the important (but complicated) question of “fair use”. The examples he cites do illustrate that copyright is not absolute; some uses of copyrighted material without payment are permitted under U.S. law. And it is true that copyright holders (especially corporations) are notorious for trying to control any and every use of such material. Nonetheless, we have to be careful since copyright law is anything but clear. It is particularly murky if one party uses characters belonging to a second party, say to produce a spanking drawing, and then a third party comes along and posts the drawing on the internet! I’ll have more to say about this at my customary excessive length on my own site in the coming weeks. — Web-Ed
As a producer of spanking films and images my view of people removing my copyright or site identification information is quite firm.
If a blogger uses some of my free TGP images and keeps the site attribution on them then I don’t mind, it advertising my site.
It takes time and not an inconsiderable amount of money to produce films and images for my sites and so I have a no-tolerance policy regarding pirating of my material.
If I find my material on any site where the image has had it’s logo or copyright removed then the site owner gets sent a DMCA notice to remove said content within 24 hours.
After that time has expired I then check to see if the site owner has complied and if they haven’t I DMCA their server company. If that is Blogger then they can probably say goodbye to their blog.
Piracy is a problem in this industry and I, for one, will not tolerate it.
To all those good bloggers who respect the copyright of the producers and who write about their site, I give a hearty ‘thank you’, to the pirates – watch out.