Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

Yesterday, Boing Boing erroneously linked to my website with the following description:

Elliott Back uses Gummi Bears to cleverly depict the 7 Deadly Sins. “Envy” shown here, and “Greed” are my favorites. Link (via Martin Klasch)

Unfortunately, I didn’t create that work, as the page itself gives attribution to the actual author:

These photographs were created by Wiedmaier and released under a limited CC license.

The way I understand a Creative Commons Attribution license is that by writing who made the photos and also linking where I found them, that I could republish them on my page, albeit in a scaled down version. That still didn’t stop me from getting hate mail, though:

Email #1)

if you’re going to take somebody’s work, you need to give them credit and link straight to their work. you should also make it so that people can actually submit comments on your blog, I just got an error from hashcash.

Email #2)

Notice that the link on Boing Boing was quickly removed, my guess is that’s b/c they realized you didn’t create those even though you had presented them as such. Linking to the author’s profile is not the same thing as linking to the original page where they appeared, plus you only added that after you got linked to from boingboing, so you obviously just did that b/c you didn’t want to get busted.

I really can’t believe this guy. First, that post has always linked to the author’s page. You can check out the google cache if you don’t believe me. Second, I responsibly called Mark Frauenfelder’s cellphone and left a message informing him that the BB attribution was wrong, which probably led to them taking it down.

Guess what happens if I try to visit my subversion repository for wp-plugins.org right now:

That’s right, the domain registration has expired. It seems like they’re in the process of recovering the domain, because I can’t buy it, but right now it’s just an ugly, spammy landing page. It’s also the last time that I upload a new version of my plugin there–all plugins of mine will now be hosted in .zip files onsite. I really can’t trust wp-plugins.org to just do its job.

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