Evidently some family from Missouri posted a high-res family photo on a social networking site, then discovered several months later that a store in the Czech Republic had decided to use the photo of the happy, smiling family in a storefront advertisement.
From NPR:
When Danielle Smith posed with her husband and their two children for a photograph that she then used on her Christmas card, little did she suspect that a giant version would end up in the window of a Czech grocery store.
The mother of two from suburban St. Louis got an e-mail from a college friend who was living in the Czech capital, Prague. He said he had just spotted a huge version of the photograph in the window of a grocery store. Smith says she was skeptical, so her friend took a picture and e-mailed it as proof.
Most folks might find that charming. After all, it’s a good photo that flatters the family, and some folks would probably be tickled that their family photo wound up being used in an ad overseas.
Not so Danielle Smith.
Smith says she had posted the photo on her Web site and a few social networking sites. It was high resolution, enabling someone to grab it.
There has been little in terms of an apology from the store. “I think at this point, our apology is that they are willing to take the photo down,” she says.
Smith acknowledges that you run the risk of something like this happening when you put your photos online. She says next time she posts a photo, she’ll either lower the resolution or watermark the image.
She says, however, that she should have a reasonable expectation of being able to create a Web site that someone doesn’t jump on.
Evidently St. Louis must be a pretty cloistered place. Who knew that when you publish things on the worldwide web, folks from, oh, around the world might be able to find them and use them.
Now, I suppose there might be an argument to be made about whether putting someone’s random family photo in an ad constitutes fair use. It’s hard to say not knowing where the picture was originally posted and what copyright and usage information, if any, were offered.
But while it’s undoubtedly a bit startling to discover that your photo has found new life in some unforeseen context, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to someone who, say, uses the internet that pictures on the internet have a way of circulating and getting reproduced in ways you might never have imagined. This is why, for instance, it’s dangerous to allow anyone to have nude photos of yourself, unless you’re willing to accept the possibility that the whole world could wind up seeing them.
And yet, people remain mystified by the internet, even when they seem familiar enough with the concept to use it on occasion.
So, what should I do with my nude photos of you?
I don’t know, you should probably sell them to a tabloid or use them to hock financial services in Sweden or something. No sense in not making money off it.
I’m kind of thinking about distributing them to your students this summer—unless you top writing lectures and preparing. You are making Andrew and I look really bad.
You know, I could just distribute nude photos of you to your students. I always knew that “Hunks of History” fundraising calendar would come back to haunt the department.