OK, this is funny.
My friend Stuart recently pointed me to an article posted on Coilhouse about musician Zoë Keating. The topic of the article was about NPR allegedly using a sniplet of Zoë’s music during their programming, but without asking her permission or attributing proper credit to her. The general tone is that this was a bad thing, something not many would disagree with.
But the reason Stuart forwarded the link to me was because the article contains a photo I took of Zoë at a performance in Seattle in December. It is, I must say, a lovely photo and I’m very flattered that they selected to use it. What’s funny, though, is that, well… they never asked my permission to use it. Yes, they did give me very clear and prominent credit, but the fact that no one checked with me beforehand, combined with the subject of the article, makes for a rather funny occurrence.
If anyone from Coilhouse stumbles across this, please know that you have my full retroactive permission to use that image in your article. And thanks for the chuckle.
(Disclaimer: I can think of one scenario that may have unfolded that would let Coilhouse completely off the hook for this. Shortly after the concert in December, I emailed Zoë a few of my pictures and I’m pretty sure this was one of them. It’s entirely possible she supplied that image to Coilhouse to use in the article, in which case I can see how they would feel free to run with it without any further checking. Maybe this happened, maybe not. Either way it’s still funny.)
Hi, David! Oh, dear…
I don’t think this situation isn’t QUITE as ironic in my mind as it is in yours, seeing as you’ve been given credit where credit was due, and I did in fact publish the article with Zoe’s permission/consent, exclusively pulling “press” images from her website and Facebook page. Additionally, we have not altered or edited your photo in any way, or paired it with completely unrelated and rather dubious content, which was why Zoe felt a bit torn about NPR’s manipulations of her music (for a radio report about two girls who got their legs chopped off by a train) and wished they’d asked her permission, despite it technically being a “fair use” situation.
Now, if we’d polarized your image, cropped it in half, or added animated gif glitter and then run it anonymously alongside an article about vivisection, I’d probably find the situation a bit more dubious/funny/ironic/whatever. But I hear ya.
Anyhoo. Mea culpa, cheers, and thanks.
Erm… Actually, I suppose I DID crop that image a bit.
*facepalm*
We try to do right, David. I promise we do. (And so does NPR.)
I’m going to go put on my hairshirt now. ‘Ta.
Ah… see, you were privvy to how that image came to be used, which would indeed reduce the irony/funny level (which is why I pulled the complete CMA move with that disclaimer). Lacking that as I did, I have to declare that the whole thing is still funny.
Then again, I’ve been known to laugh at “My Name is Earl.”
As for the cropping, well that completely destroyed my fragile artistic vision that has been carefully handcrafted over years of painstaking work and sacrifice. When I think of those poor pixels you so cruelly excised, forever lost to the world…