sorabji.com

I stayed inside most of today. It is hot, I feel hot. I slept very little last night and my eyes show bright white spots.

A friend writes to say that a prominent video game maker has stolen a photo from this web site. And, you know what, it appears to be true. I do not have the game, nor do I have access to the game, but some screengrabs found on fan sites appear to confirm that an image scraped from this web site found its way into a very popular video game.

Damn.

Some years ago a friend mentioned to me that she went to a concert by a performer with whom I was unfamiliar. I looked up the singer’s name, found his web site, and was baffled to find that the only thing there — the only thing on the band’s web site – was a picture lifted body-and-soul from one of my web sites, with no possible question that it was my image. Similarly I was once walking in a park when I spotted an art piece that had lifted almost all of its content right off one of my web sites. The artist did not deny that he had lifted the stuff, at first asking me “If you don’t want people to use it then why do you put it on the Internet?” I never responded to that amazing question, but evidently he got some counsel because he quickly changed gears and the matter was resolved.

Those are two of the more memorable incidents but now that I start thinking about it I guess I have had more altercations of this type than there is time or energy to recall. I can remember a third incident, a fourth, and a fifth, and I shall abandon this sequence of recollections lest I get needlessly angry. It is not a new routine. It is an old routine. There has always been a mentality of sorts that assumes everything sitting out here is free for the taking, but that mentality generally persists among spammers, disingenuous content providers, and adolescents – not in corporate environments. That is one of the reasons corporate bureaucracies exist, to prevent accidental theft or appropriation of intellectual property. I worked for too many years in those environments and I know how bureaucracies are supposed to work, and how unpleasant the fallout can be when they fail.