Don’t Steal My Pics Bro!
Read an interesting post from Chris Brogan over the weekend, which pointed to this post at GigaOm. It mentions and demonstrates a new widget from PicApp. More importantly though it discusses the problem with bloggers using pictures illegally. Have you posted a picture illegally on your blog? You probably have and perhaps are not even aware, particularly when you want to include a pic of a famous athlete or actor.
PicApp gets you the most appropriate picture for your post when you put in some text describing what you are writing. It then gives you photo options, puts it in an embeddable widget which includes subtle advertising and presto you have a legal picture for your blog. The revenue model is based on advertising, so the chances that this succeeds are certainly minimal, but as Om Malik points out it is more likely than bringing litigation for copyright infringement.
What did I type in to PicApp for my photo? Go #BoSox!
March 24th, 2008 at 5:56 am
Very cool, Kyle. Now the choice of photo used wouldn’t have anything to do with the player’s first name, would it?
First pitch in a little under 21 hours. Are you ready?
By the way, some debate about whether to use #BoSox or #RedSox. The former has one fewer character — and on Twitter, as you know, every character is precious — but the latter just feels more right. We’ll have to see which one emerges.
April 7th, 2008 at 4:35 am
The picapp service had all my images available for blogging for nothing… no problem apart from the fact that my images were not licenced for that use.
Getty (who the images were held with) allowed the blanket use of all images in their library to picapp, even though they were only supposed to allow access to images they “wholly owned”.
In the meantime, Getty and PicApp were generating revenue from the use of my images through this service, but this revenue does not get passed on to the photographers. What a scam!
I’ll just keep on investing my time and money into new cameras and equipment and giving my work away for free… while Getty rakes in the revenue. Obviously Getty and picapp need the money more than I do!
Seems interesting to note that picapp is owned by PicScout which looks for copyright infringement on the Internet.
It’s also good to see that the picapp logo is “because a pictures worth…” - “…nothing” in my case!