Staticfree Blog

So, apparently there's an image of me in an ad for The Scene in UMass Amherst's newspaper, The Daily Collegian. I only learned about this because some of my friends at UMass saw it and called me (and sent me the above image - thanks Dyfrgi and Miraba). The image was taken from a photo that is on my website.

The original image, shown here, was taken by Aidenn some time back via my cellcam. I did not authorize the use of this image nor did the photographer. Now, to be slightly fair, there is no copyright information on the main index page that it is on. However, throughout my website there are notes that all the content there-in is available through a creative-commons license which prohibits non-attributed commercial use of the content. Moreover, any person who puts an ad in any commercial work should at least ask permission before using images they find on the Internet.

I will be contacting the advertiser as soon as I can. Getting a call about an image haphazardly used will hopefully get them to think more about non-permissive use of Internet-found images in the future. I'm guessing that the source was a Google image search of some sort; I get many hits from that.