A Tale Of Gummy Bears
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.
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 12:49 pm and is tagged with google cache, mark frauenfelder, 7 deadly sins, creative commons attribution license, hate mail, gummy bears, scaled down version, boingboing, google, boing, greed, cellphone, guess, email, photographs, blog, photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
on July 20th, 2006 at 7:14 pm
the internet is like a giant playground, complete with bullies and kids hiding behind the jungle gym playing ‘doctor’…
on July 21st, 2006 at 11:28 am
Not your fault if they don’t see what is on the page… they can take you to court and everything but they would more then likely loose… I recommend going to google cache and printing out that cache page
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ALSO the response from the author and boing boing sound very childish and the error from hashcash from the author sounds like he was trying to post stuff that looked like spam ex. him putting a link to his page within the post.
on July 25th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
Welcome to the Internet, a giant playground to adult that never grew up
At least you’re lucky that this didn’t appear on digg’s front page. It would have been a lot worse.
on July 30th, 2006 at 11:27 am
Hi Elliott,
I’m truly sorry for my part in creating this situation that came to my attention by chance today. I should of course have checked the link that was created by my Firefox add-on “Justblogit!”.
I’m also sorry that there are people out there that are so aggressive. Why can’t they just say “hey, please make it a bit clearer who’s the creator” or “hey, you’ve got it wrong, please correct it”. The world and the internet would be a better place. Anger is a deadly gummy sin!